Two days before Christmas, I was physically and spiritually broken.
This story is written by a woman with no friends, many enemies, and a body shaking from legally induced opioid withdrawal. A woman living in a country that breaks its own people—through corruption, communism, violence, fear, and systems that pretend to protect while slowly destroying souls.
But this story did not begin with pain.
It began with love.
My child wanted to give me a Christmas gift. A simple one. A moment together. What mother would say no? No matter the weather, no matter the exhaustion, I went. When he said, “Let’s go,” I answered without hesitation.
That night, the rain was heavy. Dark. Relentless. The streets were empty. Only the two of us walked, hand in hand, spending our little money, enjoying the city in silence.
Nothing warned me of what was coming.
Until the shop.
The Nuts Shop
At first, it was nothing special. Just another small stand selling Chinese-style nut-filled dough balls. But something was different.
The vibe.
My child—who never asks for food—stopped suddenly and said, “I want nuts from here.”
We stood there in the storm. Wind, rain, darkness. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then fifteen. Almost half an hour.
The young woman selling the food moved strangely slowly. Not rude. Not busy. Just… detached. As if time worked differently for her. As if we were waiting inside a loop that only she controlled.
And my child seemed mesmerized—drawn by the smell, the waiting, the moment.
Why did we stay?
I still ask myself that.
The Encounter
Then I noticed him.
A young man. He looked no older than fourteen. Too pale. Too thin. His arms were unnaturally long beneath black clothing. His eyes—sharp, watching. His fingers moved strangely near his watch, as if measuring something invisible.
Next to him stood another figure, heavier, darker, aggressive in presence. Something about them felt wrong. Not dangerous in a loud way—but in a quiet, unsettling one.
We stood together in the rain, waiting for nuts.
In a temporal loop.
The young man smiled, as if he wanted to speak. Normally, I would have answered. But something inside me rejected the moment completely. A deep instinct screamed no.
I looked at my child and made a small sign: This is crazy. We’re leaving.
And we left.
The Fall
Five hundred meters later, at a bridge between two streets, something changed.
The air felt heavy. Pressured. As if the ground shifted beneath me.
And then I fell.
Hard.
Pain exploded through my body. A broken leg. The world blurred. Strangers appeared. An ambulance. Long waiting hours in wet clothes. Fear, shock, exhaustion.
The nuts—still intact.
That detail haunted me. AGAIN about nuts! Similarity? A “date with a nut” sent me poisoned to hospital last year!
Aftermath
The days that followed were worse.
Surgery. Pain medication – Opioids. Then withdrawal. Cold sweats. Palpitations. Nausea. Anxiety. Darkness. My child counting my breaths, whispering: “If you stop breathing, I’ll shake you.”
And I woke up. Every time.
I am a nurse. I know what withdrawal feels like. I know what overdose feels like. I know how easily pain can turn into dependence. And I refused to let that happen to me.
Cold turkey.
I will not become another casualty of a system that creates addiction and calls it treatment.
What This Story Is Really About
This is a story about aliens and very dirty and dark intelligence!
It is a story about fear, trauma, exhaustion, and how the human mind searches for meaning when reality becomes unbearable.
It is about how societies fail their people. How pain isolates. How love—especially a child’s love—keeps us alive.
And how close we all are to breaking.
This Christmas, I learned one thing clearly:
Evil does not need monsters. It only needs systems that forget humanity.
And faith—faith in something higher than suffering—is sometimes the only thing that keeps us standing.
I stepped inside my home and my CPTSD came back. The psychopath and its organized crime network, the dirty intelligence games on all sides, people poor, lack of freedom, control, and communism.
I was 18 years old when I read an old book typewritten illegally on a cheap paper format and manually sewn book, “Jurnalul fericirii” by Nicolae Steinhardt.
And I learned word by word these pages. Because these pages kept me alive when I refused to stay alive in any dirty and lack of freedom societies or circumstances.
Because YOUR LIFE matter, and you must stay alive.
Steinhardt was one of my mentors, my parents, my grounding when a psychopathic alienated and dogmatic society aimed to annihilate my personality and restructure my identity if I will oppose its ideology and entitlment.
