Let me tell you how my recovery is going. The path ahead is clear now, even if it’s still a long one. All the current problems—like the fact that a phone in my hands is about as useful as a stone, or that pouring myself a glass of water turns into a whole production—are complete nonsense by comparison. Let me explain. Not long ago, I didn’t recognize people and didn’t understand how to speak. Every morning a doctor would come to me and say: Alexei, I brought a board—let’s think of a word to write on it. That drove me to despair, because although I already understood, in general, what the doctor wanted, I had no idea where words came from. Where in my head do they appear? Where do you find a word, and how do you make it mean something? None of this made any sense at all. Then again, I didn’t know how to express my despair either, so I just stayed silent. And this is me describing a later stage—the one I can still remember. Now I’m a guy whose legs shake when he walks up the stairs, but at least he thinks, “Oh, right, these are stairs! People go up them. I should probably look for an elevator.” Before, I would have just stood there blankly and stared. So yes, there are still plenty of problems to solve, but the amazing doctors at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital have solved the main one. They turned me from a “technically alive person” into someone who has every chance of once again becoming the Highest Form of Being in Modern Society—a person who can scroll through Instagram quickly and instinctively knows where to put the likes.