sure feels like i've been here before in some other time, some other life.
it's round midnight sitting in a small, dark kitchen in flatbush, brooklyn -- the rain coming down outside a relief somehow, my wet biking clothes dripping from the shower curtain in the next room. there's a coziness to my life these days that's very much an urban coziness, a coziness that reminds me of childhood after years spent in the country and the west coast. i am a child of this city -- my past is wrapped up in these streets and the lives of the people that walk them. i feel at home in this spinning grand metropolis, i live and breathe this place of dreams and shadow visions. i am a little mouse in his nest listening to the thunder and the rain.

my present is slow and depressive. i take 900mg of Lithium Carbonate and 200mg of Seroquil every night before i go to sleep and it feels simultaneously like i'm actually giving myself a mental disability and allowing myself the luxury of deep sleep and heaviness after months of manic flightiness up in the stars. the fire inside is cooled and my mind is rebuilding itself after a psychotic breakdown i wasn't expecting and couldn't contain. these days i am intentionally chemically grounded. i'll taper off the Seroquil in the next 6 months. i feel like i'm using it in a healthy way, in a way it was meant to be taken. i already know this part of the story with the drugs. i already wrote this part of the map for myself the last time round.

when people ask me what i'm doing these days i say i'm in the process of reevaluating my whole conception of what it mean to be a healthy, productive person in the world. i paid lots of lip and pen service to the idea of change before this last breakdown but now i actually have to do it for real. there's no other choice: everything else has crumbled or i've let it go. lots of other people sit in quiet desperation with their pain and madness; mine seems to dramatically spill out all over the place and i have no choice but to deal with it. thankfully i've got some really good friends and allies to help me pick up the pieces and put them in a new order. i feel like my journey back to health is a collective process because i've made my life that way. a collective process...

i think this is probably psychology 101: we all have old coping mechanisms learned when we're children that eventually stop being effective and appropriate and start getting in the way of our personal growth and development.

this has been my solid coping mechanism for my whole adult life:

when things get hard i turn myself into a character in a story for other people to feel. i step outside of the action and just write everything down in my journal and then write stories about it -- make lessons out of the hardships. even when good friends die i just immortalize them. it becomes my self-proclaimed role in the community. i grieve into the words, and then when the story is done, a part off me can let go and give to others through my vision. but in that action i'm asking all these people to hold little pieces of my soul. and then what is my responsibility to all those people who feel connected to me and my visions?
this is one way of telling how the icarus project originally came to life: it grew out of a story i wrote because i was trying to heal myself. it was a story i wrote because i was lonely and wanted more mad friends. fundamentally i think it was a story i wrote because i was trying to make sense out of my crazy life, and i've continued writing that story for myself and others for the last six years. the story now has thousands of people writing it together. i get to slip into the background and watch.
but i have a whole internal universe that's become very wrapped up in my own personal story and then way i tell it. i go back and read the words of my stories over and over again to make sense of what's happened to me, how i got here, how the world will remember us and what we did here in these times. i get grandiose and make our collective history important -- weave it into the larger story for the masses.  and, especially when i'm having a hard time, my story and the way i tell it ends up taking up a lot of space around me. it's like a protective shell. it's my old faithful coping mechanism for feeling like life has some meaning.
 
one of the incredible things my writing has allowed me to do is to slip into the mythic realm.

are you familiar with this mythic realm of which i speak?
it's the land of archetypes and angels, shadows and Forms and Signs -- it's the world of dreams and the collective unconscious and synchronicities and spirit. it is full of layers and codes and brilliance and mystery and very much exists outside the material realm of consciousness. we create it together somehow, or we're a part of it and it's creating us, but regardless the mythic realm is woven right into the fabric of this community of people.

