Perspective

Above

Let me tell you a story.

There is a river. There is a sun. There is a forest; it stretches over the mountains and reaches up towards the clouds. Wrapped together with the mist, the evergreens sway in a summer’s wind. Yellow and purple flowers dance in a field at the feet of the mountains, and try to coax an old grey barn into joining them.

All I have ever wanted is to be myself.

Below

‘Once upon a time’ is a phrase I am fond of, at least when I am trying to figure out how to begin an essay.

There is a feeling it evokes, rightfully so — the beginning of a story; a block of pure marble, ready to be shaped into art by the throughlines of the narrative.

It is sudden, in a sense. The beginning of the story is not necessarily the start. You may be thrust into the action, or find yourself in the middle of a strange new world, missing all the context required to understand. It need not even be chronological — you can flashforwards or flashback.

It just needs to be once upon a time.

Beyond

When I was a little kid, maybe five years old, I tried to run away from home.

The street I live on has a chocolate factory. When she was alive, but after she she had moved further south — at least for the winter months to start — my grandmother used to come visit. We’d pull out a bed from inside the couch, and put sheets and pillows over the springy twisted metal thing that emerged from beneath where I usually sat. Then, me and my grandmother would walk down to the end of the block — to where the chocolate factory stood. They sold tiny solid pieces of chocolate, wrapped in gold and red foil, and shaped like racing cars. Then we’d go home and play pretend.

There was another factory, of some kind — between the one that made chocolate and my house — it was on the other side of the street, and its crumbling ruins stood resolute against the wind and winter snow. I think they made lightbulbs there, once upon a time. And during the summer, in the cracked and pothole filled parking lot of a maybe once lightbulb factory, my mom taught me how to ride a bike. Then she fell, or I crashed into her, and my dad had to bring her to the hospital, where she got a few stitches on her upper lip. And so, before and after this, I was always the sort of kid who looked both ways before crossing the street, and rode their bike with the slight unsteady ease of someone scared to fall off it. Which of course, ironically, was probably the reason I caused my mom to need stitches.

I struggled to learn to read as a kid too, so my parents would read to me instead. Sometimes comics, and sometimes novels. Or I would listen to audiobooks as I fell asleep, on my alarm clock which doubled as a CD-player. And then one day I guess it clicked, or clicked well enough, and suddenly all I’d do is read to myself. I’d sit on the side of the playground in elementary school, falling into my own imagination as sometimes stray basketballs fell on me and the book I was holding. One spring, right before the days turned long and we adjourned for summer break, we spent one of our art classes collecting twigs and built little ‘fairy huts’ behind the school — just in case the field next to the police station, where recess was held, also happened to be prime real estate for magic, I guess. I spent the remaining days of that school year building those twig huts alongside and above the stonebrick wall at the far edge of the school — where the hill it was built into crested to its peak.

And that’s why I ran away from home.

When I was a little kid I think I spent a lot of time in my own head. Like my imagination was all around me. And so one day I convinced my kindergarten classmate to join me there, and for a reason I cannot quite remember we decided to go on an adventure. I don’t think her parents were thrilled with that, but we both readied backpacks before our bedtime, and then when whatever counts as the witching hours to a five year old fell upon us, we tried to leave our houses — in search of each other, and of the great beyond.

Above

Time is nonlinear. Or it can be, like stories.

It’s the spring of 2016, and I’m in a dentist’s office. I don’t particularly want to be there, I’d rather be hanging out after school with my friends, but I have put myself at ease with the thought that one day I will be dead. I am in this present moment, and in an instant I will be years in the future, thinking back on how long the waiting room for this appointment felt like it was dragging on, and how short it felt between now and then. And then I’ll blink again, and I’ll be on my death bed — or laying crumpled after I trip down a flight of stairs, whatever it is that does me in.

For a moment I was in that dentist’s office, and then I woke up here. One day I’ll stop waking up, and despite it all I still don’t floss enough.

