Ángel Martín has no problem defining himself as ‘ex-crazy’. Going crazy, he says, was the best thing that ever happened to him: “This process of madness has forced me to stand in front of a mirror that I would not have put on otherwise.”

The journalist has just published ‘In case the voices come back’, which before reaching the bookstores is already in its third edition. It is a story about his life in 2017, when he suffered a psychotic break for which he had to be admitted to a hospital where he spent 15 days. In the book he addresses all those people who may be having a bad time for their mental health, he insists that it is normal to break down, go crazy and that he comes out of madness.

Martín has come to La Ventana to explain how during this episode, the most dangerous thing was the power of the voices he was hearing: become a puppet ”.

The alarm bell and the smell of coffee

In her case, the alarm voice was given by her partner: “I am not someone who realized that I was living on the other side, without my girl realizing it, the alarm voice was given by her the moment she I publish something on the networks, congratulating them on the success they have had with the Wonder Woman movie ”.

Her surroundings, she explains, thought it was an inside joke with her partner, but she knew then that something was wrong. Even so, remember, this type of action could have gone unnoticed because, at that time, Martín consumed marijuana and alcohol almost daily: “Many of those things, I don’t know to what extent the other is thinking ‘because today he has he shook hands with the ‘gin and tonic’ and he’s more of an idiot than usual ‘, so it takes something extremely wild and flashy for someone close to you to say’ something’s going on here ‘”.

The trigger for this admission to the hospital was not a conversation with her partner, but rather “she chooses to call the person who at that time she considered that I was going to pay more attention to her.”

His friend simply told him ‘let’s go to the hospital’, and Martín, despite not understanding why, decided to accompany him. He did it, remember, because he smelled like coffee.

“It so happened that he smelled like coffee, so at that time, for me the smell of coffee was a sign that I could trust what was happening at the moment, because I thought ‘if this guy who tells me to accompany him He goes to the hospital and he smells like coffee, because I can trust him, I accompany him to the hospital, ‘”he says.

This was one of the signals he was interpreting at the time. The journalist explains that being crazy is “terribly exhausting, because absolutely everything that comes across in front of you has a meaning.”

Start from scratch

The recovery process was very hard, but her life has also changed for the better: “Something happens to me that completely breaks my personality, there comes a time when you leave the hospital where you don’t know who you are, you don’t know anything, you are empty and you are incapable of absolutely anything ”.

“There is a moment when I decide that it makes no sense to try to keep looking for who I was, to try to keep discovering why some of the things that interested me before no longer interest me, and I decide that the only option I have to get out of there it’s really starting from scratch, that is, starting to rebuild myself completely, ”he explains.

This process was not easy either, and he had to face aspects of his personality that he was not proud of, but he assures that “the person that I am now is infinitely better than the type I was before all this happened and is much better than what it probably would have been if this did not happen to me, but I have only been able to do this, I am only aware, because I have had to rebuild myself ”.

On whether he misses the voices, he confesses that “at times he does.” “It’s not that you miss the voices, you miss things from that world you’ve been in, but it’s a drawer. Sometimes they ask me ‘how can you say that?’ and it’s like ‘because I come from a place where I could travel back in time. How can I not miss traveling in time? ‘

Traveling back in time, attending a Mozart recital or being a descendant of gods, but also discovering the good people around him are some of the things that, he narrates in his book, he lived as real during this episode of his life. Ángel Martín writes in a cathartic way in ‘In case the voices come back’: “From now on I’m not just saying it, but I have the opportunity to write it down and in capital letters: GOING CRAZY IS THE BEST THING THAT HAPPENED TO ME IN LA LIFE”.