This is the Beginning of the Rest of your Life

 Isn’t it funny that I’m 21 and I’m just now realizing how young I truly am?

I have felt old all my life. Even when I dealt with teenage angst, I still looked up to those older than me and couldn’t relate to the world of people my age. I always felt like there was a river separating us and I was on the other side. I never could understand people my own age.

I recently received my sponsor who is 40 years older than me and has been sober for longer than I’ve been alive. I’m assuming you might wonder what we could possibly talk about, what we could possibly have in common. But every time we talk, time flies. She told me she feels like she’s known me all her life, yet I am so young. It shouldn’t make so much sense, yet it does.

I lost my last grandparent freshman year of college, and it hurts a special way to have your bloodline wiped like that. I feel like I could finally appreciate my grandmother now, and she’s gone. She died while I was in active addiction and I never grieved her properly. If anything, I never prayed but I prayed for her to die and my prayer came true.

I never really understood why my grandma made me so mad at the time, but I do now. Her disappointment hit deeper than anything anyone else said to me. I felt like when I made her proud she didn’t say much, but when I disappointed her she had a lot to say. I knew I was doing horribly mentally and subconsciously knew I would only get worse, and I wanted her to die to spare her from seeing me turn into what I would become. It was horrible and selfish.

I hated her because she was me, and I hated myself. 

When I was born, my mom had her uterus removed and it sent her into a deep postpartum depression. And as I stood there at her funeral emotionless, I noticed something in the PowerPoints. I noticed I was in most of the pictures, mostly from my infancy where she took care of me with my dad. And it all clicked.

She was the one who raised me when my mom couldn’t. And she didn’t tell me this, nobody did, and I had to be overwhelmed with that information all on the same day as her funeral. And finally, at that funeral, I cried at her death for the first time and I couldn’t stop. People tried to console me but they couldn’t. I couldn’t even put into words how much it hurt to lose her, and that I didn’t even appreciate the time I had with her. I felt like she was dead because I prayed for it to teach me a lesson. I felt so evil.

Now, I try to not focus on when she was disappointed in me, because she would get disappointed in me the way a mother gets disappointed in her child. I was the firstborn grandchild, she left a very special thing to me in the will, and I ignored all of that. I ignored how much I must’ve meant to her. That’s how much drugs skew your way of thinking. Drugs were more important to me than a relationship with my last grandparent.

I try to focus instead on how she taught me women could be funny. She was absolutely hilarious and I took it all for granted. 

Now that I’m sober, I can’t numb my feelings anymore, and with this grief, I understand now why people write books and draw things to cope with it. It’s so hard. On my last phone call with her, she told me not to do drugs and that she would be watching me.

And she must’ve kept her promise. Because I believe when I got into a car accident that turned into a DUI, she was the one who turned my wheel so I couldn’t drive to my dealer’s house to relapse on cocaine. She knew, and I felt so alleviated by all the disappointment she felt for me. 

I realize now that disappointment can only come from love. When my ex-partner called me in jail, he was so disappointed and angry with me, but that was to cover the worry he had felt for me all day. Worry manifests into disappointment. They’re worried about you and your future if they are disappointed in you.

It means they have higher standards than you have for yourself. It doesn’t come from a place of disrespect or dislike like I originally thought. It means they love you more than you love yourself.

When I was in active addiction, never once was I disappointed in myself for selling my body for drugs, for tanking all of my courses, for lying to my parents, and that wasn’t because I was carefree. It was because I was in a cage of self-hatred, that kept any emotions from coming out. 

I recently did bad on a Physics test, and I was so disappointed in myself. And as I kept focusing on that emotion, I felt something shift. I had changed. My low standards for myself had changed. I finally had standards for myself again, and that’s what my grandma had for me. She knew I could always do better than I was doing, and that manifested into disappointment, but behind that veil is love. And maybe loving yourself is as simple as knowing your worth.

I read in a book by Thich Nhat Hanh that every moment can be a rebirth, that you can be reborn multiple times in a day. And I felt a rebirth that day. I loved myself so much I was disappointed in myself again. I wasn’t numb, I wasn’t proud that I got more than a zero like I was before, I wasn’t emotionless. I was so riddled with emotion that I felt nothing short of human.

And as someone who has abused pain-relieving medication, I can say that the coping and healing that comes with feeling difficult emotions is more pain-relieving than numbing it out. You can’t heal what you can’t feel. 

My sponsor is my surrogate grandmother. She treats me like the grandchild she never had. She has given me a second chance, to make things right with my grandmother. I am clean now, and my grandma would love to meet me for who I am now. 

I can’t live with this regret anymore. It is so heavy. And it hurts even worse that I don’t have another grandparent I can make it right with. It’s very lonely.

I truly believe my grandma was the one who turned my steering wheel and made me crash when I was on my way to relapse. Because I know I would’ve crashed again and had a felony possession of cocaine. My life could’ve really been ruined, but she saved me. Even after I prayed for her to die, she still did that for me. That is true love.

I live each day clean, not only for myself but for others too. For the addicts who still suffer. For all the people I hurt in active addiction. For all the addicts who stopped going to meetings and passed away. For all the addicts who sought help and have nearly recovered from obsessive and compulsive tendencies. For all my loved ones, who were disappointed in me that day just because they know I can do better.

And I can do better. And most importantly, I live today clean for myself, because I think I finally see what my true potential can be. Your true potential is like an asymptote, you get closer and closer every day in recovery. Every day clean is a day won.

I’m tired of feeling so old and archaic. I want to be young. I still have so much of my youth left, and everyone comes up to me after the NA meetings saying how brave it is to get sober so young, in Austin of all places. They wish they had as much time as me, but God, I’ve felt so old and I don’t know why.

