In periods of extreme sadness, and in periods of witnessing such feelings in others, I’ve noticed that the very mindset of stress and pain alters how we perceive reality. 

When I’m drowning in insecurity I become immersed in a story. I’m unlovable — and the reason I’m in pain is that I’m worse than everyone else and this is why I’m not getting what I need, and this will dominate my life as I suffocate in these feelings while others succeed because they’re simply better.

I recently was drowning in a story, and I’m not sure that I won’t get pulled back by the riptide. But for this one moment I am able to take breaths. I can see myself and I can feel things besides the fantasy that had a stranglehold on me. 

We have to fight against the oppressive narratives we unwittingly construct around ourselves in moments of pain.

Stories are just that. Stories. A narrative can never be the full picture; it is a collection of words and a window in on a moment in a moment; a magnifying glass against one thing. Narratives are myopic, unable to express the totality of the space available, only a single part of the whole.

It’s hard. Unbelievably difficult. It feels nearly impossible — but when we are crushed under the pressure of the story that is our feelings, we need to find a new story. One that is better able to approximate the whole of reality.

In moments of clarity or normalcy we may fail to appreciate just how the story we take to describe our life has changed. In periods of extreme suffering we are unable to remember that there could have been any other tale.

I’m not even sure how, but we… I  need to find the path back to the narrative of multitudes we experience when we’re okay.

***

I live in a world of stories. 

When I turn my head too fast reality fractures and I see the layers underneath everything. Colors and geometry I can’t describe; the embodiment of feelings and narrative and concepts. Giants so tall their shoulders can’t be seen. Starships crashing into the side of a building I’m walking past.

I am untethered from the universe. I can see and feel all of existence, and all of the existences layered on top of those. A winter’s wind is liable to blow me away from my own body.

My mind is an endless space of possibility. When I close my eyes, my consciousness spreads out across the infinite recesses of my imagination. Different shapes, feelings, people; all who inhabit this shared volume of immaterial stuff.

The stories I tell myself spread out from me and twist what it means to be alive into the shape of their silhouette. What I see when I look at a wall, and what I see underneath that wall, hinges on whatever infectious feeling is burrowing around my mind in that one moment.

I often feel like my brain is vibrating in my skull as it tries to process everything it’s seeing. I can see through time and through walls and through people all at once all the time and it’s overwhelming.

When I’m excited or in love these feelings come to shape the universe itself.

Energy radiating out from my body. I can physically pull myself across the universe with exhilaration alone.

But pain will drag me down so far my ears pop from the pressure. 

I can see undefined hands clawing at me as they try to pull me into my mattress. 

I can see the fire licking off my skin as I burst forth from a black lake of hate someone once tried to trap me in.

I have watched nearly everyone I love suffer as I stood powerless. Unable to help at all. I’ve watched as my own life crumbled in on itself through no fault of mine. Unable to stop it.

Here in the world of my mind I am divinity made manifest. Powerful in ways I cannot be anywhere else.

When you can twist the air around you into fire and fractal geometry you too would feel like a god.

***

I hate feeling powerless.

I’m falling through time. I don’t know where I am.

I’m falling through the sludge of feelings that have crushed me in the past. I don’t know who I am.

I hate that I am a weak god. There are monsters in here alongside me, and they’ll expand until they consume all the matter in the dreamscape that is my mind.

I can exert control, shape and bend reality to my design. But at its core it is an ecosystem that refuses me. I can take the currents and turn them into something new, but I cannot decide which way the tide goes.

If I really was a supreme being there wouldn’t be these stories that can drag me so far down I can’t breathe. I’ve felt so dominated by a feeling it is as if gravity was a hundred times more intense, and it takes an endless amount of power simply to avoid collapsing to the ground.

If I was a god I wouldn’t be scared of my own mind. Scared that all of reality will constrict in on me, and I’m just one break up or bad nights sleep away from the endless layers of limbo.

There is an impossible gulf between me and everyone else in the universe, and I feel so alone sometimes. 

I’m just this collection of stories spinning across space, crashing through time and the walls between bouncing light photons. It takes so much strength just to ground myself to this current moment, and something deep inside me worries that I’m never grounded enough to truly connect to someone.

***

I feel connected to her, not some sort of untethered phantasm. I feel in my own body when she’s around.

When I look at her my vision stops fracturing. I can see what’s really here, not just the fantasies that underwrite our perception.

When we talk I’m just me. Just Max.

***

The lies we tell ourselves

I wrote that nearly three eight months ago. Almost exactly, actually. 

I wish that story had a happy ending. It would have been nice if this story had a happy ending. Instead reality crashed down on top of me, and the torrent of stories that surrounds us nearly washed my consciousness away. Somehow I made it to the Otherside; though it was narrowly done, and in spite of everything.

But let’s pretend it’s still May, so the rest of what I wrote actually makes sense.

I’ve returned, but only barely. More determined than ever to exist and yet more fractured than before.

I am forced to live out the physical manifestations of everything that happens in my mind. The only respite is seemingly leaving my own body, my own self-perception, or more aptly its lack, twisting until my reflection makes me sick.

Or, as it turns out, drinking solves this problem too. But I was wise enough not to treat a breakup with alcoholism.

I feel like my thoughts and feelings become real. Manifested fifth dimensional objects I can throw about the world, or pull apart with my mind. When I feel something it shapes the universe itself.

How am I supposed to live when there’s an ever twisting infinite expanse between me and every other person? How am I supposed to be loved if I’m trapped here in my own mind?

With anger I didn’t think I’d ever have, I punched a hole in reality and pulled an earlier or more whole version of my consciousness back into the universe. Maybe if I get angry enough I can punch through this expanse that separates us.

I soared to seraphic heights when I reconstituted myself. Shimmering I emerged from the space beyond reality. I returned embroiled in energy, and I built wonders in my mind with that power. I shaped the universe around me, and I never felt so alive. But that strength is gone now, and my friends who were depressed are still depressed. Though they too have gotten a bit better, at least for now. People are still dying. Maybe this too can get better.

I’m not really a god.

I’m still broken.

I’m still just as overwhelmed by the fact I have to exist as me. 

Sometimes I’ve wished I could escape reality. Escape this. With my power anything should be possible. And yet… 

I’ve brushed against the edge of our universe, and I’ve seen the horrible truth. There is no escape, or none that I can find. No matter how far my consciousness travels away from my body, from this physical world, it will never pierce the barrier between us and the next layer of reality. I’ll never find peace. 

One version of Max sought to use their infinite power to move forward in spite of this. To move forward purposefully. I am not him. I am more nihilistic. But I am not.I’m more tired. But I am not. We both allaccept the same basic conclusion though. 

The only way out is through.

Maybe that’s okay.