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Lorenzo Coullaut Valera was a Spanish sculptor and illustrator born in Marchena in 1876, the son of a French engineer. He spent his childhood in Nantes, France, and returned to Spain in 1893. His works are found throughout Spain and Latin-America and he has a museum in his hometown.
These last few months have helped me reflect and understand what is happening with my life and what mistakes I have been making. Nobody is perfect, but the truth is that I have been the stupidest person in the world.
When I went to live alone, I became obsessed with trying to run an online business. At first, my idea was only to advertise myself as a photographer to do photo shoots here in town, but little by little the idea began to form that I could earn a living directly through the Internet. I read a lot of digital marketing books, and at that time what everyone said was that I should gain a lot of followers on social networks, and that when I had many I could sell them something or advertise other brands and get paid. They said that you just had to post every day and that sooner or later your followers would increase.
The mistake I made, and the one that almost cost me my life (I’ll tell you why later), is that I became obsessed with doing it by myself. I lived alone, I didn’t go out with friends, I didn’t see my family, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t have a life because all I wanted was to move the online business forward. I survived with help of about 400 euros a month, which obviously didn’t give me enough to do anything with. And the mistake here is that, when a person is always alone, socially isolated, they end up with severe depression, and when you have depression you can’t do anything, you have no energy, no creativity, not even to work online sitting at a computer. And that, over the years, caused me so much stress that I ended up getting sick. One day I realized that I couldn’t swallow solids or liquids. It was acid reflux esophagitis (stress gastroesophageal reflux), and it was so severe that medications to reduce stomach acid did nothing. I was like that for years. Plus we were in a pandemic, with confinements, masks and so on.
Having been so socially isolated and without financial resources made me lose my spark and my joy. I had no energy, I had no desire for anything. I was no longer the same. Before that I had high expectations, I wanted to reach very high and achieve a lot of success. I got to know very interesting people, so much so that if I told it, no one would believe me. And yet my mistake of socially isolating myself made me sink to the bottom. I stopped being myself.
If everything goes well, I will soon begin a new stage in my life. I can’t say anything more at the moment. I have many things to achieve, and many people to meet. Oh la la.
Today, it has been a very special day. My cousin Cristina’s wedding. Of all my cousins, she was the first to have a wedding (my cousin Jorge had gotten married first, but civilly without any type of ceremony or celebration). It was in the church of San Juan Bautista de Marchena:
It has been an incredible wedding. Now it’s time to rest, my body is destroyed after many hours of dancing.
As an anniversary of the day completely unrelated to the above, today marks exactly 530 years since Christopher Columbus landed on a Caribbean island and named it Guadalupe, in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Cáceres (Extremadura, Spain).
All documentation, including the ship’s logs and personal diaries of Christopher Columbus, are preserved in Seville in the Archive of the Indies building. Right next door, in the cathedral, his mortal remains lie in an impressive tomb:
© 2024 Francisco González SOLEMNITY
