So, the question on my mind, and perhaps on anyone’s mind who might choose to read this blog, is this: Why would a perfectly sane person (to my knowledge) who is a functioning member of society with plenty of other more important things to worry about, want to dedicate an entire portion of the Internet-space and potentially quite a bit of time to one shitty, awful thing that happened to him, and how he has coped ever since and the events and circumstances surrounding all of it? Hahaha! Good fucking question!
Probably the most obvious answer to me is that what happened to me at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 is THE MOST INTERESTING thing that has ever happened to me (from a merely objective point of view, not particularly to me personally, I.E. I have a family, a son, a work-life that are all plenty interesting to me and that I’d much rather focus my time and energy on in the long run, but there is no denying the objective curiousness of this story). At the very least, there are a TON of aspects to this story, and I want to share them all with anyone willing to listen/read.
Along the same lines as this, I think the first and foremost reason for me personally starting this blog is my own fascination for 1. How the mind works in general, but also 2. How my own mind works and how I can better understand myself. And nothing illustrates all of this fascination more than this one single event and how it has influenced my life.
I have always had OCD or at least anxiety in some form or another for my entire life, and I have always been fascinated with the way I think, act and react, most notably because it always felt so very different than the way everyone else seemed to be thinking, acting, and reacting. And sure, on the surface I am very similar to most people and the things I think and my goals in life are very “normal.” What always struck me as strange was how I got to the same conclusions as other people (and of course different conclusions, as well), by completely different pathways and routes – that is to say if there were a “typical” pathway to a conclusion, for example needing to use the restroom, my pathway always seemed to involve a circuitous route around a swamp and through some back woods, a few backtracks and reroutes along the way, and the path always seemed much more convoluted and complicated than a simple “I needed to go pee, so I went.”
In the case of the bathroom example there might be a few “is this the RIGHT time to go?”’s, or “how do I know that I REALLY need to go?” and maybe even an “Am I sure that someone else doesn’t need to go more and I might be hindering their ability to do so by going first when I don’t really need to, and therefore I might be causing them to get a urinary tract infection and have problems and complications down the road that at this time I cannot even possibly fathom?”
Anyway, the point is that I find my own inner workings interesting, and I want to share them, and there is no more compelling way to explore my own mind than through the events that occurred in late 2017, early 2018. Not only are the events of that time an interesting anecdote to my own personal thought processes AT THE TIME, they have also tremendously and irrevocably changed the way I think and act as a result of those events. Also, not only my thought processes themselves have changed, but also how I THINK about thinking, or just perceive my own existence and presence in everyday life, or however you the reader, yes YOU, want to describe these aspects of one’s being (in I’m sure could be a much more eloquent way than I’m doing right now).
I can’t help comparing myself at the time of these traumatic events to Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly” – while I at times may not like or agree with some of the things that have changed in me since that time, I have no choice but to accept these changes as fact. Moreover, I feel a strange duty to human-kind to document these changes as they are the most significant I have ever experienced, and I’ve actually experienced quite a lot in my life.
In addition, I feel it is just helpful for me to understand myself for my own self-knowing and growth, and if that self-discovery can help someone else in anyway to understand themselves, or maybe show them that they are not alone, then I will consider it a blessing to have gone through what I did, however much I begged it to stop happening at the time.
An added caveat to this is that I DID indeed suffer a tremendous trauma in the events I describe in this blog, and I have learned in the intervening months and years that a HUGE part of trauma recovery is sharing your story, so that is what I am doing. And again, if through my own “selfish” desire to get through this time in my life I can give any kind of help or comfort to those in similar circumstances, than this is a much welcomed added bonus that I will fully embrace.
The final, and perhaps loftiest and probably unachievable goal of this blog(yet ultimately most important to me in the long run) is that I strongly and irreversibly feel that there is something inherently WRONG with what happened to me and with the system that led to my trauma, and I would sincerely like to contribute to some kind of change for the better. If I felt that my trauma was completely isolated or that I was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I might find it easier after two years and a lot of therapy to just move on from this event, but unfortunately for me, and more importantly for everyone else, mine is NOT an isolated incident, as I have witnessed through just the most CURSORY research and even just anecdotal evidence from people I encountered during the very incident I’m talking about – there are people in many institutions all over America and I’m sure the world, who’s mental health issues are not fully understood, treated correctly, or just marginalized entirely (all of which happened to me), and I am outraged that I live in a world that accepts this as “just a fact of life” in an otherwise “civilized” world.
I am not a “crazy” person by any means, and I never have been – I’m also beginning to strongly intuit that the existence of “crazies” as I have understood them might be much more myth than fact, if not entirely myth. I have OCD, which is a relatively common yet severely misunderstood mental illness that is literally on the exact opposite side of the spectrum from disorders which people fear or with which we often associate violent outbursts or huge disruptions in life, yet my life was COMPLETELY disrupted as a result of a misunderstanding of my mental illness. I was hospitalized involuntarily for a month, and as a result of that hospitalization I had the worst OCD symptoms of my entire life, and had the most severe panic attacks I’ve ever experienced, not to mention insomnia that lasted most of the month and peaked with a 4 day span in which I did not sleep and barely ate.
I can certainly get into all of this at a later date, but the point I’m trying to make right now is that everything that happened to me could have been avoided if the professionals in charge of my care had properly understood what was happening to me, and how their own steps and missteps drastically affected what I was going through.
The Absolute Center of Everything 