it's easy to get lost in the mythic realm if you're a mad one.
they say the shaman swims in the waters that the schizophrenic drowns in.
for me the mythic waters have been a great source of refuge in recent years. they've allowed me to leave the material realm and dance with the ghosts of history -- to feel my place in the cosmos, the connection with the greater spirit. but boy can i get lost in there. if i really screw up i end up in a total spiritual emergency. my ego gets all fucked up and cartoonishly enormous. i stop being able to tell what's me and what's everyone else. i start thinking that i'm the entire universe -- that i'm the center of everything, the beginning and the end -- the alpha and the omega -- some kind of messianic figure sent to save the world.
it's so beautiful and glorious and then at some point turns really ugly.
i get obnoxious and loud and stop listening to the people i love who are so worried about me. i check out of consensus reality and start living in 'the dreamtime' - but it's really My dreamtime. i become a raving narcissist that eventually no one wants to deal with, all my subconscious hopes and fears pour out for the world to see, and eventually i pull some totally dramatic attention seeking chaos move and end up in the hospital and get strapped to a bed and forcefully medicated.

i really, really need a new story.

being in a public leadership position in icarus for the past four years was full of lessons and challenges. i feel like i got so much personal criticism that i didn't know how to deal with at the time -- criticism that's just really seeping in now that i'm slowed down enough to be present with it. back in the spring of this year i started getting all this criticism from other people in the community whose opinions i really valued. this group of women got together to talk about the gender dynamics in the icarus project and i ended up with a lot of angry fingers pointing at me. i suddenly was getting criticism about my lack of personal and professional boundaries. i was getting criticism of how my past intimate relationships with women had undermined the power dynamics in the organization. i was being told by people i loved that my actions made them feel like 'glorified secretaries.' i was also getting criticism of my inability to be present with the people closest to me--that a part of me was cold and cruel and hurtful in a typically male way.

the way i dealt with all the criticism was my old faithful: to step back and try and write about what was happening. to be a mythic character in a story in my mind. but part of what i was being criticized for in the first place was taking up too much space with my story--for eclipsing other people's stories with my own.
and amidst it all i think i short-circuited. instead of being present with the criticisms -- sitting with the pain of it,  i kept unconsciously trying to make myself the center of an adventure story -- a crucified martyr in a way that just wasn't appropriate at all. the old coping mechanism finally hit a big wall and cracked: it was being called out and asked to change. suddenly i started to get little glimmers that i'd been using the excuse of building a radical mental health support network as a way to not get too close to other people in my life. i was doing the classic activist thing of putting the Cause before the personal relationships. and eventually it just all unraveled.

so now it's suddenly fall and i don't live on a farm in the valley anymore. i'm back home where i have to face my demons but i get to be around all these amazing people i love. the rain outside feels good, cleansing. i'm not sure what i'm supposed to be doing with my life but i guess that's okay for right now. i'm just figuring out how to live it.

when i was in the hospital all these friends just wanted me back on the ground, wanted me to be with them, and i couldn't do it. i was so far away. now here i am, back in the material realm, sleeping hard and dreaming every night, waking up slow and trying to be gentle with myself. trying to give myself space to grow.

these days i'm doing a lot more listening than talking, more reading than writing. trying to figure out how to be friends with people in a way that is truly supportive and solid, and intimate in a way that has always scared me.

trying to tone down my personal narrative and see the ways i use it to protect myself and shield myself from others. i'm trying to figure out the role that writing is supposed to play in my life. i really want to write stories that touch people's souls. i also know that this kind of writing is essential to my well being. just getting these words down in a way that i can go back and read is at the foundation of how i take care of myself and make meaning in the world.

it's like some kind of spiral dance,  a manic-depressive schitzo-coaster spiral dance of fate. it's familiar, like i've been here before in a different life and i already know the path. there are a lot of us dancing to our mad music, and we're figuring out how to be together and work together and live together in ways that have never been tried. this place really is like a bridge between worlds where our stories connect to one another. i feel you all out there from this little kitchen in brooklyn, at least i imagine i do. whenever i'm about to finish a little piece of writing like this it always somehow feels like i'm connected into the collective consciousness and i'm moving upwards. like i'm spiral bound, connected to people i've known in the past and places that we've been too before.

at least i like writing the story that way.

why not, you know?