Below

Once upon a time I went for a walk with my friend in the park at night, which technically you are not supposed to do; but I was young, and full of rebellion. We walked along the river, and in the midnight glow of the nearby city — reflected in the water — we saw two trees softly illuminated before us. My friend remarked how perfectly the set of trees were framed by the river, “Isn’t it remarkable? How perfectly nature placed these trees?” he said, but then he paused — because they really only did align well from this one specific place we stood. A few steps forward, or back, and the trees just faded back into the dark and the barely visible greenmush of the after hours park.

Beyond

When I was younger I used to think of myself as someone who was, generally speaking, happy. Not always, but often. I thought of myself as someone who was, generally speaking, pretty secure.

And to be fair to my younger self, there was quite a lot to be happy about, and many reasons to feel secure in who I was. I had the sort of imagination that spread to others, and they literally made chocolate down the street from me. It took a bit for me to get the hang of reading, but I got good grades and unlike a lot of my peers I had literally no fear with public speaking.

But the interesting thing is all my issues were always there too, I think. I couldn’t place or name the feeling, but with hindsight I see all the times I’d fall away from myself as a kid. Like it was almost third person, or unreal. And dear god would I not pay attention in class, at least not fully; maybe it’s a miracle I learned anything at all.

Sometimes I think I’ve changed so much since then, since being a kid — usually I think its for the worse, but maybe things stay the same more than they don’t.

Above

I used to dissociate quite a bit. Or derealize, I’m not sure what the right term is anymore. And I guess I still do, just less. 

There was, or maybe is, a cosmic horror to it. To walk outside at night and find one second you are leaving your house, and the next you are a mile away, and the difference is just two points in a sequence.

There’s no feeling of throughline, no stream of consciousness — just moments, and then you’re somewhere else. Nothing looks familiar. Nothing feels right. It doesn’t even feel like there is a self — just moments — almost third person, instances flashing before your eyes as you blink. And all this god damn distance. Like I was underwater, or so far away that even my own memories became someone else’s. 

What are we but a collective of memories? So there is a deep horror to finding mine were now so far away from me I might as well be drowned. Does what remains of my grandmother die with me every time I dissociate? Do I lose my mother and my father, as they become someone from a distant land; foreign to me.

 I just wanted to feel like myself. Like I was real.

But I was drowning, or I was holding on to the river’s edge too tight. I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to be myself, Max, but I couldn’t figure out how to hold onto that — and so the rocks and branches swept up in the river current crashed into me, bruising and cutting my skin.

I just wanted to be okay. I didn’t want to lose the people I love. I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong. Understand why was I like this. So broken.

Below

I wanted to escape, once upon a time. It was too much, and I didn’t know what to do or how to do it —  I didn’t know how to keep going. I felt so disconnected from myself and everything around me, it felt like I was right up against the edge of reality, and I could finally be free if only I could move just a tiny bit further beyond.

I felt like a storybook version of myself. Paper thin — jumping back and forth between random moments, and finding that the streets I had walked down a hundred dozen times no longer looked familiar, and the light and trees took on an otherworldly beauty.

I wanted to escape, but there was a wall in the way. Glass or something — or maybe I was simply too heavyset, and I couldn’t break the gravitywell of existence. I just wanted to be okay. Or to leave this all behind. Either to return to earth or to cease my consciousness and pass to the otherside, to whatever afterlife awaits after completely derealizing.

But I couldn’t. There’s no storybook magic here, just brain chemistry.

So I just kept crashing into that glass wall. I kept feeling like I was dying — losing contact with everything that was me, like a fictional character flashing into existence for moments before someone turned the page and ended me. 

But the pages kept turning, and I couldn’t stay dead. Eventually I’d return, and my memories and my emotions felt like mine once more — and I thought I could start being okay again. Like I was solid, and had my feet on the ground. 

But I couldn’t hold on.

When I was younger, and when I’d close my eyes — and sometimes even when I didn’t — I could see the vast space that is my conscious and subconscious mind. In this world where I sometimes viewed my thoughts, there was a sun. When I manipulated an idea or dreamt up a story it lived here. They were haphazardly strewn about, no rhyme or reason to where I put them. Caught in the star’s gravitational pull, stray objects clumped together, time and force smoothing them into great rings of stone that orbited the sun. When I took a moment and let myself feel my own mind, my vision stopped for a moment and instead I saw this wonderland layered over everything else.