I will use my wisdom to help me bond with my surrogate grandmother, but I will use my youth in my actions in recovery. My youth is my superpower. 

It’s very corny, but every time RuPaul’s song goes “This is the beginning of the rest of your life,” I cry when I never used to cry before. I can’t help it. I can’t help feeling like this is the beginning of the rest of my life. I see my college years so far as a blur of running away from my problems. I took a pause on life. I fell into a coma. But nobody faults people for going into a coma; they just try to update them on what they missed and what they can do now.

I will try not to hate myself for being asleep mentally and spiritually for so long. I wrote an article a while ago that I was like a cat, who had nine rebirths and would die at the end of my ninth one. But I’ve had ten. If you count the mini rebirths I have daily, I have infinite. I survived longer than I thought I would.

I was given another chance when I didn’t die in that car accident. Every morning, I pray to my Higher Power, thanking them for giving me another chance, and I pray for all my loved ones to live long and healthy lives, for everything they’ve done for me. And most of all, I pray for my Higher Power to remove all my regret and turn it into action.

I have made a complete 180. I stopped praying for people to die and started praying for others to live. I understand what it means when they say that you can’t love someone until you’ve loved yourself. I couldn’t pray for my grandmother to live until I loved myself. I am so sorry to her, but I can only say sorry in my actions.

My life is not over yet. In fact, it’s only just started, or at least that’s what all the oldtimers in NA tell me. I have so much time left. And I am not weak for getting sober at 21. It just means I woke up that early, and I am so grateful. I could’ve been homeless, or out of college, or had worse things happen to me than what has happened to me. I could’ve had more stories, but would that mean anything if I wasn’t around to tell them?

I think I can say for sure that I am proud of myself now. They say in recovery everyone else sees the changes and you are the one who always sees it last. But I finally see it. I thought I saw the light one sees when they die, but it was just the sun. 

This is the beginning of the rest of my life. You can always start over. You don’t have to wait for anytime. You can do it right now. The only time you have is right now. You can be reborn right now. It’s okay if you haven’t been reborn before. Now is better than never. 

Creativity is my New Favorite Drug

We wonder, how can we emulate the ecstasy that certain drugs make us feel? Are we restrained by the time limit of certain drugs? Can we only experience true creativity and mental integration when tripping on magic mushrooms or are we restricted to the bliss cocaine makes us feel during the 30 minute long high period? We, as humans, are attracted to these measures because they recreate something we have always wanted all our lives — austerity.

For one time period, life is simple. Life is so complicated when sober. It becomes a grueling, horrid task to wake up each morning and escape from your dream state, full of simplicity, conclusions and control. Drugs are simple, especially cocaine; it jumpstarts your dopamine reward system, and provides you with something you’ve wanted all your life — answers to why you’ve been feeling so unfulfilled the entire time you’ve been on this planet.

Drugs are a forced state of the abandonment of the mind. It’s like a cheat code for the brain, or at least that’s what it feels like. It feels like we can bypass all the hard work it takes to reach the enlightenment that comes alongside creativity. 

I remember I used to think I was only a good writer when I was on cocaine. What Sigmund Freud had to say about cocaine was “You perceive an increase of self-control and possess more vitality and capacity for work. In other words, you are simply normal, and it is soon hard to believe you are under the influence of any drug. Long intensive physical work is performed without any fatigue.” He’s not wrong; cocaine is magical in the sense that it makes you feel superior than human. It makes you feel stronger, makes thoughts flow easier and makes words easier to construe together. I was really onto something when I thought cocaine enhanced the experience of writing.

But I would like to tie it back to this specific Bojack Horseman episode, where him, Todd and Sarah Lynn get high on cocaine and write his autobiography, which turned out to all be gibberish. And that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make: cocaine makes you feel like you’re stronger and you’re more articulate than before. That’s it.

But it’s simply by hacking the dopamine reward system, as I mentioned before. It provides you with endless reward, telling you that every word you are writing is the best one you’ve written. It gives you no self-awareness, which is the benefit of the sober mind. It only provides action, and in a world that is so dependent on it, that doesn’t seem so bad.

There used to be this song that I loved and the lyrics write: “I do coke so I can work longer, so I can earn more, so I can do more coke.” This sounded genius to me at the time. In our hustle-bustle society, this seems perfect. I remember I used to think if I had an IV of cocaine endlessly in my system, then, and only then, could I accomplish all my goals.

But I am sober now. How have I been able to go on? How have I been able to write without cocaine? I used to think that that was impossible. I used to think my sober writings were boring, because there was no story attached to them.

It’s funny, because the very thing that made me think I needed coke was also the thing that made me realize I didn’t need coke at all, and in fact, it was holding me back.

When I was in active addiction, I could only remember the good parts of my drug use, and I ignorantly forgot all the bad parts. I remembered that I could only write when I was on coke (only because I had fried my brain chemistry so much), but forgot I could only write a mere few words. Because doing coke alone is boring. For someone who hated being alone with her own thoughts, cocaine made them run free. That should’ve scared me away from needing it as much as I did, but I couldn’t connect the dots. I only saw the perspective of how I couldn’t write when I was sober, and could only find the will when I was on cocaine.

And just like Bojack, my writings were pure gibberish, uninteresting and lacked creativity. It was because I suppressed everything I felt, so I had nothing truly to write about. I would only write about how I wanted to forget everything I kept remembering on cocaine. I never could see the cycle that cocaine was putting me through; no, instead I loved tiring myself out on the hamster wheel.

Would you believe me if I told you that there’s a way to want to live in the world without the excitement that comes from drugs? Would you believe me if I told you I found a way to write more happily than I was when I was high? 

