Moving to Spain did indeed make me happier in many ways. I was now living in a beautiful city on the Mediterranean coast, benefitting from a more pleasant climate, speaking a gorgeous Romance language everyday instead of my shitty native dialect of British English, enjoying a far better social life with many new friends and even meeting hot women from the Latin American diaspora community. Life was objectively much better than it was back in my bumpkin hometown in the UK.
However, the HA thing didn't completely fix my life; I still had various unresolved issues that continued to creep up on me and drag me down into the depths of depression.
1. Autism and neurological problems
Even though in Spain people are much more accepting of those with autistic traits and quirky behavior and I felt included for the first time in my life, the improvement of my social skills was a gradual process (now made possible by a more inclusive social environment) and I still had to deal with autism-related problems such as mental fatigue, sensory overload, OCD-type thought patterns, dysprosody and anxiety. My botched neurological makeup has always held me back in life and caused me various difficulties. Going abroad to a more open and fertile social climate might have helped me improve but it certainly didn't remove my developmental disorder. That was just a bitter pill that I had to swallow.
2. Dysphoria related to skin tone
When I first moved to Spain I still had a pale Northern European skin tone and didn't know about Melanotan. I always suffered from dysphoria due to my skin tone. I hated being pale. Spaniards would sometimes draw attention to my skin tone and tell me that I was pale and I used to get depressed about it because I knew that they were right. I would always avoid going to the beach or pools because I was embarrassed about my skin tone. I would even pass up on dating girls because I perceived myself as ugly. I would have been too dysphoric to strip naked and have sex with them anyway. My dysphoria continued to hold me back even in Spain. In fact, it even became worse as I constantly felt inferior to most Spaniards with their beautiful Mediterranean skin.
I only managed to overcome this problem when I discovered Melanotan and mustered up enough courage to take the unregulated substance. Now I can achieve a deep brown tan with just two weeks of injecting myself and going on the sunbed a few times. In Spain I'm enthusiastic about showing off my body and deep tan, have a lot more self-esteem and feel much more comfortable around the ladies. Melanotan really is a godsend; it saved me from my previous dysphoria and the related depression. I wish that I'd discovered it sooner.
3. Hatred of my own nationality
Through moving to Spain I managed to get away from the country that I hate so much but at the same time more attention was being brought to my unwanted nationality by virtue of me being an outsider in the new country. I hate being British. I don't relate to that culture at all, don't know how to act like a British person and don't want to be associated with that culture. However, I've found that, even if I don't identify with that nationality, others will still associate me with it whether I like it or not and so my unwanted nationality will always continue to haunt me. I just don't feel comfortable in my own skin, as though I belong neither here nor there.
I speak Spanish well enough not to sound like an Anglophone and people often confuse me for other nationalities. But whenever somebody asks me where I'm from, I become extremely embarrassed to the point where my tongue seizes up and I find it incredibly hard just to spit out "Inglaterra". In the event that my unwanted nationality has been revealed, heaven forbid that anybody try to speak to me in English (
My hatred of my own nationality even caused problems between me and my Peruvian ex-girlfriend. She found it strange that I hated my own culture and would often encourage me to connect with it or learn to appreciate it. She even once told me that she would like us to live in the UK for about two years in order to learn about the culture, despite initially having a negative impression of the Anglo world. That would obviously be a problem for me. All I ever wanted was to get away from the UK and British culture and now that I had finally escaped I had a foreign girlfriend trying to drag me back to that godforsaken place!!! Incidentally, my relationship with the Peruvian didn't last and we eventually separated. However, I started to realize that even a Latina girlfriend could become a source of sabotage for my HA plans and that I'm therefore better off alone. I don't feel capable of sharing my life with another person because I hate my own roots and don't feel comfortable with my own national identity.
Yes, my own national self-hatred reaches a pathological level. I'm even unable to maintain a healthy relationship because of it.
Final reflections
I've said it before: the HA philosophy, while incredibly beneficial, can only take me so far because my frustration is with destiny itself. It can't solve my neurological problems, my skin-related dysphoria or the pathological hatred that I have for my own nationality.
I hate my life due to circumstances beyond my own control. Misery is the base condition.
For me, the goal is to keep myself above the threshold of misery through constant communion with the beauty of life. I myself find beauty and satisfaction in higher pursuits such as martial arts, artistic creation, erudition and spirituality. Pursuing big Colombian booties also fills me with joy.
I'll continue to keep myself afloat through these higher pursuits. I'll keep striving to create meaning in my own life until the misery grows too strong and overshadows the beauty. At that point, when I no longer find any beauty in life, I'll either reach for the loaded gun or the rope. But, until then, I intend to keep making good with what I have and capturing whatever fleeting glimpses of joy I can.
This is just a personal reflection on what things the HA philosophy has helped me with and what things it hasn't.