about 24 hours ago i was discharged from another mental hospital

well, it was more than just a mental hospital. it was rhode island state hospital, and in its halls i became different

for the second time. 

but some things were the same. 

i fell in love all over again. emphasis on again, because i did it all over again and again and again

i was ‘manic’

manic

again, manic all over the walls and all over the floor and all through the halls. 

i got an mri once. i meditated in that mental tube, i found peace in it’s white stomach, listening to glee (season 1, the first 4 songs) while the machine cranked and ground to prove to the world that i was well.

was i well? was i healthy? was i good? am i now?

i couldn’t tell, not really. and maybe that was true the whole time. maybe that is true for all of us, maybe none of us really know how we’re doing. 

we answer the simple question ‘how are you’ without thinking, after all. 

there are reasons for this. it is safer to avoid interrogating our minds. it is safer not to question our mental health(s). it is safer to hide from ourselves, to hide in the world and among other people, to avoid diving deep into our psyches. 

inevitably, when we do so we find pain. we find all those things that we used to remember to forget until we found our courage. 

we also find power. immense amounts of it. 

when i was

manic

i found myself, i suppose. i was manipulative. i caused pain. but absolutely nobody can deny, 

i was powerful. and i was powerful because i was uncovering the deepest parts of the my mind, like i was something separate from my own brain, that i was on a little scavenger hunt to come into being. 

i could move that curtain in room D7 with my mind, and i’m still not sure if i imagined that or not. 

maybe i am magic. 

i am just loving. 

but i do know one thing. 

our minds are mysteries. there is nothing more fascinating, more complex, more powerful, more

dangerous and terrifying

than our own minds. i have always been terrified of my mind. once, it tried, over and over again, to kill me. it brought my hands to my throat, it clenched my fists, it hurt people who didn’t deserve it over and over again to protect itself. 

in mania, the mind, the brain, takes over. the soul is gone. the self disappears, or it gets enveloped and overwhelmed by a brain trying to desperately to protect itself. 

it hurts people in the process, always. but it felt like it had to. i felt like i had to, that it was the best possible thing in the world, and for the world, to cause some pain. 

because things need to be broken to become better. 

i hope that isn’t necessarily true, but i’m still unsure. 

it occurred to me today that ‘evil’ people think they are doing good. serial killers, in some twisted unfortunate way, think they are helping the world by satisfying their minds’ desperate yearnings or purging the world of the wrong kind of person.

love spelled backwards?

it was the first thing i wrote on the walls of my room when i found chalk sitting on that little windowstill below the window that looked deeper into the ward instead of outside. 

we were underground. how appropriate. 

it’s time the world stops hiding from us. 

we’re not hiding from the world. 

the world forces us to hide from it. 

and that is why we become dangerous in the first (and last) place.