My writings plainly sucked because I lacked what Krishnamurti puts it as “abandonment.” He defines this as “the sense of not being held, of no restraint, no defense, no resistance.” And I couldn’t write well because I was allowing my creativity to be restrained, to be reliant on something. 

Creativity is not induced in a state of drugs and it never can be. The only reason why people come to conclusions on such drugs is because it is the only time they can ever spend by themselves. Every other moment of the day not on drugs is an attempt to escape themselves.

Krishnamurti says that inward beauty is the key to creativity, and can only be attained “when you feel real love for people and for all the things of this earth.” And, funny enough, you yourself are a part of this earth. As long as you hate yourself, you can never unlock your full potential, your full capacity of creativity and you can never love another being. You can read and know everything there is to know about writing, but “without this creative beauty inside, your talent will have little significance.”

We tend to overcomplicate things. We tend to create more problems for ourselves than is necessary. Sometimes, we create pain so that we have an excuse to take a pain-relieving substance. Krishnamurti says “we can thus abandon ourselves only when there is austerity, a sense of great inward simplicity.”

Creativeness is the beauty in life that you are so desperately seeking.

I bet you might ask about the Grateful Dead, and how they created such beautiful music by tripping on acid, or peyote, or mushrooms. You must think I am so stupid, that drugs can elevate creativity. 

But if you ask any member of the Grateful Dead, they will say the same thing. They will say their fans are all misled, that their band was never dependent on the drugs while everyone else seems to believe so. Drugs are a shortcut, but most of the hard work was generated sober. If you need a drug to enjoy a band, think, maybe they aren’t that good.

The thing I do when I want to use again is write, when that was the thing I would lean towards whenever I was on a substance. And that is because creativity is a drug. Drugs, at least for me, were the first time that time flew and I wasn’t impatiently waiting for the day to end, watching the hands on the clock tick. Actually that’s not true; it was the third time. The first time was when I found out how much I loved writing. And the second time was when I found out how much I enjoyed researching neuroscience.

Creativity is simple, yet drugs overcomplicate it. It makes it feels like creativity is a threshold one has to achieve, when it’s as simple as putting a pen to paper and letting something flow out of you. 

Hemingway stated that “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Creativity is like catching the beauty of the world in a butterfly net and making it your own. We were born into a world that is not our own, we were born into a body that is not our own, but our actions are what are our own. And we can choose if we want to spend our precious acts being wasted and reliant on something to carry us through the next day, or developing a habit that will be there for you when nothing else is.

Krishnamurti says “You can be creative only when there is abandonment — which means, really, when there is no sense of compulsion, no fear of not being, of not gaining, of not arriving. Then there is great austerity, simplicity, and with it is love.”

Once I realized I loved myself, I realized how much I loved writing. And with loving something, comes hating it as well. Hatred can only sprout from the seed that was previously love, but they can interchange at will. When I am in a writing stump, I hate writing more than anything in the whole world, but I only have hated it because I love it so much.

I was in the depths of my creativity when I was using drugs, when they are said to create creativity. Even the neuroscience of psychedelics suggest that they cause the neural pathways of the brain to be more interconnected than before and thus, provide more conclusions and ideas! 

But, creativity does all that and more. It leads to hyper connectivity, cognitive disinhibition and an increase in cognitive flexibility, and it does all of that sober.

I used to be so interested in the impacts of drugs on the brain, but I find I am more interested now in what the human brain is capable of without the injection of other substances, what it is able to do all by itself. 

I urge you to meditate 5 minutes every day, and see how creative you truly are. You are just being stuffed with stimuli — either on social media, or with drugs, or with other things. Creativity is creating something nobody has ever seen before. 

Creativity is making the world’s beauty your own. We shouldn’t be afraid of the sober brain — we should be in awe of it. I find it’s more interesting how specific breath work exercises or specific contemplative or concentration meditation practices lead to similar psychedelic sensations as those seen in psychedelic drugs. 

The human brain is my favorite drug, and I am going to get high on it.

What is Freedom?

What is Freedom? And where can I buy it?

 I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you wanted, when you wanted to. I used to think freedom meant that that’s what people striving for a lot of money ultimately reached for — financial freedom. I thought freedom was the thing that stems from love, not the other way around. I used to think freedom was the destination everyone so clearly wanted. I thought freedom was the purpose of life.

I lived most of my life, contrary to these beliefs, not free. I wasn’t free from my trauma, I wasn’t free from financial distress and I never experienced or understood love. What did give me a false sense of injected freedom was drugs.

When someone is not free, they take drugs to feel free. There is this lyric from a song I used to love called: “Take this and be free.” I thought the only times I could be free were when I was incapacitated, with drool spilling out of my mouth and in awe at everyday objects, like trees, or grass. Since I never understood freedom, the closest I could come to pseudo-freedom was believing it was full of lies. I thought freedom was only attainable on something like DMT. I was deluded into thinking drugs were a portal into something else; I ignored how everyone who had an “ego death” became more egotistical afterwards. 

I lied to everyone during my period of drug use, but I still had the guts to say that I was free. Sure, maybe I was free when I took the drugs, but what happened after the drugs wore off? Simultaneously, what else wore off was my wonder and curiosity towards life. I started seeing my periods of sobriety as something evil. I stopped seeing sobriety as the default state of the brain; I started seeing it as something to avoid at all costs.

That is not being free, and nobody who relies on drugs is free. And, contrarily, it doesn’t mean that people who are off of drugs are free either. Sobriety doesn’t guarantee enlightenment just as a drug-induced state doesn’t either. There is no default state of enlightenment; the gap can only be lessened by trying. These external things only make the gap farther apart.

Everyday, when I popped Percocet like it was my scheduled prescription pill, I used it to falsify the documents that say whether someone is free or not. I lived as a fraud. I would be knocked out for several hours, then the remaining hours of the day were spent being ignorant and waiting for the next pill. How did I ever think that I could take those pills and subsequently be free?

