Damned and Then Redeemed

Lost my twenties to drug addiction and mental illness. After sobering up, the weight of it all sank in. 

I’m bitter. Angry for modern psychiatry. Angry for Western medicine. None of that helped. In fact, the opposite.

We live in a world that’s been crafted for automatons. Corporate drones inhabit these soulless organisms under the grey skies. Psychiatric nurses in white coats. They will tie you down to stick a needle in your ass when you’re too much for this world.

Mental illness, you say. It’s Divine Insanity for which this dulled-down society has no concept.

Not anymore, at least. I’m sure there’s been an ecological niche for freaks like me in the past. Maybe they’ve been crucified, exiled, or burned at a stake. Then deified as having been God’s among mere mortals.

The machine doesn’t want you to heal. That would only be bad for business. If those pills and injections would make the sickness go away. Then there would be no returning customers. Perverse incentives. You need only a rudimentary understanding of economics to get that.

I dabbled in alcohol and weed as a teenager. Struggled to find a place uniquely my own. Then again, maybe there once was an Eden for people like me. Millions and millions of misfits are mauled by the jaws of our hostile culture. 

Our DNA has a code where our destiny is embedded. Some people have it as their birthright to lead uncomplicated lives. The eccentrics, madmen, and the rest are doomed to feel out of place. That’s until we manage to carve a space for ourselves. Lost souls in the land of hungry ghosts. I cannot say how rare of a case it is to eventually find salvation. To be once damned and then redeemed. There truly isn’t anything more sweet than that.

I ended up being hospitalized for a psychotic mania. These watchmen of so-called sanity took my treasure away. It became impossible to settle into an existence of any cohesion. Tranquilized into a docile condition. I yearned to find my way back to the Promised Land.

Drugs are a Pandora’s Box. Still, not even methamphetamine compares to the high I’ve felt in a pure Mania.

A decade of frantically trying to escape the invisible prison of modern life. A decade of feeling my way through the darkness. Never again. No more wasting potential. No more allowing dreams and aspirations to go down the drain.

I thank the Most High for all the struggle and pain. That has been for the Good of me.

Now, an empty slate. In a temple of infinite possibilities. With no roof over me. Ascending to the heights where I’ve belonged all along. Clear blue skies, as empty as I.

Those who experience the lowest lows have the equivalent capacity to rise to the highest highs.