My drug fascination started early, when I started hearing about these miracle pills that could make you feel fantastic, give you all sorts of energy, let you see beautiful colors, and expand your mind. I was a curious kid, still am, and it will probably be the death of me (almost has on numerous occasions), but hearing this sort of stuff was enough to set the hook on the line that pulled me towards drugs forever after.
It was early in my teenage years that depression first reared it’s ugly head, and for me, it was a menace, a vicious hell hound that sucked the joy of life out of me, tore my dreams from me, and left me cutting my arms to try to feel something, anything at all that was not just this terrible inner pain. This was when I decided that it was my fate in life to become a writer. All writers must suffer, I believed, and it was through this suffering that they gained the insights into life that created great works of literature. And I was not going to be just any writer, I was to be great.
I wrote page after page after miserable page, documenting my struggles, my self doubt, my deprecation’s, my failings, my pain, filling journal after journal. Someday, I thought, somebody will look upon all of this and realize just how talented yet tormented I was, a savant drowning in his own words and sorrow. I knew that it was just a function of time before somebody came across all of these pages and would realize my genius.
I could never understand why, when I offered, nobody seemed all that interesting in reading all this shit I had written. I occasionally picked out the best pieces, assembled them into a manuscript, and gave a few acquaintance’s, friends copies, only to never hear a word about my words. Of course, now I realize that they were being kind. When I go back and read over what I had written, all I find is page after page of pain and blackness. Some of it written occasionally well, maybe even a few pages that has some sense of style and finesse to them, but they were nothing but just on ongoing recollection of all the dreary and dreadful thoughts go through the minds of countless depressives all around the world. And lord knows that we have more than we need of published accounts of teenage angst, anger, bitterness, and pain, and there are thousands of books, blogs, and articles written by people in the death throes of depression, wringing every last drop of misery that they can out of what they think of as their death garments. The last thing anybody wants is to read through somebodies constant, unchanging, and endless refrains of how they hate themselves and want to die.
That wanting to die part, that I understood well. I wanted that too. I even tried. I will spare you the melodrama, but to say that a great friend of mine took me seriously, instead of just laughing it off as me being attention seeking, grabbed me, and stopped me from what I was doing.
And so I was introduced into the world of mental health, antidepressants, sleeping pills, and all the others that have come and gone over the years.
Much more to come as describe how my understanding of psychopharmacology, consciousness, freewill, cosmology, string theory, and was shaped and constantly remolded by experience, learning, understanding myself, and others, and so on.