And, the last thing I want you to do is look down on me for doing such a funny thing. Yes, you can laugh at me for thinking that taking drugs made me free, when in fact they made me shackled, but you are no better than me. I know this because after being an addict, I see addiction in everything, like a sixth sense. I see that everyone is addicted one way or another.

People love to look down on addicts and call them stupid for not realizing such an obvious thing. Should I laugh at you for the amount of hours you spend on your phone? Should I laugh at you for craving validation from others and not from yourself? Should I laugh at you for binging on food every time you are the tiniest bit upset? No, we don’t do these things, yet addicts are still villainized.

During every NA meeting, I am forced to repeat that “I am Amanda, I am an addict.” I’m not allowed to forget it in NA and I’m sure as hell not able to forget it in the real world because none of you guys let me. I am labeled a drug addict for the rest of my life, but why do I get a bullet wound and everyone walks around with scrapes and bruises? Why are some addictions deemed as worse than others?

I see jokes everywhere online about people obsessing waiting for a boy to reply to their text, and instead of the comment section calling them an addict, it’s flooded with corresponding remarks, such as “Me too!”. Do we tell these people to go to Codependency Anonymous? Do we tell these people they are trying to fill a void in themselves like we do with drug addicts? 

We are all not free, yet there are some that are more than others, but it’s more of a spectrum than a black-and-white diagram like we see it today. If someone took away your phone for a week, you would crumble, but I am demonized because if I’m without a drug for a week, I would crumble as well.

What they teach us in addiction recovery is the function of the dopamine chemical. But outside of these treatment centers, we make light of it! We suggest doing a dopamine detox for a week to “cleanse” us of our addictive tendencies. Why am I expected to be sober the rest of my life, while you get to do whatever you want, do a week break of it and continually suffer, go right back to it not having learned your lesson, and still have the nerve to tell me you are more free than me? 

The dopamine detox trend is hilarious. It shows how much we don’t know about addiction and how much we are controlled by it. We are afraid of being addicted. We all live in denial. Drug addicts are just the ones who are not supposed to. It’s hypocritical.

Freedom does not mean independence. It does not mean getting to do what you want when you want it. It is to be free of fear, and all of us are so burdened by this daily. We are afraid of dying alone, so we marry the first person we find that likes us. We are afraid of dying, so we spend our whole lives trying to maintain a legacy, or circumvent our aging process, or find the root to immortality. 

Is our fear not an addictive quality itself? We think we can live without it, but we cannot. Not if we keep walking the road we are on right now. We treat our fear like it’s normal. We treat our fear like this because we were never taught about it. Instead, we celebrate people who take dopamine detoxes. We celebrate weddings of people who are incompatible and fight all the time. We celebrate bodies at all sizes. We celebrate the age that one is able to start drinking. 

We celebrate addiction except when it comes to drugs. And that’s why none of us are getting better.

It’s an invisible barrier that is made against drug addicts — it separates the general population from them. We talk on the news all the time about murderous fentanyl and face-picking meth and the zombie drug flakka. We make it scary. We make it another thing to be feared, when we should be focusing on the increase in junk food being produced everyday, the amount of alcohol commercials everywhere, the shared acceptance of porn websites, the widespread amount of locations of casinos. But, no, drugs have to be illegal because they make you look ugly.

I doubt as many people who have claimed to have felt love have really felt it, because love only stems from freedom. I did not receive and accept love when I adhered to everything I knew; I received it when I let it all go. Love is not dependence. 

Why is it we fear-monger drugs but everything else remains okay? Why is that I’m the one who has to recover and everyone else gets to remain addicted? How in any way is that fair?

I urge you, for one time, to look within yourself and see what you are addicted to. And don’t say nothing. Don’t try and say you are better than drug addicts, that you would never let yourself get so weak to the point where you rely on an external source for happiness, because you do. If you didn’t, you would be spiritually awakened, and nobody has done that yet to my knowledge.

You are in denial. Let that sink inside you, let it fester and let it turn into an angry tumor that you want to remove at any cost. That is the only way you can help yourself, if you stop lying to yourself. 

I’m tired of seeing everyone grow fat with ignorance, while I have to sit here sober watching it all. It’s painful to see. You people deserve better; I just wish you would see that.

On (Not) Being in Denial

 I hadn’t been alive for years, until I had to fight for my life.

In a jail cell, they want you to suffer. They make everything suicide-proof, but it’s all ironic. I found a way to kill myself in there if I wanted, one that would be painless, quick and seamless. But I didn’t.

I had hurt everyone I loved at that point. All my lies had crumbled, like badly written lyrics on pieces of paper in a trash can. I felt like Judas, having betrayed all of my friends. I understood why Christians made up Hell. They made it for people like me.

My ex-best friend said my drug use in freshman year would amount to me being dead in a ditch. I realized me being dead in a jail cell in junior year wouldn’t be that far off. I hated everything I became, but most importantly, I hated that she was right.

In order to get all the drugs that slowly killed me, I had to lie to everyone. By the end of my reign over my life, I had conjured so many lies to my friends and family that I had grown tired. I knew that day when I drove something would go wrong, but I didn’t care enough about myself to stop anything. All I could think about what my next fix. I couldn’t stand being sober for one minute.

The girl who could do nothing else but be alone with her thoughts was gone yet again. She came back in waves. She oscillated, in flux with the moon phases. 

I looked around at my friends who could regulate their drug use. I didn’t suppose my daily use was anything abnormal. I saw it as something I necessitated that others didn’t. I would grow angry at drugs being illegal when so many other addictive things are legal, like gambling, drinking, sugary foods, or smoking. None of it seemed fair; I couldn’t see myself as an addict in the sense I didn’t see myself as different from anyone else. I saw everyone else as addicted too, in some way, just they were in denial of it. I felt stronger by being addicted and yet knowing it too. I was never in denial. I always knew what I was.