I will share with you THE PAGES, that every time saved my life and keeps me going!
I hope it will help you too, as much as it helps me in the last 40 years! You keep GOD genuine in your heart and let go of anything else. YOU MUST SURVIVE!
To save your life and soul in a place without freedom is all that matters and is AT FIRST!
Nicolae Steinhardt Jurnalul fericirii / Journal of Happiness The Solutions – Political Testament
To emerge from a concentration camp universe – and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a camp, a prison, or another form of incarceration; the theory applies to any type of totalitarian product – there are (mystical) solutions.
We won’t discuss this further, as it is a consequence of selective grace by essence.
The three solutions we refer to are strictly worldly, practical in nature, and appear accessible to anyone.
In “The First Circle”, Alexander Isaievich briefly mentions it, returning to it in Volume I of “The Gulag Archipelago”. It consists, for anyone crossing the threshold of the Security or any other similar investigative body, in firmly saying to oneself: “At this moment, I am really dead. It is allowed to console oneself: it’s a pity for my youth or woe to my old age, my wife, my children, myself, my talent or my possessions, my power, my beloved, the wines I will never drink, the books I will never read, the walks I will never take, the music I will never listen to, etc. etc. etc. But something is certain and irreparable: from now on, I am a dead man.”
If one thinks thus, resolutely, he is saved. Nothing more can be done to him. He cannot be threatened, blackmailed, deceived, or tempted anymore.
Since he considers himself dead, nothing frightens him, entices him, attracts him, or seduces him. He cannot be baited anymore. Because he no longer hopes, because he has left the world, he no longer desires, holds on to, or regains anything, no longer keeps or sells his soul, peace, honor. There is no longer a currency in which the price of betrayal can be paid. However, it is required, of course, that the decision be firm, final. You declare yourself deceased, you accept the permission of death, you abolish any hope. You can regret it, like Madame d’Houdetot, you can regret it, but this moral and anticipatory suicide never fails. The risk of yielding, consenting to denunciation, or fantasizing about recognition has completely disappeared.
The second solution: Zinoviev’s It is the one found by one of the characters in the book “The Yawning Heights.” The character is a young man, presented under the allegorical nickname Zurbagiul. The solution lies in total non-adaptation to the system. Zurbagiul has no stable domicile, no proper documents, is not in the field of work; he is a vagabond, a parasite, a freeloader, and a hobo. He lives from day to day, from whatever he gets, from whatever happens, from whatever. He is dressed in rags. He works haphazardly, sometimes, when and if the opportunity arises. He spends most of his time in prisons or labor camps, sleeps wherever he can. He wanders. For nothing in the world does he enter the system, not even the most insignificant, sinful, or unengaging job. He does not even become a swineherd, not following the example of the hero of a novella by Arthur Schnitzler: that one, obsessed with the fear of responsibility, ends up as a swineherd. NO, Zurbagiul has projected himself (in existentialist style) once and for all as a permanent shelter, a ragged goat, a begging Buddhist monk, a madman for (in) freedom. Such a person, on the margins of society, is also immune: they cannot exert pressure on him, take anything from him, or offer him anything. They can always lock him up, harass him, despise him, ridicule him: but they lose. Once and for all, he has agreed to live his life according to the example and model of a perpetual night shelter. From poverty, distrust, non-seriousness, he has carved out a creed; he resembles a wild animal, a scavenger, a highwayman. He is Ferrante Palla of Stendhal. He is Zacharias Lichter of Matei Calinescu. He is a layman jurodivy, an unwavering traveler (and Wotan descending to this earth, what name may he bear? Der Wanderer), a wandering Jew.
And he’s got a mouth on him, he talks his head off, gives voice to the most dangerous anecdotes, knows no respect, takes everything lightly, says whatever comes to mind, speaks truths that others dare not whisper. He is the child from the tale of the naked king, by Andersen. He is King Lear’s jester. He is the wolf from the bold fable of La Fontaine: he has no idea about a collar. He is free, free, free.
