Rescued

Last year, I burnt out.

As I finished my technical residency and fought to keep Outreachy afloat, something inside of me broke.

Search

After several appointments with doctors and therapists and despite my attempts to keep myself up, I was told I was presenting symptoms of both depression and anxiety. For the first in my life, one of my first lines of treatment became taking antidepressants (fluoxetine, also known as Prozac; and trazodone). Then, following a check-up after removing my hormonal implant^[1], my gynecologist discovered I was prediabetic. An appointment with an endocrinologist later on confirmed what should’ve been obvious: the way I was leading my life had to change, or I would keep getting sicker^[2].

I had to pick up my broken pieces and rebuild myself.

I now recognize that, while working with projects and organizations in the non-profit and public sectors, I let my professional life takeover me. What I do for work and how I defined my very self were so deeply tangled it was suffocating other aspects of my being. I had to reconnect with the dormant (and, admittedly, forgotten) parts of who I am.

Glimpse

Last year, I traveled to Berlin for the first time.

This time, as Outreachy finances were tighter and I was funding this trip myself, no work colleagues were accompanying me. I had some time to enjoy the city with my spouse.

I had picked up the habit of going on walks with him to photograph nearby neighborhood cats. I was using an old, not-so-great Samsung digital camera that sometimes struggled to turn on as the zoom mechanism would often get stuck. It didn’t matter; the goal was to flee notifications and other distractions coming from my phone. It felt great in my hands.

But as malfunctions were getting more frequent the more I used it, I decided to use the opportunity to travel abroad to get myself a compact camera I couldn’t buy in Brazil: a Ricoh GR IIIx. I experienced several magical days in Berlin with it as the sun had come out and everything became a hundred times more photogenic.

Alas, this hobby weaned out as depression and anxiety creeped in. My GR IIIx (and my instant film cameras) spent months stored in a drawer.

Friendship

As we returned to neighborhood walks as a part of the plan for me to become more active, we befriended one of the people feeding our neighborhood cats. We learned her routes and her routines, and we started to help her once a week. The cats started to recognize us, come to us — even when we were off duty —, and ask for pets and food (which prompted us to always keep treats with us). And as visits to buy more medication become more frequent, it wasn’t unusual to finish a shift and walk to a couple of pharmacies nearby.

Connection

This year, as we walked to one of the pharmacies mentioned above, we spotted a small and thin black kitten own its own.

We tried to approach them, but they hissed at us.

Nevertheless, we offered them food and water. The kitten ate everything we gave them, as if they hadn’t seen food for days. When we realized they weren’t being care for by either their mother or a colony, we felt compelled to start visiting them every night.

He (as we would later learn they were a male kitten) became so attached to us he started to try to follow us back home every night.

One day, it hit us we just couldn’t return without him — so we didn’t. We prepared our home and I took him with us in my arms. We gave him a bath and named him Morceguinho (i.e. “little bat” in Portuguese).

We rescued him that day, but I’m pretty sure we were also rescued in return.

Vision

While I still have some bad days, life is starting to make sense again. I went back to all my hobbies: reading; playing video games; photographing; watercoloring; journaling. I made more new friends in the last six months than in the last six years. I found joy in revisiting the past and planning the future.

Most importantly, when it was time to return to work, I returned with a newfound perspective and distance. It stopped being the most important part of myself; it is now in balance with everything else.

Footnotes