I was in so deep that I needed to swim up now or I was going to never be found again in the water. My body would only rise again with the gases that are released from a decomposing body. I needed to swim up that day or I would only be found again dead.

And I did swim up, but not of my own volition. I needed to be pushed against a police car, handcuffed and incarcerated to swim up. 

Because there was something I realized in that jail cell. It was different from the police that came to save my life when I attempted suicide. Those police wanted me alive; these new ones wanted me dead. 

And I just couldn’t stand the fact someone wanted me dead for being addicted. I couldn’t stand seeing someone wanting me dead more than I wanted myself dead. That gave me strength to not kill myself in that cell.

There are still things I wrestle with everyday: why I got in that car, why I crashed, why I failed the field test. None of it goes away, and it won’t forever. I changed my life forever that day, but had addiction not done the same thing but slower? I would’ve never been there if it hadn’t been for my addiction. 

And, for the first time in my whole life, I hated being addicted. I hated who I became. Before, I was proud. I remember I told the love of my life that I was proud of how well I could keep things from people and he was disgusted. And I just couldn’t fathom why. 

It felt like life was a game and I was playing it right. I was maintaining about four lives while living one steady one in my subjective reality. I felt superhuman. I felt like I had cracked some code. I remember thinking that if anyone else had had to deal with these many stories and keeping them in track, they wouldn’t be able to. All my life I felt so boring, but this was how I coped. This was my way of feeling special.

I bit down on my cloth until my gag reflex enacted. That is innocence. Innocence is shattered when you keep biting down, until you have no more gag reflex. Until nothing phases you.

I’m embarrassed now that I needed several rock bottoms to wake up. But I realize now I was just in a very, very deep slumber. And I realize now that when I awoke from my metaphorical coma, I did have others around me, in fact, they were holding my hand and crying at my feet. And I just looked at them with confusion at why they were still there, not elation in the fact that I had woken up or that they were with me. I was so ungrateful.

I’d rather have been in denial, but I always knew everything that was wrong with me. I just never wanted to fix it, and I guess that hurts worse. 

To be Loved you must be Vulnerable

Everything clicked when I realized that vulnare is the Latin root word for “to wound” in Latin, and that that is the word that vulnerability comes from.

Vulnerability is giving someone the key to your apartment and trusting that they won’t steal anything. Vulnerability is climbing inside someone’s mouth and trusting that they won’t chomp down on you. Vulnerability is giving someone permission to wound you, and yet, trusting and knowing that they won’t.

I’ve had to deal with vulnerability a lot when getting sober. My biggest problem was assuming that people would look at me the way I looked at myself in the mirror the first time I realized I was an addict… a tinge of disappointment, a lot of disgust and a huge amount of hatred towards what I became.

But I learned something the day I was honest with everyone in my life for the first time in two years. I learned that real friends don’t get mad at you for lying to them about how you hurt yourself — they just want to be there for you any way they know how.

They didn’t ask me how I could keep a straight face and how I could sleep at night knowing all the lies I carried with me. No, they just asked what they could do to help me! I know! I’m the one who betrayed them countless times, and yet, they have the heart to ask me how they can help me.

It’s because people don’t want to see you get hurt if they truly love you. And they don’t want to perpetuate the suffering you’ve already put onto yourself. 

That’s been mind-boggling to me, because if it were me, I don’t know if I would have reacted the same. I thought they would look at me differently, as if the fog of lies that I had cast would settle and they would see me all my gangrene arms and legs. I thought they would at least flinch seeing how ugly I truly am. But nobody did. They just held me closer and let me cry and pity myself.

If you feel unloved, tell people how you’ve punished yourself when you didn’t deem yourself human. Then you will feel so much love that it’s hard to deny that it exists.

I remember in eighth grade I told my best friend that I tried to kill myself years ago, and she told me that she cuts herself, and we just cried together. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but what it did was strengthen our relationship, even though it ended years later. Because no sane person wants someone they love to suffer silently. I don’t know what was going through her head at the time, but I remember crying those tears not for myself, but for her. I was so sorry that I wasn’t there for her and she felt the need to punish herself in that way. I think tears were what she wanted. She wanted someone to feel bad for her for the first time in a long time.

Love is tricky, but it’s also very obvious when the time is right. Addiction plants a seed in your soul, and can only be watered by self-pity. When that seed dies is when others find out and pity you themselves. You realize you hated pity all along. You realize you just wanted to be normal this entire time.

I don’t know why I’m a person that can’t use drugs normally, but it’s something I have come to accept. My friends don’t look at me like some junkie freak. They look at me the same as before. I think, if anything, they look at me more truthfully now.

I realize all my life I was shifting my gaze away from people. I never could maintain eye contact, fearful of what people would find that existed underneath my pupils. I was afraid they would see me for who I truly was, and they would hate it. 

I thought I could never be loved for who I was. I always thought I had to maintain a farce in order to be accepted. That’s how my life had always been — it’s like I was assigned a role and I played my part very well. So well in fact I believed it too. But I’ve found the opposite is true. Even if you’re broken and piteous and sad, people will still love you, because they love you for you. And they hate to see you become someone you’re not. 

If you hate yourself and you’re surrounded by people who look at you like you view yourself, the only way to stop hating yourself is to be around people who see you for the opposite as you see yourself. Be around people who can’t imagine why you would ever try to kill yourself.

