For many it had started in their childhood years. They had an 'overactive' imagination. It was fun when you could 'make believe' that the things you wanted to happen really would happen, but it was another thing when you believed it to happen. Then you tried to convince your parents it was real. They would scold you or brush it off. You would try to re-evaluate your beliefs. You were ten years old, sitting on the swingset in the backyard crying because you hadn't really seen an angel right before your grandma died.

You let those habits die after elementary school when you learned how to fit in. Or at least you wanted to fit in, and did everything in your power to play your part in the game of life. Your parents got a divorce, you felt like a piece of you had been broken and tried to recover that missing half. You started dating, but each affair only pulled you deeper into the drama that was that inkling that everything around you wasn't real to begin with.

What were the causes for those transformations that began to take place. Who knows. Who knows? Of course, it had nothing to do with a distant mother and alcoholic father. It had nothing to do with being picked on, or getting all D's on your report card. In other words it had nothing to do with your life. It was your brain....scratch the MIND part. Or maybe you had a perfectly normal life all leading up to it. It was a cold day in October, you woke up to the same old routene and yet it seemed like on that certain day something was missing. From then on you were 'crazy'.

Something fired in your brain, you hid in the closet with pillows over your ears to cancel out the noise. But you couldn't stop it- stop the volcano of blackness from spilling over you and engulfing you in liquid heat. You start sweating, the noises increase, your body is tensing as your temperature goes from hot to cold to hot again...they take you to a hospital. No observable changes. You just kind of 'slipped' and now they're treating your catatonia, or voices, or visions, or whatever...with a chemical straight jacket. You are injected with your 'Lovidine' and all is well. All is well. All is well.

And you just keep repeating that to yourself- All is well all is well. Suddenly you're 23. Suddenly the 'All is well' mantra is not working out for you. Suddenly you realize that all those years of medication and therapy and hospitilizations were substituting and corrupting the important things that you needed. In fact life is feeling rather cynical and like a bunch of hypocritical shit. You have diabetes. You're smoking every day. You lost your job. You're still in that place, still in that same place 7 years ago when it all began. The same repetative problems that made you feel like there was no escape. You wait for death, you want to end it all, want to take back all that people had done to you but you just can't. 

Then one day you wake up--and it's gone.

You stop smoking and pick up a new book. This time absorbed in the pages but this time you aren't slipping, you are falling into those flights of fancy. You aren't psychotic--you're just you. The book becomes an all time favorite of yours because it seems to write out perfectly everything that you had gone through, even the things you weren't able to address. 

That book's title is: The Human Experience