The sun went out.

I took a step forward, and in this moment of distance and dissociation I felt like I stepped inside myself — saw a vast space layered over the now alien outside world, and I felt the weight and hiss of wind as the rings of stone caved in on themselves — spinning out and crashing down; and with the next step, as I moved back into the darkness of an Ohio midnight, I felt this infinite chasm of nothingness inside me. The streetlamps pooled light over sheets of raindrops flung about, alongside the hood of my coat, by the mid-spring wind.

Sometimes, for brief moments, the dissociating stopped, and I thought everything would finally be okay. But there’s no light here, and the page turns. Long past the point of being able to handle it, it kept happening — and it broke the part that thought I’d ever be me again. The universe doesn’t care if you’re at your limit or not. And so I cried. And then I felt gross and weak for doing that, for not being able to handle this.

All I have ever wanted to be is myself. And yet I felt cursed to never be.

Beyond

I spent a lot of time the last few years unsure how to relate to myself, or the world, or anything at all.

I felt like something was wrong, something deep inside me. For years and years and more years than I can really think back on anymore. I felt so goddamn distant.

From myself. From others. Like there was something deep inside me that I couldn’t relate to the people around me, a hole at the bottom of me where a soul should have gone, perhaps.

And there was something wrong with me, several things probably. But no matter which problems I fixed, the feeling persisted. And so I just felt wrong. Broken.

I wanted to be loved. To be seen for myself — wholly — and to still have someone else want me once they had seen who I was. But it felt like something was wrong; like something was missing. So I just felt lonely and empty — far away, either lost above in the clouds or deep in the pit my essence should have filled, if I actually had one.

Above

There is a river.

Below

There is a sun.

Beyond

There is a forest that sways with the summer wind. 

The only way out is through.

Above

I used to really hate myself.

god, did I hate myself. It was only ever with the distance — months and months and months of space between us, that I could see myself, or rather my past self, as a person. 

Poor Max, who hated their body and hated the things they had done and hated their weakness and hated and hated but only ever themself.

Sometimes I wished to hurt myself, perhaps because then it would mean there is a self there still, even if it was in pain. But I knew not what to do or how to do it, so I just hated myself instead. For only the hope that being mean to myself might somehow free me of it. 

And then the night would end, and the feelings would fade away — I guess. But I don’t think I ever really stopped.

Until one day I woke to find it gone. 

Once upon a time I used to really hate myself. And maybe I still do, I don’t know why I wouldn’t. I am as I always have been, and I’ve changed nothing, so I don’t know why I’d expect myself to have either. Yet I cannot remember the last time I felt hate, at least not for myself. 

Somehow something has changed, I think, nevertheless. When I think back on all the things that used to make me want to crawl away from myself, I just can’t find whatever it is in me that felt such anger. I don’t feel tired, or sad — it isn’t that I’ve passed the point of being able to feel anything anymore, and am simply distant and numb. I’m happy. If there is melancholy it is just that I wish I somehow could have given my past self a hug — I think they needed it.

I am sorry I hated you so, Max.

I’m sorry, you didn’t deserve any of it. Not that anyone deserves to suffer, but you never did anything to earn the way I treated you, so I am sorry. You didn’t deserve any of what other people did either, and who knows if they’re sorry, but still you didn’t deserve it.

I wish someone had been there to tell you it was okay. But it gets better, it does. And I’m sorry that somewhere across spacetime you are still alone and suffering. I wish I could help you, but I don’t think I can. I am the you that came after, and while you’ll never know for sure, it did get better. And just as I am sure it will get worse for me eventually, it does get better too. For a time, at least.

I think I am the person I always wanted to be. Myself.

Below

Once upon a time I wanted to be strong.

I never thought I was, or would be, all that smart or all that fast or all that tough; but I thought I could have a different kind of strength. I wanted to be myself, and I wanted to somehow put the people in my life at ease — if only even a little bit — just through my presence.

For a while I felt I was doing that, and then I had a two-ish year long mental health thing where I was dissociating quite a lot and generally not particularly happy, so it kinda felt like I’d never really be strong again.

