Expecto Patronum

I am feeling kind of down tonight. Well, I am about to make a life-changing decision. The feelings of guilt and loss of self-worth that my thesis adviser inculcated in me are making this decision more difficult. My aunt is not helping: she actually takes my thesis adviser's side and thinks that I am just lazy and complaining. In fact, I am working my back off.

One colleague recently reminded me, not without spite, to comply with the rules regarding thesis students regarding staying overnight in the lab. She implied that I should not stay up late in the lab (unless she or her fellow research personnel were there). I understand that she was merely trying to tell me. I do not think she knows of my life-changing decision, because I have kept it from others and merely consulted the important people for this decision. However, as a former research personnel, I took it in a not-so-good way. I felt that I was being degraded to the status of a subject from my former status of a citizen. This added to my melancholy over my life-changing decision.

I have had thoughts of suicide in my mind:

• Squirting drops of potassium cyanide in my mouth. We have this in our laboratory.
• Hanging from the second floor of our institute's museum.
• Being run over.
• Being killed by criminals on an obscure, dimly-lit road.
• Being maimed by a stray bullet.

Of course, doing suicide is another thing. I do not want to be buried without a final blessing. I'm Orthodox, so my church cannot bless me when I die.

I seem to be on the borderline of clinical depression and normalcy. However, I improved a bit when I read the Wikipedia articles on these topics. I don't know why. Am I even subliminally denying that I am depressed? Or I really read these articles and think, "No, I'm not THAT sick." Maybe I am relieved that it is explained to me, so that I don't delude myself into more and more pessimism and negativity.

I am a multi-sinner, but even then I pray that God might be by my side. In a world which has proven itself to be utterly utilitarian, cold and unfeeling, I cannot trust anyone to pick me up in the way I should be picked up. Even if only God is by my side, I know I can face the world and my problems. But He has to be there and I have to sense it. I do not know when this dark cloud of hopelessness will lift, but I hope it will come soon.