It boils down to this: in the presence of tyranny, oppression, misery, misfortune, calamity, danger, not only do you not give up, but on the contrary, you develop an insane desire to live and fight. In March 1939, Churchill told Martha Bibescu: “There will be war. The British Empire will be pulverized. Death awaits us all. And I feel like I’m twenty years younger.”
The worse things get, the more immense the difficulties, the harder you are hit, the more surrounded or subjected to attacks you are, the less likely you see any probabilistic and rational hope, the more intense, viscous, and inextricable the gray, darkness, and sludge become, the more direct the danger, the more eager you are to fight and experience an (increasing) feeling of inexplicable and overwhelming euphoria.
You are assaulted from all sides, with infinitely stronger forces than yours: you fight. You are defeated: you defy them. You are lost: you attack. (That’s how Churchill spoke in 1940).
You laugh, you sharpen your teeth and your knife, you grow younger. Happiness tickles you, the unspeakable joy of hitting back, even if much less so. Not only do you not despair, not declare yourself defeated and overcome, but you also fully enjoy the joy of resistance, of opposition, and you experience a sensation of furious, demented joy.
This solution, of course, presupposes exceptional character strength, a military conception of life, a formidable moral tenacity of the body, a will of noble steel, and an adamantine spiritual health.
It probably also requires a sporting spirit: to enjoy the battle itself – the brawl – more than success. It is also salutary and absolute because it is based on a paradox: as they hit you harder and cause you more harm and impose increasingly unjust sufferings on you, trapping you in places more without exit, you rejoice more intensely. You strengthen yourself, you grow younger! Churchill’s solution is identified with Vladimir Bukovsky’s solution.
Bukovsky recounts that when he received his first summons to the KGB headquarters, he couldn’t close an eye all night. Naturally, the reader of his memoirs will say that it couldn’t have been otherwise, that’s only natural; uncertainty, fear, emotion.
But Bukovsky continues: “I couldn’t sleep out of impatience. I could hardly wait for the day to come, to be in front of them, to tell them everything I think about them, and to penetrate them like a tank. I couldn’t imagine greater happiness. That’s why he didn’t sleep: not out of fear, worry, or emotion. But out of impatience to shout the truth in their faces and to penetrate them like a tank!”
No more extraordinary words have ever been spoken or written in the world. And I wonder – I don’t claim it’s as I say, not at all, I just wonder, I can’t help but wonder – if perhaps this universe, with all its swarms of galaxies each containing thousands or millions of galaxies each with billions of stars and at least a few billion planets around these stars, if perhaps all these spaces, distances, and spheres measured in light-years, parsecs, and billions of thousands of miles, all this worminess of matter, stars, comets, satellites, pulsars, quasars, black holes, cosmic dust, meteors, I don’t know what else, all the eras, all the eons, all the times and all the space-time continua and all the Newtonian or relativistic astrophysics came into being and exist only so that these words of Bukovsky could be expressed.
Conclusion All three solutions are certain and without error.
Other solutions to emerge from a boundary situation, from a concentration camp universe, from the nets of a Kafkaesque process, from a domino game, labyrinth, or interrogation room, from fear and panic, from any rat race, from any phenomenal nightmare I do not know to exist. Only these three.
However, any one of them is good, sufficient, and liberating.
Take heed: Solzhenitsyn, Zinoviev, Churchill, Bukovsky.
Consented, assumed, anticipated, provoked death; indifference and audacity; courage accompanied by insane joy. You are free to choose.
But you should realize that – speaking worldly, humanly – it is very doubtful that you will find another way to face the iron circle – which is largely also chalk (see Camus’ State of Siege: the foundation of dictatorship is a phantasm: fear) – other than these.
You may protest, perhaps, considering that the solutions imply a form of life equivalent to death, or worse than death, or involving the risk of physical death at any moment. That’s true.
Are you surprised? Because you haven’t read Igor Shafarevich yet, because you still haven’t found out that totalitarianism is not so much the consolidation of an economic, biological, or social theory as it is mainly the manifestation of an attraction to death. And the secret of those who cannot fit into the totalitarian pit is simple: they love life, not death. But who, Alone, has conquered death? He who trampled death underfoot.