It’s pretty well documented here, actually. If you haven’t noticed.

And during that time I felt, not often, but sometimes, a sort of ‘this is simply too much, and even though this is now past the point of too much for me, the world continues the same as it did before, and I no longer know what to do in a world that is the same whether I’m beyond my limits or not’.

Maybe not often, but sometimes.

Through it all I held on to this belief — that I was strong; that I was the sort of person who was generally happy; that I was secure — even after the evidence started to pile up that this was false.

One day, once upon a time, I was in a dentists office waiting for my appointment to start, scrolling on my first smartphone, which I had bought myself; and then one day, once upon a time, I was laying on the floor next to my bed — unable to write any of my thesis, unsure if I’d finish it or college, unsure if I’d even be able to get up and get more tissues; and today, once upon a now, I woke up and found things were fine, and nothing had been too much in a long time, and while this was great, it was also annoying — because I wanted to be okay then, and to know what to do in those moments of beyond overwhelming, and it turns out there was no way out but through, not beyond — as I had longed for it to be all those years ago.

Somewhere along the throughline of moments that are me, I lost and then found again the strength I could no longer remember if I’d ever really had. I used to think of myself as happy, as secure in myself even. And at some point I stopped being able to tell if that was a story, or if it was more than the lies we tell ourselves late at night.

And so here I am, and I see the qualities I saw in the mirror when I was young — once upon a time, when I used to build tiny twig huts at the edge of the playground. I am not perfect, I still don’t view myself accurately all the time. But I’m happy, and I like who I am.

And while all the parts I hated are still there, so is everything else. So is the strength. Even when it felt like it wasn’t.

Beyond

I remember all of it. Every heartbreak, every loss. All that burning rage and self hate. And the joy. It’s all mine and it’s all me, and I remember all of it.

I wished to escape to the other side of my feelings, once upon a time. To solve them, somehow. Be free of them. Surely this must all serve some purpose, there must be something to this. Some reason that once gleaned will allow me to never feel this way again.

Somewhere along the line I think I was able to accept that I am me. I am all the past and all the future, and even the present — before it becomes either of those things. I feel sorrow for that young kid who probably should have been tested for some stuff, and that slightly less young kid who hated the way their body looked. But they aren’t people or moments dissociated, separated, from the rest of me, or from my now — they are who I was and am.

Balance doesn’t feel like a lacking. It hasn’t come to me through the denial of the parts of me, even the ones I wish weren’t me.

When I was in college it used to feel like I was constantly vibrating between states. So much ego and so much hate, and I’d switch between them like a second thought. And sometimes it felt all consuming, like in those moments all I am was what I could express or feel in those seconds. And there was a balance in that, I guess, but it felt chaotic and turbulent. Like it couldn’t last, and I guess it didn’t.

And now I feel like the culmination of the tightrope act. I feel all the parts of me, and accept them all — for all I am is that which I exist as.

Above

Last night I went to bed, and today I woke up. And I was still me.

I think I was holding on to the wrong thing. I am me. Throughout it all. Even when it feels like I’m not really here anymore, or the world looks wrong. All I’ve ever wanted to be is myself, and so I can accept everything that goes hand in hand with that. 

I let go of the river’s edge, and the stones and sticks stopped bruising my skin, and instead I flowed with the current. I changed my perspective, and found something better to hold onto. And then I felt more like myself. Even in the moments where I feel almost third person. Sometimes being me means being dissociated, and sometimes it means being something else instead. I can accept the parts of me, all of them, for they are what makes me who I am.

I used to feel like I was only ever here for a moment, and then I would die and some new person would take my place. Sometimes it would take months, sometimes days, occasionally only an hour or so. And while I do not feel as if I am the person I was six months ago, I don’t feel like I’m someone else either. I just feel like me, and like I’ve changed with time. 

I was always trying to hold onto myself. Perhaps that is easier to do when you see yourself wholly for who you are. So wholly and truly I try to accept who I am. The hate and the regrets and the mistakes, and even the ever too constant dissociation. They are parts of me and experiences I sometimes have or express. And either way I’ll always still be me, for as long as I live. The cosmic horror kind of fades away when you look at things from that perspective. Rather than hold on to a single moment, living as this one expression of myself, I feel my desire shift to living well; to respecting myself and the person I wish to be.