One thing someone told me after I got out of the psych ward for attempting suicide was, “Amanda! I can’t imagine why you would do that. I’m so jealous of you. If you do that, then what do I have going for me?” At first I was angry. Over time, I realize, I’m jealous of how they view me. I wish I thought of my own life as something special and worthwhile. And you should only surround yourself with people like that, that can’t fathom why you would try to do that.

Vulnerability is hard. But, aren’t most satisfactory things hard? Like taking a cold shower, or exercising. I find that honesty hurts in the moment, but is much longer lasting satisfactorily than lying. Lying eats away at you everyday until there’s nothing left. Honesty builds you up stronger than you were before.

At first, I was so scared of being wounded. But I’ve found nobody can wound me worse than I’ve wounded myself, and from there, I have found peace, love and virtue. I pray for the same to happen to all of you.

(I Just) Died in your Arms

 I almost died and it taught me more about life than I ever could have read or heard about.

There is a sick kind of cycle I find myself in when something profound happens to me — I try to distance and protect myself from it as much as possible. The first thing I thought to do after I almost died was drinking myself into a stupor, so much so that I could drown out the voices that pleaded with me to finally pull the trigger.

Almost dying, at first, did the opposite of what it was supposed to do. I did not feel immense pleasure in the present moment. No, at first, I wanted to be back in the dissociative purgatory state I had been in.

What I had seen when I went under was nothing short of nostalgic on a cosmic level. I was nostalgic in a way that surpassed subjectivity and the linear nature of time. I had experienced complete identity dissolution, and my first-person perspective changed from my own which I usually had, to that of a little boy. I had become a seven-year-old boy, and I could see through his eyes. I looked at my altered parents who were sitting in their chairs, waiting for me to open my Christmas presents. I looked at my brother who was a little older than me, beaming about Christmas morning. Then, I snapped back to reality, and thought the most isolating thought ever: What is this horrific place and why would it take me away from such solace?

I longed for a life I never experienced after that day.

Even when I snapped out of my trance, I couldn't stop the grief for a life I had not lived. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the first-person freeze frame from the boy’s perspective I had seen when I went under. I could not stop feeling decay overwhelm me. My suicidal thoughts did not become quieter, but instead so loud I could barely focus on anything in reality anymore. I read so much about near-death experiences changing people's lives, and I couldn't help but feel ashamed that mine had only managed to make me weaker.

All I could think about was how I wanted to start my life over again. I felt too far gone, that the years I spent wanting to die, I actually spent doing nothing to improve myself. Being in the shoes of a child only furthered my thought that I should restart my life since I hated the trajectory that mine was going in. I felt the most connected to my soul over my body, and to feel it leave and go into another body only confirmed what I was thinking — that I am not my body, and I need to leave. Since I never could imagine myself grown up, I never paid attention to when people were explaining the directions for the future. And being in the body of a child made me only realize how much I longed to do my one life over again, because I viscerally hated the way I lived the first time around. I wanted a do-over desperately.

Right after this experience happened, I went on a weekend getaway with my fraternity to the University of Oklahoma for a football game. That weekend I drank the most I ever have, partied all three nights then ultimately passed out, lost my phone and belongings, and came back a bigger mess than when I left.

Since I had lost my phone and also hadn't texted anyone, my parents and my loved ones were worried about me that I died. They banged on my door and barged in, assuming me to be in some kind of life-or-death trouble. As I called my parents to alert them that I was alive, I felt like a tree falling in the middle of an empty forest. It felt like I was dead those few days, because are you alive if no one knows you are? The metaphor of dying started to take over my whole life and I started to become obsessed with it. It started to seem easy, so easy in fact that I longed for that experience again and for it to completely overwhelm me and take me with it this time.

It was the most pleasure I had ever felt in my life. What did that mean if it was the closest thing I had experienced to death?

My dreams and daydreams were haunted by wishes to dissociate and be in that boy's body again. I didn't know what about the life I had built seemed so insufferable, but I decided I couldn't be a part of this world as myself anymore. I hated myself from every crevice, and I hated the way I was handling this traumatic situation as well. I feel piteous, but at the same time, not anything to be pitied.

But, little did I know, was that this experience would send me down a deep rabbit hole that would fuel my purpose in life. It gave me questions, in a world I noticed would look down on those that asked questions. I found questions that were not unimportant to ask, such as if we have any meaning in the world, but more about the foundations of our minds and the elasticity of consciousness.

        It's what led me to creating this blog and all of my theories I've thought of thus far. I just needed to die to teach me how to live.

The Brain is my Higher Power

 I would hate the brain too if I didn’t know so much about it; it makes us hypocrites, because simultaneously it makes us self-conscious and also incredibly selfish.

It is through self-exploration that one comes to the conclusion that they are the most misunderstood being on this planet. Due to the nature that nobody speaks honestly and we have not made communication a straightforward act of evolution, but instead a meandering multitude of layers, intricacies and lies to ourselves and others, we are under the illusion that we are each special. The western world has capitalized on this and bred a society that’s dependent on individuality and competition. 

In order to be successful, you must be different. This is based on the university system and how one progresses as an adult. We are terrified of not being seen as distinguished enough by another person.

We base our happiness on the perceptions of others. We base our satisfaction on individuality, whereas we spend all of our time in the shallow end of the pool along with the majority of people. We play it safe, because we are more scared of strange looks than dying unhappy.

        With how many people are starting to question this, neuroscience is as important as ever, but why don’t neuroscientists seem to think the same thing?

As a future scientist, I am befuddled with the collaboration of philosophy and science. Neuroscience despises philosophy, and in my courses, the only philosophical thing taught about the brain is the hard problem of consciousness.

The field of neuroscience is a microcosm. In the field of neuroscience, we have a “common enemy” that we are all fighting against and thus, is what progresses research. But, what if I told you that there was no enemy?

