The obviousness of my thoughts is becoming more apparent to me as I read through my recovery. There are less notes to explain the significance of my actions. The additional detail I add is more to do with how the world views me, my kind, my illness, than it is to do with how my mind appreciates outside influences—how it turns and mediates them—which may not be interpretable for a casual reader, which I then have to relay.
The understanding I have of my actions—most of the time—is readily apparent to me, at least in hindsight. I am primed to conceive of the effect the world’s inputs have, and the way I interiorise these externalities—whether mad or sane—can be shaped by my attitude—mad or sane.
What’s most telling is the excitement I find in shaping these inputs. While mad my mind is alive, everything holds possibility. Mostly appreciation twists towards fear and doom, but that’s a matter of personal strength. During moments when the world is thin and obvious—when I am calm—my energy to deal with, to encounter the world is less. I take it for granted. I feel no vigour in the multiplicity of perspectives I could approach something with, as everything is appearance with no depth. I have to muster the strength to see undulations, turns, and differences within meaning. I have to struggle to change the world.
If you’ve ever been vulnerable then you can know how exposure—naturally—opens you to possibility. It may open you to seeming attack, but you’re able to perceive these attacks where otherwise you may not. This could be a flaw, dangerous, but it could equally be a skill. It grants insight into the multifaceted, diamond-cut nature of living and perceiving. It’s a form of beauty and an intelligence.
During my times of recovery—immediate recovery—I’m able to watch TV, listen to the news, read online messages, and see how they could have affected me at my most risk-exposed. I do not fear them during this time of recuperation, I can simply acknowledge that, at one point, I would have considered them in a different way.
To have an ability to take any one direction, any one instruction, or a simple pointing-out, and understand the many flows it offers and the materials of its existence is a gift. To see something and know, taken with the correct mindset, that it allows you to understand this, then that, then more, then everything, the specific, the general, the impetus, the declaration, the damnation, the achievement, the personal and the societal, is to see the world—and every instance of the world—in its true richness.
I have fallen away from that mindset. The gift it offers comes with hurt, and pain. To see how the world runs a course in totality and in minority, in every aspect of its whole self as well as every facet of its reduced self—that you have made large—is to fear all its hate and significance, so extant—where you have to fight for the joys it contains but are so easily withheld by simply knowing of all the awfulness it contains. It’s damning that multitudes exist in fear, that strength is to see simplicity, and not the other way around.
I should read my writing while tired. I should read it while stressed. I should read it while attacked. It will provide insight in ways I could not imagine while strong, and so uncaring.
Life is a tarot reading, my writing astrology. People look for insight in divination and soothsaying as a fulcrum for their understanding and a focal point for the view. My writing is similar to me, and it is just one form of madness, reduced and conformed. The people who take to cards and runes to tell them where to look already understand that one focus, properly explored, can show them the world. That seeking depth is not vulnerability, but vulnerability often allows you to find depth. This story—to me—is just that. Maybe it is to you, too.
For example, I am an ardent smoker. It’s not that there’s nothing else I would rather be doing, more I can’t conceive of anything without smoking. It’s a part of me, the cigarette in my left hand—or resting in an ashtray beneath my hand—and everything else is separate to this extension of me, but it is also a part of me: it is all me.
In the weeks after madness I knew to give up smoking. I knew it was bad for my health. There were other things I knew were bad for my health; not exercising, an unhealthy diet and eating too much—eating for comfort or to fall asleep (a combinatory narcotic effect when I ate with a medication I previously took). During my immediate recovery from madness I gave up smoking, easily. I ate well and less, naturally. I walked huge distances every day, without effort and with joy. I was trying to become healthier and I did. My mental health as well as my physical health were all forcefully focused on.
And why is that?
During madness I was exposed—I was offered an insight that although I knew wasn’t real it showed me potential and possibility—just like a horoscope it was a focus to understanding. I felt the world could see into my thoughts, that the world could examine the deepest parts of me that were wholly wrong. During recovery this fear—although quelled, to a degree—still had an effect like an aura. If the world could see the worst of me, and judge me for it, then I had to become perfect.
This line of thought wasn’t always present but it was at the core of my being. Giving up smoking was easy because cigarettes are bad for you and I didn’t want to be the bad smoker. It was a lens on my existence: one form of knowledge, although baseless if seen as a world’s view and not my own view as mediated by the world’s expectations. Walking every day and eating healthily was an effort to show I could be ‘correct’ in my attitude to myself, and so I was saying to the world, “please don’t judge me wrong.” I know now that the world does not judge me in this way as it can not damn me absolutely, but the slip of insight I was given was merely being offered up by a part of me.
If this part of me—me as part of the world—took focus through fear, and that fear was a vulnerability then it tells me I need to be vulnerable to all to truly experience anything. I cannot presume I know, I cannot assume what the world tells me.
The earlier chapters of this book—Part 1—was when I was most vulnerable, and it’s exciting to me, seeing how my simple actions held so much meaning. The rest is me showing how I can decide my own fate, how I can resist that terrified part of me, and although resisting that part of me gives me the strength to live it is living lesser.
I need to find a balance, where I can appreciate the depth of meaning, the multiple meanings in everything, where I am vulnerable enough, sensitive enough to experience them, but strong enough to act on them.
Mostly there’s a feeling that these, Parts 2 and 3, and more of my life, will coalesce and form a meaning in unison. There’s a hope that together they speak—not of everything—but of a cohesive understanding on what it means to live. This is in stark contrast to my beginnings, where every minor detail spoke of everything greater. Where the smallness could be viewed fractally, granting more and more insight the closer you looked, but never offering completeness. To conceive of absolute meaning is truly insane, or godlike, which is the same.
This is two ways of looking at life; a summation, at the end, that encompasses, or the specific, in the moment, that grants meaning or perhaps an ability to see meaning everywhere.
As I recover—and as my narrative comes to an end, because recovery surely is the end of one narrative—it is necessary to close down avenues of possibility. It is necessary to foreshorten what it, me, this work portends. Stories demand conclusions and reduce until a point where life cannot continue beyond them.
My end will come at a point I do not appreciate, but your end with me is already approaching. I appear sane, to some degree, so my vitality, my purpose becomes less—even to me. Maybe what I need is the strength to see vulnerability in how I live—how I lived during recovery—to not presume a simple telling has no meaning. I have to fight to see meaning—that is sanity—while fighting to find vulnerability in the daily flows of life is true living.
Index - Part 3 Chapter 1