Hi! My Name is Veronika!

I read the book Veronika Decides To Die by Paulo Coelho a few years ago after I was discussing my life with a friend and they said I reminded them of the lead character Veronika. I took them up on their advice and I am so grateful for it. It is a great book and if you are ever thinking that your life will never change or if you feel like life is just a bunch of nonsense, I totally recommend this book!

I completely related to the character and when I finished reading the book, I took something away from it. Below is an excerpt of the first chapter. If you can relate to this small part, read this book!

Excerpt from Veronika Decides To Die by Paulo Coelho

One day, I’ll get tired of hearing mother’s constantly repeating the same things, and to please her I’ll marry a man whom I oblige myself to love. He and I will end up finding a way of dreaming of a future together: a house in the country, children, our children’s future. We’ll make love often in the first year, less in the second, and after the third year, people perhaps think about sex only once a fortnight and transform that thought into action only once a month. Even worse, we’ll barely talk. I’ll force myself to accept the situation, and I’ll wonder what’s wrong with me, because he no longer takes any interest in me, ignores me, and does nothing but talk about his friends, as if they were his real world.

When the marriage is just about to fall apart, I’ll get pregnant. We’ll have a child, feel closer to each other for a while, and then the situation will go back to what it was before. I’ll begin to put on weight like the aunt that nurse was talking about yesterday – or was it days ago, I don’t really know. And I’ll start to go on diets, systematically defeated each day, each week, by the weight that keeps creeping up regardless of the controls I put on it. At that point, I’ll take those magic pills that stop you feeling depressed, then I’ll have a few more children, conceived during nights of love that pass all too quickly. I’ll tell everyone that the children are my reason for living, when in reality my life is their reason for living.

People will always consider us a happy couple, and no one will know how much solitude, bitterness and resignation lies beneath the surface happiness.

Until one day, when my husband takes a lover for the first time, and I will perhaps kick up a fuss like the nurse’s aunt, or think again of killing myself. By then, though, I’ll be too old and cowardly, with two or three children who need my help, and I’ll have to bring them up and help them find a place in the world before I can just abandon everything. I won’t commit suicide: I’ll make a scene, I’ll threaten to leave and take the children with me. Like all men, my husband will back down, he’ll tell me he loves me and that it won’t happen again. It won’t even occur to him that, if I really did decide to leave, my only option would be to go back to my parents’ house and stay there for the rest of my life, forced to listen to my mother going on and on all day about how I lost my one opportunity for being happy, that he was a wonderful husband despite his peccadilloes, that my children will be traumatized by the separation.

Two or three years later, another woman will appear in his life. I’ll find out – because I saw them, or because someone told me – but this time I’ll pretend I don’t know. I used up all my energy fighting against that other lover, I’ve no energy left, it’s best to accept life as it really is, and not as I imagined it to be. My mother was right. He will continue being a considerate husband, I will continue working at the library, eating my sandwiches in the square opposite the theatre, reading books I never quite manage to finish, watching television programmers that are the same as they were ten, twenty, fifty years ago.

Except that I’ll eat my sandwiches with a sense of guilt, because I’m getting fatter; and I won’t go to bars any more, because I have a husband expecting me to come home and look after the children.

After that, it’s a matter of waiting for the children to grow up and of spending all day thinking about suicide, without the courage to do anything about it.

One fine day, I’ll reach the conclusion that that’s what life is like, there’s no point worrying about it, nothing will change. And I’ll accept it.

*On a side note, they are making a movie based on this book with Sarah Michelle Gellar as Veronika. I don’t like her, so I probably won’t like the movie. Read the book. Books are always better anyways!