The belief that has propagated neuroscience for several decades, since the 1960s to be exact, is the serotonin deficiency hypothesis. It essentially states something very basic when looked at from afar – that the common cause of major depressive disorder is a deficiency in serotonin. And I have one thing I would like to say to that – damn, I wish it were that easy!

Part of me wants to cry, but another part of me wants to laugh at how many years we have wasted on this theory and how many people have unknowingly suffered because they placed all their trust in science.

I have a very horrible thing to tell you. And it is going to make you sad, and it should break your heart. Science doesn’t want to figure the unknowable out. The days of science, as we know of it today, that consisted of epiphanies, discoveries and mind-altering prepositions are long gone.

In other words, the creatures that are dependent on the brain have no real desire to figure it out. In other other words, to the people who first fell in love with it, the brain has turned into a tantrum-ridden toddler, that doesn’t seem to calm down when given things that are very much not the solution. The industry of neuroscience is, essentially, full of parents who shouldn’t have been parents. They were parents not for their children or themselves, but for others. I’ve noticed that people just mostly want something to brag about. Oh, and they want a lot of money.

Neuroscientists treat mentally ill people like uncontrollable infants, and that is the problem with the industry as a whole today. It seems we are always stuck between a rock and a hard place with mental illness – either people don’t take it seriously or they take it seriously to extreme lengths. We can never see mental illness for what it truly is — it always ends up being something else: a justification in a murder trial, a reason for someone’s irrationality or a cause for someone to start medication. In all instances, mentally ill  people are deemed as diverting dangerously from the norm. They push the limits so far of what it means to be human that it’s better if they would just be quiet. 

And that is evident in the medications that are prescribed to mentally ill people today. Antidepressants can definitely benefit some people’s lives, but most people recall negative side effects to their overall life when taking it – such as lack of pleasure in daily activities, lack of sex drive, lack of motivation, but also a lack of depressed mood. Essentially, they take away every aspect of human experience instead of focusing on the cause of the problem. In other words, it causes the numbing of mentally ill people who are unable to function and complain a bit too much for neurotypical people. 

People ask me then, why do we keep doing this? I have an answer, but it’s not a fun one. I believe that mental health caretakers simply want mentally ill people to shut up and keep quiet. They deem them not as people, but instead pests. This is a genocide that doesn’t kill anyone off — it only aims to suppress them so much so that they are basically philosophical zombies. They’ll react when you pinprick them, but they have no conscious experience, because the medication has sucked it out of them.

And this is where I want to start when dismantling current day neuroscience – the serotonin deficiency hypothesis, because this has seeped into so much more of neuroscience and biology today. 

Neuroscience today is based on the notion that there is a common cause of all mental illnesses, and that is the disorder itself. For example, all the symptoms of depression lead to the common cause being diagnosed as depression. This notion implies that the problem in the brain is the cause, since it is the thing that is causing all of the symptoms. They make the assumption that if you snip the cause of the disorder, you will cut off all of the symptoms.

From there, a decrease in serotonin was correlated with a cause of depression. I bet scientists were throwing a party when they found this out — they thought they had genuinely found the cause of depression. But, I argue, if this were true, why has our number of mentally ill people not gone down, but instead gone up? Why do so many psychiatrists misdiagnose bipolar people with depression, then prescribe them an antidepressant blindly to thus induce a manic episode? And why is nobody questioning this at all? How has nobody realized this is the laziest game of guess and check in existence?

From multiple sources(1), it has been found that there is no such correlation with a decrease in serotonin and an increase in depressed mood. What this suggests is scientists have attempted to put a bandaid over a huge, huge wound fundamentally in neuroscience.

I don’t know how to explain this without crying — how am I supposed to be okay with the fact that all of the research on depression has been based around the serotonin deficiency hypothesis? How am I supposed to be okay with all of the people who have blindly gotten serotonin syndrome or lost all of their motivation due to antidepressants, and they are so trusting of scientists that they think it is their own fault? How am I supposed to be satisfied knowing that we are running longer and quicker in the wrong direction? Why are mentally ill people not allowed to ask their psychiatrists why they are on their medications without the worry that they are trying to “go off of them”? Why do we hate mentally ill people so much?

And why won’t anyone listen to me? Why am I being taught about the serotonin deficiency hypothesis in my classes, but nobody is doing anything about it? Does it not make everyone else full of rage?

I wonder, am I the only one who wants to figure out the brain, not simply figure out how I can profit from it?

Our subjective desire gets in the way of researching subjectivity. We collectively write the hard problem of consciousness off as philosophical jargon – something that is interesting at first, but will never actually be able to be figured out.

But, I argue, if we can’t, what is the purpose of all of this? What are we advancing for, if we don’t even know what is between our ears? How can we ever dream of understanding society or the universe when all of us have our brains at gunpoint right now?

Everyone is scared about AI — I’m not so much worried about that, as I am people trying to replace the brain with it. They have no idea what they are up against.

We need our brains to figure out inventions, but God, we haven’t even figured out the brain. We are screwed.

It’s because we don’t want to understand the brain truly and we never did. We just wanted to learn how to control it to thus control everyone. We saw the most beautiful painting in the world, and instead of preserving it in a museum, everyone plotted on how they could steal it for themselves so nobody else could have it. They don’t want to make it ubiquitously known — they want to keep it from us and use it against us. In other words, they want the brain to remain a secret, so they keep these hypotheses that amount to nothing except money, money and money and a lot of silence from mentally ill people. It’s just a version of asylums where they have freedom — they are still controlled and regulated so they aren’t as much of a disturbance, but it’s under the guise of being helpful and considerate this time. They prescribe medications, telling you they don’t want you to go off them for your own safety. But it’s mainly because they don’t know what will happen if you stop. It’s not that doctors are keeping from you what they know — they are keeping from you that they in fact don’t know anything.

