I write therefore I think.

Complicity

You sit in the dark. Visions of unreality reflected in the things you see around you. Things which could not possibly be so. Things which apparently are. You look for a way to connect. To find a way to communicate with something beyond yourself. You try and try.

You find yourself without the words. Lack the language to communicate. There’s something deep within you. Something unseen and unspoken. An inherent bias draws your mind, your very consciousness, to that point. You can’t escape it. You’ve been close to the answer before. Yet the realities of existence force you to lock it away. So you sit alone in this dark place and pray for the day it gets better.

You consider the faces of them who offer assistance. See the inherent hypocrisy. You have nothing to say which they are willing to hear. It’s not assistance they offer but a way to surrender: sacrifice yourself, become like us, and you will be cured. You see now how little they truly understand in the way you are consistently abandoned.

You were bullied into accepting medication you didn’t want. Now you can’t see a way to live without it. Yet it mattered so little to the Doctors they didn’t think furnish you with a supply when they threw you out of hospital. Last year they told you that you lacked insight into your need for treatment. Now you gain insight from the silent month you’ve spent on the outside. You’re not wanted, you never were. You were simply an extra in the soap-opera of their misplaced lives.

Yet you still you go on. Surviving despite the crippling fears which plague your existence. Only rarely allowing your true self out of it’s box. Complex emotions intertwine in your mind echoing future events, creating prophecies which fulfill themselves. You lack the basic skills to survive this place yet circumstances tell you that you must.

The world kicks you. You know it would be wrong to kick back. Yet others seem to imply that you should. But you’re not like them. You never were. You simply held up a mirror and showed them themselves. You couldn’t see it, then. Now you can. The piece of you which stood in the shadows saw it all. And that part of you remembers all.

So you accept them at face value. Hold within you the seeds of their downfall. Protect them from the light which will destroy their very existence. Play the game which always takes its toll. You begin to wonder why you’re so accepting of the price you have to pay. Considering that one day the price will become too high and you’ll tell of the secrets you hold in trust. The secrets which by your previous model of reality you’d swear you have no right to know.

XVI - we are the one

Imagine if you will a multiple personality,  
As if a point at the centre of an infinite sphere grew in eight directions,
Each thinking: I am the one
then one day the point they left behind thought
Look behind you  

You can never read too much Batman

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem

Looking back through my diaries I discovered plenty of interesting stuff. There's lots I could share with my solicitor or my psychiatrist. Along with lots I should probably avoid sharing with my wife. There's lots I'd like to blog about. There is also, and this rather worried me initially, two distinct personalities visible on a line by line basis. For almost two weeks now I've been searching for a context upon which I could expand these ramblings publicly.

I suppose you could say I've been searching for my voice. Then, as if by magic, an old friend appeared and hit the nail on the head. Well actually, now I re-read the offending paragraph, I see he managed the astounding feat of hitting three nails with one swing of the hammer. Seemingly opening a can of worms too. Setting aside my desire to digress and extemporise on my fledgling theories I'm going to stick to the rusty nail which mirrored the initial chord.

Because although my diary has some use in recording life events, it's main purpose I now see was to help me find somebody: The Real Me. It sounds trite I know, but really that's why I started my diary. It's also why I started blogging. Nobody could argue that as we live life we are shaped and we change. But in fact that's backwards, because it's the changes which are life. In another example of applied synchronicity I made these notes after casting an I Ching in the bath the other night:

To stand still is regression. A firmly integrated whole renews itself and is not worn down by hindrances. Contraction the end turns into the new beginning of expansion. Change and transformation - the inner law of being - produces effects that endure.

But as my friend deftly pointed out, we sell our souls to the economy. We permit the external influences of working life to grow for us work-specific personas that bear no resemblance to the people we really are. Personally I've always been aware of the masks I wear, and that's probably why I've lived with agoraphobia for more years than I care to imagine. It's why I had a major psychotic break when life got too hard. And it's why now have a wonderful personality disorder with which to entertain my team of brain care specialists.

Yet it is through the auspices of my six-year-old son, exhibiting either childish innocence or wisdom far beyond even my years (even now I'm not quite sure which), that the my final realisation recently became clear to me. Quite simply he requested a repeat viewing of Batman Begins and insisting I watch it with him. As I sat there and watched this most marvellous Gnostic reinterpretation of a cherished myth I realised something startling. Bruce Wayne is the persona, the mask for public consumption. Whereas Batman is the real person, and by the simple use of nothing more than cheap theatrics, requires no mask. With this realisation came the answer to my quest.

The real me?

Is Batman.