Alberto García 🚀🚀🚀

Learn from my mistakes before it is too late.

The problem with depression is that when you want to realize that you are depressed, it is already too late.

I spent years depressed without realizing I was depressed.

I was raised in a culture where men were not allowed to cry and were not authorized to show weakness.

And that made me spend my life fighting against an invisible enemy that I could not name because being depressed was a luxury that you could not afford in the nineties.

That’s why I want to share with you 25 things that just thinking about them makes me ashamed and that I did when I was depressed without knowing I was. So if you see yourself reflected in any of them (I hope you don’t), you can put means in place sooner than I could.

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1. I smoked a lot, 90 cigarettes a day. When I ran out of cigarettes in the wee hours of the morning, I would rummage through the trash and ashtrays to find cigarette butts to roll a cigarette with.
2. I drank more than Charles Bukowski and thought I wasn’t an alcoholic. I even got stomach ulcers and would buy stomach balm at the drugstore so I could keep drinking.
3. I would go on adult chat rooms, looking for strangers to have phone s*x with.
4. I would fall in love with people who mistreated me. And I treated badly people who loved me very much and well.
5. I remember accumulating so many dirty dishes that instead of washing them in the sink, I had to put them in the bathtub and let them soak. I used to leave them there for a week. In the meantime, I didn’t shower, and I ate on disposable plastic plates.
6. I didn’t brush my teeth; I forgot to do it, and because of that, a cavity went to the nerve in one of my molars — I have never experienced a more intense level of pain. So when I wanted to go to the dentist, it was too late, and I lost three molars.
7. I lied to everyone: my mother, my girlfriend at the time, my friends, and myself. I had a double life. And I justified myself with that “Carpe diem” stuff. My drunkenness was terrible; I went from laughing to crying easily; I even thought I was bipolar.
8. After closing the bar, I celebrated parties with more than 50 people in my house, and the next day I didn’t clean up. Once I threw sawdust on the floor.
9. When I moved out, I was so embarrassed to hire a cleaning service and have them see how dirty my apartment was that I left money on a table and called the landlord who rented me the place from my new city.
10. I stopped going to college: I played online poker professionally by day and ran a nightclub at night. I went from being Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting to Hunter S. Thompson, reprised by Jhonnie Deep in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
11. I was making thousands of dollars a month, and by the 20th of every month, I was already using my credit card because I couldn’t afford to keep partying.
12. I thought I was a good person, and the people around me weren’t and didn’t do anything to me because I was running the trendiest bar. But the reality is that I was just one of them. I thought I was an angel, but I was not.
13. Once, a customer pointed a gun at my chest for not serving him a drink in the right glass, and I said, “Shoot.” He said, “You’re a tough guy.” I wasn’t; I didn’t care if he pulled the trigger.
14. I kept getting into fights of all kinds. I had so much anger inside that sometimes I couldn’t handle it.
15. When I had to take exams, instead of slowing down, I would take Katovit (amphetamines) to keep me awake and study when I wasn’t at the bar or playing poker.
16. I was never interested in where my customers got the money to buy my beer or whiskey. I always looked the other way, even though I knew that 80% of the people who came to the bar were criminals.
17. I spent half a year eating Spaghetti Bolognese every day. Fortunately, a friend who had Pica’s disease (she ate sponge baths) alerted me in time to the eating disorders, and I went back to junk food but varied.
18. Every day I visited a friend of mine who had agoraphobia, and instead of helping him, I favored his victimhood by giving him the reason for all his complaints.
19. I lost count of the movies and series marathons I watched in the 2000s. The point is that now I’m disgusted to watch most of the series on Netflix.
20. I was a compulsive exerciser, despite all my bad habits and addictions. It was important to me to be muscular because of my lack of self-esteem.
21. I stopped attending family events: baptisms, weddings, and communions. I didn’t congratulate my mother on her birthday or Christmas. Instead, I isolated myself from all my loved ones: they were the enemy. I became more paranoid than Jordi Mollá in the movie Blow playing Diego Delgado,
22. I tried to buy people’s affection with costly gifts: I even gave my girlfriend trips to Ibiza or cars.
23. I slept so many hours more than once that I woke up in a wet bed.
24. I did all kinds of crazy, incoherent things, like eating a cake with hallucinogenic mushrooms with the excuse of “experimenting.”
25. I looked like one of Chuck Palahniuk’s characters in his novel Choke: I could masturbate several times daily. Sad.

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I did all this shit in a period that lasted too long — from 18 to 33 years old —. At a time when far from realizing I was in the darkest pit of depression, I thought I was a Viking warrior living my youth on my way to Valhalla.

I was completely unhinged. And I didn’t realize it. I thought I was an achiever.

I have written this article because sometimes what we think is good, or proper for our age, is not, and it costs us our health. So I hope that something here has helped you.

A virtual hug

AG