Mon journal et son deuil résumés en un Tweet — Letter to Suede [Eng]

C’est drôle. Si je me rappelais avoir dans un moment d’égarement envoyé début décembre sur Twitter la “letter” qui vient ci-dessous, je ne me rappelais aucunement à quel point son contenu résume efficacement en quelques paragraphes et à travers l’histoire de ma passion pour un groupe toute l’histoire de mon trouble bipolaire et tout le deuil associé à ma dépression actuelle. Après l’avoir relue et y avoir ajouté une ou deux corrections, j’ai décidé de la publier ici. À montrer dans des facs de psychiatrie? Mais surtout cette question: écris-je mieux, de manière plus concise et compréhensible en anglais qu’en français?…

It’s weird. Although I remembered having sent on Twitter during a wandering moment of the beginning of December the aforementioned “letter”, I had no clue anymore of how the content was, through my passion for a band, a perfect abstract of all I could have written in this blog, the story of my bipolar disorder and the mourning associated with my current depression. After having readen it one more time and slightly corrected it, I have decided to paste it here. To be exhibited in psychiatry manuals? Meanwhile, especially the following question: is my writing better, more concise and more comprehensible in English than in French?…

Message sent on Twitter to Brett Anderson and Mat Osman, December 13, 2020

Dear members of the band Suede,

I think it is time. I think I have been waiting for this moment for twenty-five years. I don’t know if those lines will reach you, if you will pay attention to them or have the time to read them in detail — anyway, I don’t have any problem writing in the void. I guess what comes afterward is not a common fan letter. This letter is a letter of deep acknowledgements and confessions. Saying “I’m a huge fan” or “you are my favorite band” would be a cliché and euphemism. Your music and performances have not only enlightened and soundtracked a great part of my life but also saved it in many occurrences. All of my life I have suffered from bipolar disorder and its co-morbidities, first without knowing it, or ignoring it, or overcoming it naturally without any medication, before it finally exploded in a dramatic and quite invalidating psychotic way a few years ago, ruining the love of my life, severely compromising my professional career, and driving me into aberrant behaviours.

First, when I lately discovered Suede with the album Coming Up (and, by ricochet, your debut album and the masterpiece Dog Man Star) in 1996, I was in mourning after the death of my mother by ovary cancer and at the border of a total renouncement to life. “What to believe in? It’s impossible to say”, would you sing. Yes, for me, it was possible to say: I started believing in you and your art — recognizing in the lyrics many aspects of my existence like gloomy suburb atmospheres, despair, loneliness, loss, wandering, vain love and lust, confusion, addiction, dark and rough hope, and, of course, highness, and finding in the music an energic and glittering vector in order to either struggle with or over-enjoy life. You know, it’s akin to what Kurt Cobain evocated in the song ‘Lithium’: sometimes, especially when you suffer from severe (bipolar-disordered) depression, you need God. Since 1996, you have become more than heroes: a true kind of religion and faith. I cannot remember any period of my life during which I would not have listened to Suede and I cannot identify any album for which I would say: “this is my favourite.” Any of your records is a piece of me and exhibits both an up and down side in my reception and passion. Nevertheless, Bloodsports will always remain a peculiar opus: when it was released, more than a decade after A New Morning, like a gift from heaven for a fan like me, I would live in Southern America and was more than deeply in love with a young and adorable Chilean woman. Her and I fell in love with the record, not solely because it was extremely good, but also because it was the first real ‘love album’ of Suede and, therefore, a flowered soundtrack for our idyll — “This love has lifted her / This love has lifted you.” However, there was a terrifying mise en abyme in the last, melancholic part of the record and its thin-skinned fear of loss. What could occur occurred: I was contracted in the academic domain on a highly demanding position, burned-out, and was ‘definitely’ diagnosed with bipolar disorder before the latter disease dissolved piece by piece my abovementioned sentimental relationship. Honestly, still today, Bloodsports drives me into too much nostalgia and regrets, contrarily to all the other records of your career.

That few (compared to all I could write) being said, you may ‘know’ me (and therefore know her, see the aforementioned details), since I have over-tagged if not morally harassed many, many people (then maybe you) on every kind of social network in 2018 and 2019. In those years, I existed on the internet under the pseudonyme of David Anderson — from David Bowie and Brett Anderson, obviously. I was in an exuberant and extremely delusional manic phase and I started to blog in splitting and incoherent directions. I first created a blog called Bipolarity Report, which rapidly turned into a collection of tremendous adoration letters to my favourite French artist, Fishbach (hence, her; if you don’t know her music, I could suggest you listen the song ‘Mortel’, which is a remarkable kind of retro-synth-pop, sad dancefloor-like echo to ‘Europe Is Our Playground’). I was then under wrong medication that could not impede — or even enhanced — the further development of all kind of hallucinations, disconnection from reality, drug abuses, obsession with quantum metaphysics and telepathy, paranoïa, or persecutory delusion. The Blue Hour was drapping my mental sickness. At the puerile paroxysm of my mania, since I had discovered there was a ‘real’ Sir David Anderson in UK working for the MI5 on terrorist attacks, I decided to create a new arcane site called Fishbach Program: New Insights Into Terrorist Attacks, whose underlying purpose was probably to protect Fishbach from cyber-terrorist attacks from unvisible and unnamed hands in the Future (such a concept…) — though in which, later, I would talk about Islam and Daesh in hazardous ways putting me in a volatile situation and exposing me to be seen as a potential psychotic at the border of an irrational act of despair.

I started to harass Fishbach and her relatives — and, in addition, quite the whole Humanity — with my extremely odd and delirious writings by any possible remote mean and, retrospectively, I wonder how she could not have complainted against me — who knows? Considering the frightening dimension of my former writings she may still fear me. Of course, I have deleted from the internet all of this insane stuff. Then, I subsequently fell into a terribly long, deep and intense depressive phase (being in the ‘death zone’, as I describe elsewhere) — from which I have hardly been recovering during the last few months, coming back to life — and mourning — with — paradoxally or not — the rediscovery of the album Night Thoughts and my ability to cure by writing listening to it.

I would have liked to write you something concise, say “thank you from the bottom of my heart and soul.” I have quite failed, but maybe it sounds better in the way it is. Now, I just hope that your show in the Salle Pleyel in Paris, 21 April 2021, will not be cancelled one more time — two and a half decades after, I still believe Coming Up truly saved my life in the 1996–1997 years.

With all my respect and best regards,

Vincent Tristana