Up until the most intense and unexplainable experience of my entire life, I felt like I had a certain level of control over what happened to me in this world.
There have been certain things along the way in my life that made me feel somewhat out of control or helpless at times, like when my parents split up when I was 6, only to get back together when I was 10, just to finally split for good abruptly and traumatically when I was 13… Another story for another time, perhaps, but certainly a moment that has defined me, and I hope in the end made me more resilient and empathetic and understanding.
And there was the fact that I have OCD, and that I’ve basically had it all of my life, along with some relatively strong social anxiety, though my OCD had peaked (at the time) when I was 20 years old in college, when I had the uncontrollable fear that I might hurt myself or others. I committed myself to a mental health facility at that time because of those fears, because I wanted to be certain beyond any reasonable doubt that I would not be capable of hurting someone, and I couldn’t be. I have since learned to live with uncertainties like this and to even laugh at them from time to time.
Yes, there were all of these things and certainly others, yet strangely I had always been able to see the silver lining, and to not get too caught up in dismay or despair, and after every distressing or somewhat traumatizing event, to always pick up the pieces of my life and arrange them into something new and worth loving and living for, finding another reason to carry on and to make my life worth the fight and the day to day aggravation of just dealing with my own issues, or my own brain, as I often say to myself and others.
But on the night of December 30th, 2017, all of this changed.
I was 34, and my wife, my one year old son and I were staying at my sister place upstate, along with her husband and two daughters, who were 3 and 4 at the time.
I had been having a tough year… rewarding, but tough. My son had been born a year ago that last October, and I was probably the most proud father you could possibly imagine. Less than a month after my son was born I had been contacted by my previous employer and was made an offer to return back to work for them. I had hit a plateau at my current job after recently obtaining my architecture license, and so I gladly accepted. The new job involved more responsibility and relative independence in a project management roll. Since then I had been working hard at this new job and was on the verge of burnout at the end of that year. Additionally, my wife and I had moved into a new apartment the month after my son was born, immediately realized it was too small for the three of us, but were still determined to make it work despite everything.
So to say that I was worn out and beaten up at the end of 2017 would be a bit of an understatement.
To top it all off, upon arriving at my sister’s place for this vacation I had gotten a horrible cold and was now feeling awful all day long and every night, while still trying to enjoy my family and relax a bit before returning to my demanding job back in the city. In addition, I was at the end of my prescription for Prozac, so for the first two or three days of the visit, starting on the 26th, I did not have Prozac to take. We quickly got more once I started to have withdrawal symptoms, which I have had before and basically can only be described as phantom pools of color that formed in my periphery vision, along with a slight confused sense of detachment from reality.
About the day after I got back on my Prozac, my cold had gotten very bad and I asked my wife to go back to the drugstore to get some DayQuil and NiQuil. My cold had basically wiped out my energy completely, and I was getting massive chills throughout the day and night. The day of December 30th I had been taking DayQuil all day, and I had possibly even taken one too many doses that day than the directions recommended.
That night, all of us decided to sit and watch a recent movie, “I, Tanya.” I had been pretty out of it all day, but right away when the movie started, I started to notice some weird things about my perception of the movie… it started to feel as though I was almost watching myself watch the movie… as though I was floating above my body and watching myself on the couch looking at the TV screen. Along with this I also started to feel as though my perception was beginning to slow down and separate, as though I was watching my experience on film and the reel was beginning to slow down, so much so that it began to feel like I could see individual frames of my own experience of reality. At times curious and interesting, at others disorienting, I started to feel this experience increasing in intensity.
It eventually became so intense that I could feel my heart rate increasing and I began to get a little scared by the whole thing. I decided I would go to the bathroom, even though I didn’t particularly have to go. As I walked over and stepped into the bathroom a new sensation began to wash over me in waves. Now not only was I aware of the individual frames of my reality, the basic units of my experience, but I started to become aware of multiple, branching realities that started to spin off of my current version of reality. Not only did these alternate versions branch out into the future with all of the possibilities of this current moment, but they also branched back in time with all of the various possibilities of how my life could have ended up or gone in different directions with all of the different decisions I could have made, so that my entire existence started to feel as though it was but one branch of the most complex and vast living, plantlike organism that I could possibly ever imagine.
Not only that, but I started to feel that those alternate paths that I could have taken and that I might take in the future had just as much validity and reality as my current version of existence. So intense was this feeling washing over me that I became positive, without a single doubt in my mind, that I was only one of an infinite, but very clear and defined, number of alternate versions of myself. Not only that, but I was on somewhat of a continuum of all of the possible versions of myself, and I was very close to, if not exactly within the center of that continuum as far as the extremes of my possible choices were concerned.
In addition to that, my perception of time itself became linked to these other ideas, to the extent that I also felt very close to, if not exactly within the center of all temporal human experience. All of this was occurring to me while I was in the bathroom, blindly staring into the mirror, and upon my mind pulling so far out from this actual moment to the outer reaches of existence and then back to this moment, I realized I had no idea how long I had been in the bathroom. It felt like years had passed. My wife and family could have been calling to me from the bathroom, but I had no way of knowing in that moment.
Finally after my first of several mental odysseys of the evening, I walked out of the bathroom and back to my family in the living room…
The Absolute Center of Everything 