I first started writing this blog after witnessing the suicide of someone off of one the buildings in my old neighbourhood. I found myself both feeling and not at the same time—stuck telling myself how shocked I ought to be and surprised back at myself for not being more so. Regardless of my ultimate feelings, the events played out in my head over and over again until I wrote them all down. In doing so I realized how unhappy I was in my own life despite living in the urban paradise I so wanted to be happy in. I knew I needed to make changes, and I knew some of the changes would not be easy or quick. Sometimes life’s a barge.
Subsequent posts followed—and then I started writing posts about time travel, and then I started going back to talk to my past self and reposting paper journal entries from fifteen years ago when I was in school for digital media. I brought my past self into the future and we were going to figure out what it was that had happened to us. It was fun writing, and I found catharsis in being able to talk to myself from the perspective of someone who knew nothing about what was going to happen to him and from the perspective of someone who knew all too well what was going to happen to him.
There was a problem though. As I was creating the blog, and this is true for any blog, I knew any reader who began reading the blog after I’d started writing it would find the narrative running backwards before the point where they began reading. Imagine picking up a book and starting in the middle of a story. You can read normally forward from that point and you can also go back to the start of the book and catch up to the middle. But with a blog you’d have to read the pages backward from the point your started until you got to the beginning. It might not make much sense—then again, it might also make one of the funniest episodes of Seinfeld ever.
A few months later I pulled the plug on the entire thing. The back and forth dialogue was a mess. The backward and forward narrative was a mess. And it was getting far more personal than I’d ever intended. I could see what those who would want to see would see. The blog format creates an artificial intimacy, a consequence of these words seemingly spun directly from my head into my computer and onto the internet—seemingly unedited, unfiltered, unreviewed—before appearing on your screen as if I’d wrote them just for you. The blog format feels autobiographical because it is almost exclusively authored in the first–person, and I almost exclusively write in the first–person.
So—this is when the lines blur. There is an event in my head I need to get out, and much like the one which got this blog started, it’s going to be challenging to get the words right, it will be difficult not to sensationalize, and it will be impossible to keep me out of it all. How much of me is in what I write? All of me—I wrote it. But I have no interest in being my own biographer. Would this story be any more or less interesting because it’s based on real events from my real life or based on real events from my fake life? Have I blurred the lines now, or did I start with the first word of this post? Perhaps it was with the first words of this blog over a year ago. Or perhaps every word I’ve ever spoken or written is part of a crafted series of messages to position your mind exactly where it is now… where I’ll then start you wondering if you can trust anything I’ve ever written or indeed trust anything you take for granted as being known.
In early 2014 I experienced a stress–related psychosis. I lost my sense of self and sense of continuity within my own existence. I doubted my own memories and the validity of my personal relationships. I was an actor—and so was everyone else. I was an agent—but nobody knew who for. I could hear everyone’s thoughts—but I had none of my own. I was a wolf—and my life was in danger. The paranoia spread as quickly as my mind could fill in the details of why I couldn’t trust any aspect of any past, present, or future moment of my life.
I withdrew from rational thought and went into a crippling survival mode fuelled by terror. Each day, each hour, was one I had to consider as it related to whatever nonsense was streaming through my mind at the time. It was exhausting—I had to always be one step ahead of the paranoia, planning my next move and coming up with every contingency I could imagine to trick myself into thinking I had the upper hand, even if they thought they did. Yes—I became one of those people who was worried about a they. In my mind I was the target of an on–going mental and physical hijacking, and depending on the day I was having, they were either winning or losing.
Everything suffered. I felt as if I was being monitored, spied on. I didn’t trust emails and txt messages. I didn’t want to touch objects other people had handled recently. I only ate food I had bought and prepared myself. I became confused and lonely. I said nothing about anything I was experiencing to anyone aside from carefully crafted exchanges to try and figure out if I was dealing with a friend or a foe. But there was neither past a point. It was always just me and madness.
It went on for months. I burned bridges under the guise of protecting myself. I withdrew from friends and family and kept them at arm’s length, never being able to confidently determine their alliances. I halted all online activities. I deleted accounts, pulled down all my websites, erased any trace of my digital identity which could be linked to me offline. I didn’t do anything I thought might be used to profile or identify me. I was going to disappear. Then I’d be safe.
I lost my home, my sense of family, some of my dearest friends, and any financial stability before I was able to break through my own mind. I’ve never had to fight myself so hard before, and part of why it took so long was thinking I could fight myself and somehow win. The fight is what kept it all going. I was trying to fight a fire with more fire. It was only after I stopped trying to fight did things start to get better.
In my dream I am with people. My dream sense tells me I know these people even though my waking mind doesn’t recognize their faces. We’re in a snowy place near an icy river. There are rocks jutting out of the ice as we stand by the shore. It’s overcast and cold. The air is calm. And then there is the sound of ice cracking and snow crunching. A giant polar bear is by the river right beside us. I can tell the people I’m with are slowly backing away, but I stay where I am. I’ve caught the gaze of the animal—we regard the other. Then the bear is in front of me, towering in front of me on their hind legs. But I sense no threat and in turn wish no harm—we have happened into the same moment. And then the bear’s arms are around me, lifting me up off the ground. It’s a hug. I’m getting hugged by a polar bear.
I wake and feel different—a quiet resolve surrounds me instead of my usual terror of having to face another day not knowing which delusion was going to fuel which awful thought at any given terrible moment. I remember my bear hug and a song lyric—Just ’cause you’re crazy doesn’t mean that you’re free.
My life had vanished into my delusions, my energy consumed with attempting to figure them out, my sense of self lost in trying to understand what was real and what wasn’t real—that was the trap. The escape was accepting the delusions might be real or the delusions might be imagined because it actually didn’t matter what they were, what matters was the self I wanted to be at the end of the day, or in this case, at the start of the day.
If my entire world were a Truman Show, or a Groundhog Day, or an Inception, or a Matrix, I would still want to be the gentle, compassionate, intelligent, helpful, strong, genuine person I strive to be. If I was being held captive, being experimented and spied on I would want to show the true nature of my character regardless of circumstance. I’d still want to be the best me I could be no matter if that me was happening in a computer simulation, at an alien zoo, or on the surface of a black whole.
It’s taking months to heal, but I feel it happening. Each day is a little better, and then some days I wake up and feel like I’ve slipped back. I get echoes of madness at times, if I’m under stress or under slept, but from what I’ve been told this is normal and nothing to be discouraged by. A mind doesn’t just snap—the circumstances build slowly over time, over years in some cases, until you reach the definitive moment where a new path is created—suddenly you find yourself on it—and it takes laps before you realize it’s circular.
We are the compilers of our own experience—in that sense it is only ever our own selves in this world. But, and this is the challenge, how we compile our world will impact how others compile theirs. It’s all the same source code, but every machine, every system, will interpret this code in its own way. The resultant will be the appearance of many paths to walk, many lines in time.
But, amongst these infinite paths, there is also only one path—the one you’re on right now. And whether you believe you’re able to choose to stay on this path or that path or not, it’s up to you to walk it.
