Submitting to the urge to write

I keep coming back, wanting to write at the moment. I’m trying to get something out, or put something into words which will cement it. I feel like I’m floating, somehow. I just started a new book, The Art of loosing control, and it’s legitimised a lot of the experiences I had with my recent clash with schizophrenia. I was just about to write relapse, but I’ve avoided using purely negative language for so long now, I’m loath to start laxing off on my principles and embracing simple terms. It legitimised, but also offered a cautionary note. And so I’m quite pleased with the way of phrasing it- a clash with schizophrenia.

I’ve always written about the phenomenal power of schizophrenia, and the way it turns the head into a receptacle for forces which in a rational state of mind seem inconceivable. I also hold to the notion that there is positive in it. However I do fall to “pride and ego inflation,” when experiencing schizophrenia in its whole force. I’ve spent the last ten years acknowledging the spiritual aspect to it, and therefore the positives; however now, having recently suffered massive negatives and set backs due to its power, I must learn humility once again, when writing about it and referring to it. I confess, that when it first came on, I made a decision to follow it. It wasn’t an 100% conscious decision, but I went out into the park to lay down for a bit, just as it was coming on, and then when it seemed to be wavering I got up and walked back to the flat. At the time I countered that when one has experiences which are that intense, one has to follow them. And I have made positive the negative aspects of them- I will never be able to mindlessly drink alcohol again. I will likely never be able to drink an entire bottle of wine without considering the consequences. But, at this stage in my life, this is not an entirely negative thing.

It’s more, my current problem, with considering these experiences without feeling as though they are unique to me. When I was in the middle of it, the voices of the entities I thought were guiding me, told me that I had a destiny, and this destiny was a big one- there was something special in my future, something which I had to achieve which would affect other people. It’s such a common theme of schizophrenia, to believe that you have some cosmically charged sense of destiny, or fate, or importance in the grand scheme of things. Of course I can still rationalise, and say- perhaps I do have a really good book in me.

And you know what- I’m free writing atm- I literally just realised I do have a really good book in me. I know that I have more than one! This is actually quite a moment of revelation for me, because the flatness and depression of the last few weeks had made me start to question this on some level. I know I have ideas inside of me, and the enthusiasm to construct them. I just need to put the work in! I just need to resummon the motivation and the work ethic to get into this routine of working. I’m being lazy at the moment, I’m not working. I’ve had reason to be low, my world fell apart, but, I need to get out of it. I need to get back into a routine of getting up and writing.

I will do this.

For I owe it to myself. I owe it to myself to get some of these brambles out of me, to pull out a few of these splinters and let the blood flow.

The experiences I’ve had are yearning to be transformed somehow, I’ve only got myself into a rut. I can get out of it. This man might be a distraction- I was just going to message him back and apologise but I won’t.

Going back to the schizophrenia quickly, I think that the way I’ve just conceptualised it is right; it feels better than previously. I just read a section in this book, the art of losing control, which really resonated. It’s too long to copy but it basically talks about an enchanted world view, pre-rationalism, in which the animist cosmic view saw “deities, spirits of the dead, nature spirits and spiritual energy,” inhabit the space our psyche exists in, and moreover our psyche is “porous,” which really, really resonates. It also makes me happy, is seems to plug some hole which was somewhere. I separate that from the aspects of my life and experience which require rational thought. Most of the time, I’m learning and thinking about things which require rational thought. I’m learning how to use the tools I have, where they are needed or might work best.

Anyway, I think i’ve written what I needed to at this time. I’m going sleep early, as much as this is the most banal comment, it’s a journal and so I’m going to continue to keep it as such. Train of consciousness.