On December 28, 2008, at three in the morning, my greatest fear became reality: as the saying goes, I went mad.

My mind - my world - collapsed and was replaced by an all-powerful psychosis, which, like a parasite with myself as the host, fed and grew stronger with the paranoid ideas it incessantly generated: I was the new Dalai Lama, the Catcher in the Rye, paid assassins were lurking behind me.

In this delirium, still vividly alive in my memory, during my brief hospitalization and subsequent deadly depression, I dragged and led to despair all the people of my heart, who suddenly saw me shattered by an uncontrollable mental illness.

The bleak December of '08 in a numb Athens. The sacred red color. And my suicidal mother, who years later returns from Hades. In this book, I wrote everything I remember, without changing anything and keeping nothing hidden. Because thanks to these inconceivable days, I managed, amidst the wreckage of my mind, to find a new self and the difficult path that leads to mental tranquility. And while my story seems unique, the monster of mental illness and the fear it spreads is common to all of us, as is the beast of love and every human strength.

Because our soul is not made to be content with misery.