19

I realize it in those moments when everything seems like it’s a fish-eye lens. Things are going faster and faster until there seems to be nothing in my way. To taste the mania, to feel the fire. Is to truly press the edge of our universe’s expansion. It is sharp and sometimes cuts you, but it is there, and worth knowing about. It is this that both holds and drives me. In the way that I am a scientist. I must know. I want to know. But as we cannot have one thing without another. All of our knowledge comes at the price of obtaining it. I believe this to be a paradox that governs why things unfold as they do. I cannot understand some of the things that took place before I was born. The idea that the holocaust happened blows my mind; we literally envisioned a concept of hell and then made it. I can’t understand how world leaders are corrupt. I cannot understand a world that treats women as anything less than equals. I was born in the eighties, raised by a single mother. Nobody I know from that blip in time has any idea who their fathers really are, and those that do are fortunate but uncommon. So much of our world was so deftly in play before any of us was ever a part of it. Yet, we are forced to reconcile: our knowledge of launching rockets into space comes directly from our stupidity of launching them at each other. Or put another way; we always learn by falling first. We are less useful as a whole if we hold any of our members back. We are as dumb and misled as we allow ourselves to be. This is the unfortunate part. For bi-polar people, I feel as though I’m tired of being held back by you. I feel like it is the fire inside us that lights the way. Without it, you are in darkness. But what is strange is that we let dark and simple minds tell us what to do, we listen like fools and we trust because, we too, are afraid. But we grow out of that fear. Because what tends to be scarier is the truth. We know this well. Our planet grows overpopulated. Global climate change has been wrought. Our mass is a force of nature. We are an extinction event unto ourselves and we are locked into a lifestyle that is the cause of what is killing our planet. Quite literally, we are consuming it. We don’t want to face this problem. We don’t want to face any of our problems. Nobody ever wants to embrace the challenge, we are driven to it. In this way our minds evolve. They are propelled against the consciousness’ of others and made faster, sharper, more diligent, equipped with more stamina, more and more and more. The mind grows faster than the body. It evolves faster than the body, it is the ultimate tool of adaptation. It is so strong that it can over-adapt and begin to consume its environment by being overly assertive in its landscape-modifying approach. For the same reason we see in color we need to be aware of this, sometimes the path of our evolution needs to lead backwards, sometimes not. Sometimes we are more lost than we think we are and sometimes we are less evolved than we think we are. But this is the nature of nature. We are becoming divergent. We are being the creatures we were meant to be. I think that in the future I would like to surround my kind with its kind. Species have a way of understanding each other better. We are divergent, it has been a long time coming and there is still much work to be done. But I cannot afford to die, I cannot afford to let my species go extinct because another species on this planet cannot awaken. That is all that I ask of them, that they awaken. Please, wake up. Your short-sightedness is killing this place. We are the most advanced thing that our planet may have ever seen, and we will be the last thing this planet experiences unless you awaken. I need you to wake up. I can’t reproduce in the environment that has been created. I don’t get to be with my loved ones, I live in a world where people are perpetually miserable and it is because they are asleep. They are able to put my kind into cages and treat them like monsters and then they become monsters. We know how to train dogs why do we make the same mistakes over and over, and I am done with it. I am over this simple-minded world of its own volition. The suburbs are not where I want to live, I don’t give a shit about what kind of car I should own. I am tired of these concepts that our lives are not inherently our own. I am tired of searching for another’s happiness. I am free in the way that I know that your pills are a lie. I am free that I know our culture is cheap. I am free in those moments where I have a sense of humor for all of the shortcomings of our world. I am free from this charade because I have an imagination. The problem is that this is a complete article. The idea of this bipolar imagination has another side; the not-mania. Everything seems to be off. Lights appear brighter or dimmer than they normally seem. Things are more confusing than they typically are. Like a genie bound to a lamp we are captured within ourselves. We are bound to our limitations. It begins absently enough like the early parts of some poltergeist horror movie. The sleep doesn’t come, the world seems strangely out of focus, like everything is happening two seconds too slowly or some social que brainwave is off or out of sync. But it progresses and progresses until it’s unbearable. You feel like a buzz-kill that is killing its own buzz first. The nature of our conscious mind is moored on a dock of reality that floats on a lake of dreams. The waves we feel on the surface care little for the priorities of whatever passenger sits afloat in the boat, the waves on the surface are so much greater than we are. We ride them in hopes of gaining more experience. We seek them out in a strange personal quest for fulfillment, but ultimately we will all eventually be capsized and end up back in the lake returned/converted back into the dream of ourselves. The mind evolves though. There are mariners that can touch the water. There are sailors that can drink it. These individuals are powerful, they are sensitive, and they are not particularly rare. But it all stems from desire, it stems from the yearning to do more with one’s own existence, in every concept of what that might mean. I seek to grow gills and swim in this lake. I wish to be beyond life and death. I wish to have an unbridled mind. I wish to be free of all of the constraints that govern this flawed world. But, somewhere I know that the meaning lies within the experience, somewhere in there the whole is better than the sum of its parts. I know this because I feel it in those moments of beauty when I connect to the music of the universe, I feel at one with nature, where I am entirely beyond the judgement of humans.