Look into my eyes and I’ll tell you a story about this kid who got lost wandering the traintracks in outerspace, made his way back by leaving a trail of candy wrappers and love letters and one day he woke up and was right back where he started. “I had the strangest dream Auntie Em. I was wandering the streets mad and kissed beautiful women and swam in waterfalls and felt the entire city breathing in my fucked up lungs. I wrote a book about it in the future so I could go back and change the past and then I met myself in the mirror and only recognized him when he looked me square in the eyes and told me it was time to write the next chapter.

The contours of your mental terrain are complex and jagged, carved from a life of adventure and pain and love without regrets. Scars from climbing over barbed wire fences between the borders of depression and mania and getting your heart broken over and over and patching it back together with pieces from everywhere.

Your inner landscape is full of canyons and rivers and makeshift dams. Pleasure and trauma cut grooves into your soil like new streams during flashfloods. You are a master at building walls to control your emotions but inevitably the walls grow old and obsolete, like monuments to old fears, leaving you with puzzles of how to dismantle them build something better with the broken pieces. Your internal landscape is sometimes like an unstable government with shifting borders: young, nervous, trigger-finger men with guns waiting along the edge zones and chain-link fences. You wait till nightfall to make the long journeys through the deserts of your mind. In this world you’re the illegal aliens AND the border patrol. And you police yourself the way you were taught.

There are multiple levels to your world: windy staircases of hidden memories and emotional triggers and trap doors to navigate, the collective consciousness swirling above you like a waterwheel or a roulette game. It’s like a circus in there sometimes, or maybe a school bus of screaming children driving along a rutty, potholed road. Who’s driving the bus? Can you access the part of your Self that can get all the screaming kids to calm down? Can you find some quiet in there? Meanwhile, all of the crap you watched on television, all of the years of school, all the strangers that have passed through your life and all the years of life experiences, all the billboards and internet porn and cereal commercial jingles and exploding supermarket signifiers, they all leave tracks and traces inside of you. What is You and what is the Outside World? Sometimes the borders are too thin for comfort. The topography shifts around, perspectives widen and narrow – micro to macro and back again, it’s easy to get lost in there. You long for steady ground.

Something you’ve learned from experience is that if you want to get through this mad life you have to mark your trails. You have to mark your path through this world as best you can. You do it because eventually you know you’re going to find yourself in a dark place and it’s going to be hard to remember that there was ever a way out. You do it because sometimes you stumble upon answers to the really hard questions, and you want to hold onto them. You do it because you know life is about finding and making meaning, sharing it with your friends, figuring it out together as a community. So you make your maps from pieces and scraps. You seek out others to learn with who carry their own maps and memories. You dive into the scary places together because you know they have the most to teach with their treacherous terrain and painful lessons. You time travel, you journey, you learn to control your breath and to see beneath the surface to the other layers, to mark those layers and look for openings to the other side.

You’re like Theseus in the old Greek myth, unraveling your golden thread to mark a path through the labyrinth so that you know where you’ve been. You leave clues for yourself everywhere. Some of your clues are written in code, only decipherable when you’re in the head states that need to hear them – messages written in the past to the future or maybe from the future to shake yourself back to the present. Some of them are plain as day: the basics, the foundations, the ones that keep you alive and happy and out of trouble. The labyrinth is inside of you and the labyrinth is embedded in the culture outside. We’re all struggling through our labyrinths with many of the same pitfalls and ladders and escape hatches. But we can figure it out together. You and your friends figure out where the good crossing spots are and you keep them marked. You look out for each other through the long journeys. You distract the gate keepers. Once you figure out how to cross over, you bring other people with you who’ve never crossed alone. You look for glimmers of golden thread in the darkness. And slowly, over time, you dismantle the maze, and change the face of the cultural landscape and build a new world from broken pieces.