Microbes & Me

This is a letter to each one of you who feels lost in life. I’ll tell the story of me, James, which is a story of confession, passion and hope–with a hurting, clinically depressed protagonist, and a plot twist of him finding happiness unexpectedly in a tiny drop of water. . This is a long text but I appreciate anyone who is willing to read it to learn more about me! I want to say thank you to the @ontheedge team for helping me to tell my story by choosing me as one of their favorite content creators! . So… My life story… I grew up such a curious kid, bamboozled by every living thing around me. I followed bugs, gazed at stars through my window and searched for fossils everywhere. My grandma loves to tell about the time I was 5 years old, and a chicken pooped in front of us. The curious 5-year-old me picked up a stick and poked at the poop for a good half hour. My grandma says, “You were so interested in the dropping, you wanted to see what was in it!” 😂 She also adds, “I knew you were going to be someone like this when you grew up.” 😂 Not sure if she meant that as a good thing, and although she still doesn’t quite understand what I do, I think she is proud of me. I don’t remember much from my first chicken poop experiment, but I do remember being obsessively curious about all animals. I wanted to live amongst them in Africa, and write books about them. I didn’t think of writing as a “real job” but also I didn’t think of Africa as a continent with many countries and borders. Childhood perspective tells so much about the society one grows up in. How naïve to think that you need to do hard labor to earn good money, yet to also imagine no invisible borders between the people of a continent. . As a teen, I couldn’t stay just a curious kid. These years were the hardest. My depression was a result of all the domestic abuse I suffered for years. To the point that, back then, I never imagined passing 30. I thought I’d have kicked the bucket by the time, bought the farm, gone to the glue factory! Worst of all, I believed I would cause it. I never felt safe anywhere, never felt like I belonged. I was beaten and insulted every day for so long. Learning became an escape and helped me deal with very hard things, and I was good at dealing with stuff. Nature provided me with so many wondrous things that I could lose myself in. When I say nature, I think of even rocks and stars because they were and still are a part of my bubble. I grew up before the internet era, or at least before it was available in my home. But even with all this curiosity, I was shut in my room. I always locked my door, slept with knives under my bed. Nothing changed much when I grew older, I still searched for my place, somewhere where I felt accepted and safe. My search took me to many places; politics, spirituality, but in the end I was a 20-something-year-old who was struggling with debilitating social anxiety. I couldn’t even go to see a movie without feeling like fainting. . I then moved to Italy as a student, I couldn’t even imagine talking to people, let alone partying like every other student. Then I started drinking to help it, and it seemed to make it all fine. Now everyone knew who I was: the heart of the parties, so cheerful and happy–but no one knew I cried myself to sleep every night or more like every morning. . In Italy I met a Polish girl and moved with her to Warsaw. I stopped drinking. My relationship started to go bad. And Poland was the opposite of Italy. It was hard to make friends regardless, but living here made it even harder. I was sad, poor and in a toxic relationship. I didn’t know what to do. But then I met my saviors in a lab course: the microbes! I would have never imagined seeing such a diversity through a microscope in a single drop of wastewater. My eyes were opened to so many things living, buzzing around! I would never have imagined that something invisible could be so beautifully ornamented. It was like my childhood “Africa” had been condensed into a single droplet. I was madly captivated. Everything I had ever been interested in had been in that water: I just didn’t know it. I began to crave learning about everything again. In the past what I usually did with new things was to get into something and consume everything about it in a couple of weeks–then move on to something else. But this field was so wild and unexplored, I started reading everything I could find! The more I learned the more ignorant I felt! I had never experienced that feeling before! I couldn’t stand meeting microbes only for two hours per week in the lab, so I scraped together the money to buy the cheapest microscope online for $160. I contemplated the purchase for days before buying it because I didn’t have money to pay the rent after. But I did it anyway. I learned how to use my cheap microscope very well, and keep learning about microbes. Just after a couple of months, my new “hobby” got tested. . Continues in the comments