In all the ways that go alongside me.

Below

Once upon a time I thought I was empty. That there was some distance I could never cross. That there was no way for me to show someone else who I truly am, not in the deep way. That something was too broken within me to ever do that, even if I could see others.

In this story my friend says to me, “look at how perfectly these trees are framed from where we stand. Perhaps you should change your perspective on some other things too.” And for some reason taking that step forward and seeing how the trees gained shape against the backdrop of the midnight river made me want to cry. And even if real life didn’t quite happen like this metaphor, and even if it was actually a different friend from the one I walked through the park with all those years ago, she still helped me anyways. And then suddenly everything clicked into place.

Above. Below. Beyond. I shifted my perspective and lay down against the rockfloor of the pit I thought was buried within me — where my soul should have gone but instead felt like an irreconcilable emptiness. And all that distance turned out to be the space between the forest floor and the nighttime sky, where the clouds spun over themselves like water cotton candy, and the stars burned in the sky. Suddenly I realized I could describe this thing I thought no one would ever be able to see; and I felt solid, and I felt like me.

Beyond

I finally understand the shape of my soul, and when I allow myself to fade away — or see it out of the corner of my mind’s eye — I smile a little to myself.

It felt like there was this absence in me, like something was missing. I didn’t know how to explain it, but it was there, haunting me from the corner of my eye. ‘There’s something wrong with me. Something off. There is a distance that is too vast to bridge, and so you’ll never truly connect to another person. They will never see you for who you are.’

And that made me sad.

Turns out I was wrong, isn’t that funny. I mean I knew I was wrong, intellectually. There were words I could say to myself that could counter whatever void I felt inside. But it never made that distance go away, it just made me able to pretend it wasn’t there.

I thought there was something missing in me. Something wrong. And I couldn’t figure out what it was. I thought it was the fact I keep dissociating, and yeah, that didn’t help. But that is incurable; it’s just something about the way my brain works. And so I thought if something was missing, if something was wrong, then there would be no escape.

And I was okay with that. In nihilism I find nothing, for there is nothing there by definition. We are free, radically so.

But still, there is a joy to learning that despite it all, I was not broken. This thing I felt but could not name, which I mistook for emptiness, just required me to look at things from a different angle.

Above

I seem to be rather nihilistic, even on my best days. But I love staring up at the clouds, or the stars. It feels safe and wonderful, and it makes me want to live. Nothing is real, and I want to laugh, because even though it’s all nonsense I still find it beautiful. I feel wonder and awe and what I think might be defiance, because none of it makes sense and none of it will last, and still it is lovely to exist in.

Like stories before they are written, the world is a blank canvas devoid of meaning and bereft of purpose. And like the story, even after it is written, as soon as we die it all just becomes nonsense again — squiggles on a page that cannot mean anything for there is no one for it to mean anything to.

It is us who give the stars their shine and their beauty, for without us it would just be bouncing photons. It is perspective that draws the distinction between things, and in those shapes the world obtains beauty.

Oh what joy, to find that the world reflects who we are because the world only exists through us. So the distant peaks of mountains, and the evergreen trees — shaded patchwork dark by the shadow of a cloud — take on the feeling of love or joy I feel. We are above, and so the below reflects us — our melancholies and our mirth. Or perhaps it is the reverse; but either which way the world is in the most literal sense what we make it to be. Through our love and our pain and our fundamental expression of who we are.

There was a thing I could not name about myself, and now that I see it so too does the world see it in me. And that makes me smile, in the odd moments of quiet I sometimes find myself in.

Below

Once upon a time.

There was something I wanted to communicate. Several things, actually. I’m not sure how well I did at any of it — but I’m not sure how much that actually matters. I’ve had some stuff I needed to work through the last few years; a bunch of different things, really. This is a snapshot of it, that perhaps someday I will read again when I need a new

Perspective

Beyond

There is a forest that sways with the summer wind. A river flows from between the mountains, and the midday sun shines through the clouds.