Written while recovering from acute psychosis, 2021.

I took sleeping pills last night and for the first time since mid-July, I slept more for than 5 hours. What a rush! I woke up this morning, and I was like, “huh, I think I can survive the day.” It’s only 7:27 am, though, so take my resolve with a grain of salt.

My friend told me I needed to look for a full-time sub/dom type of relationship, so I decided to join a few of those communities (online, of course) and let me tell you: I legitimately cannot tell if this is for me. But I have been talking (offline) to a woman I met on there. Let’s hope she doesn’t murder me. Yeah, if my life ended I would be soooo devastated. Like, wow. I def don’t want that! Life rocks!

I’m not scared of myself or anyone else anymore. I keep replaying the beginning of my psychotic episode – before I went to the hospital. Those performances were…. chef’s kiss and I know because I’m a poet, a speaker, and a debater. This is my calling, and I know that now more than ever. My roommate recorded the last couple “outbursts” of mine and later she agreed that in another life, I would have been a prophet. I corrected her: “in another life, I would have been a great heretic, and I would have been burned at the stake.” I became a version of Socrates much more fitting for a world like ours. I touched my own potential. I lived a thousand lives, and it was painful. It nearly killed me, and that’s no hyperbole. I won’t tell my doctors this, but I did have a plan to ~end it all. It was a good plan, too. That’s the distinction between fantasy and reality, by the way. Planning.

Regardless of whatever I felt, I’m not going to end my life. Not now. Not ever. The world will take me out soon enough, and I hate doing favors. My psychotic episode gave me something many people will never have to experience: raw, unadulterated fear. Compare it to dementia patients or people with alzheimer’s who disappear from their homes and walk miles in the dark, searching for their own memories. Imagine waking up as a stranger in your own body. I experienced my death. I experienced my rebirth. I sat in the psych ward and had my repressed trauma playing on a loop in 4k. And it didn’t kill me. I have conversations with my abusers, my rapists, my bullies. I believed in my heart that everyone could hear my own thoughts, so I practiced keeping them at bay every day because I didn’t want anyone to suffer.

I believed that “Mack” or my “soulmate” and I had a psychic connection, and they were somewhere else reliving my horrible past, so I made a promise to the voice in my head that I would defeat my pain so that we could share a future together. Before the lithium did its work, I had made peace with the fact that my “soulmate” wanted me to be able to endure them talking to me telepathically. So I was making myself stronger and trying to keep my thoughts pure. DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD THAT IS FOR MY MIND? But I was willing to do it for a fantasy, for a ghost. That’s the kind of person I am.

I am easily manipulated. I am easily taken advantage of. I am easily hurt. Because that’s what I want: I want to be the best version of myself so that people show me their humanity. That is why I speak so well. Why I have such empathy. It’s why I tried to reach my racist family for so long, even as they chipped away at my self-identity. I want to be a good person surrounded by people who see what’s underneath the trauma and the pain. But I’m not a fucking idiot, okay? I’m not delusional. I know that love and goodness and kindness do not exist without darkness and pain and misery. One group leads the other at all times, but it does switch around from time to time. So don’t despair yet.

I am the goddess of empathy, and I will create a better world, even if I only reach one person. Throughout my life, there is no truth I know better: one is all it takes.

Thanks for reading.