What’s worse than not understanding is pretending to understand.

Whenever I am full of hatred for science, I try to remember how beautiful it is sometimes, and how science would be nothing with subjectivity – how so many amazing creations were found out all by complete accident. I think about how many lives penicillin has saved from a mold that grew over a two week period – let me put that into perspective for you: so many lives were saved due to a mistake of a human. I think about how microwaves were found out to work by the inventor realizing his chocolate bar had melted when he was trying to make energy sources for radar equipment (2) during World War II. Even gunpowder was figured out by Chinese alchemists trying to find the elixir for life.

What I am trying to say is, humanity is somewhat dependent on subjectivity. But, the opposites of something are not enemies, but are instead poles. We strive for objectivity, when subjectivity is the end result. The problem is we think subjectivity is an enemy – we see it as something to abolish. We think that is what seeps into science and poisons it — but no, it is when subjectivity is not used curiously but instead with evil intent.

This is where AI comes in. It takes away the subjective nature of humans, and in unprecedented circumstances, makes it even better. But, I have some questions as a very curious neuroscientist.

What breakthroughs will AI ever discover? What leads to breakthroughs is an innate feeling of insatiability. AI has a purpose – to fulfill their task. But humans have no purpose – that’s what makes our breakthroughs so worthwhile. We fight to keep living on a planet we don’t have to. We are struggling to make answers out of things that have none. We were born with a certain hunger that can’t be satisfied no matter how much we read or watch. AI has no subjective reason for doing things. Humans have to generate that reason for themselves, and when it’s so real like that, it’s impenetrable and no machine can come near it.

I fear if we replace scientists with AI we will lose all possibility of figuring out mental illness. And a part of me is hesitant – especially for therapy. I see the biggest problem of therapy is subjectivity as well – but that’s also the biggest argument in favor of it. There are lots of bad therapists, such as ones who haven’t been through horrible instances themselves so they have nothing to relate to their clients on, ones that push an agenda onto you or ones that otherwise abuse you. That is where subjectivity gets in the way — because we have this insatiability, it doesn’t just seep into inventions, but also things that have already been invented. 

I see a lot of current therapists as Mary in her room. They study all they can about mental illness, but I’ve found that if you’ve never lived with it, you don’t truly understand it. I would argue even if you watched a loved one have a debilitating mental illness, although it’s sad, you still don’t understand. And that’s what breeds bad therapists – people who speak as if mental illness is a mindset, as if it’s something that can be cured with mindfulness or living in the present moment, as if it’s something that the only problem is that they don’t want to get better. I find that a lot of mental health technicians and counselors really hate mentally ill people.

It’s not that they don’t want to understand – it’s that they can’t. But, all of the people who would be good therapists end up thinking they will amount to nothing and are dying at alarming rates. They don’t know how necessary they are in their field – this is because we preach stability in the course of university. But I argue we need to have lived through instability to teach someone who is unstable to live a stable life. What does a person who swept through school with daddy’s money hav e in common with a decade-long drug addict on Skid Row?

I think this serotonin deficiency hypothesis has plagued every aspect of the neuroscientific study of psychiatric disorders. It is just like the reason parents give their parents endless hours of iPad time instead of spending time with them – because it’s easier. This goes back to my analogy that neuroscientists are just parents who weren’t ready to be parents yet. 

Raising a child consists of long, strenuous decisions to over time grow them into a better person. If you jump over the complicated steps of raising a child, they will grow up completely misguided, and that’s where neuroscience is right now – they were raised incorrectly, they were given kisses for every wound instead of gauze, they never learned right from wrong. How do you undo so many years of imprinting?

Neuroscience is a victim of itself – what do I mean by this? The thing we should be working to figure out is imprinting, but it’s the thing getting in the way. It's imprinting about imprinting. Damn, I’m starting to understand why nobody wants to study this. This is meta shit.

I don’t want to be a parent when I grow up, and maybe I see why now. I already have a child that nobody is taking care of properly. In fact, it’s being utterly neglected on all frontiers by people who claim to love it. We must have a very different definition of love, because I know I would never try to suppress the truth of something I loved.

What I think happened is a lot of people went into neuroscience when it isn’t neuroscience that they loved. They loved something else that neuroscience isn’t – they loved the money, the status, the bragging rights. 

I ask, what could neuroscience be without being tainted by malice? What if neuroscience wasn’t used for any ulterior purpose – what if it was just genuinely wanted to be figured out? What would happen then? Would we find that the brain loves us back?

Would we find, maybe, that it’s not as elusive as we think it is? Maybe it wants to be figured out as much as we want to figure it out?

So many people see the brain as an enemy, something they are cursed with making sense of. I argue that we have fabricated the brain into being an enemy, so we have a common cause to eliminate. And AI is trying to eliminate the brain.

“We have scrubbed the world clean of magic,” Alan Watts stated. This is evident in trying to make machines replace the brain in a time where we haven’t even understood a fraction of the brain. It’s just like when a parent walks back into a child’s life after having been gone for a majority of it. It’s a contradiction in and of itself. We have spent no time trying to befriend the brain, only control it and that’s all we’ve known. We haven’t spent any time raising it but we expect it to be a fully fledged adult. We never spent any time fostering care, but we expect it to love and obey us. 

Humans are so used to being at the top of the food chain that they forget what causes them to be at the top of the food chain – their developed brains. 

It makes me want to cry seeing how many people take their brains for granted.

It makes me want to cry hearing so many people say they wish they could go into neuroscience. It makes me feel so alone. What that essentially means is, I know exactly what you are saying, but I’m not in love with the brain enough to dedicate my whole life to it. I see what’s wrong, but that’s for someone else to fix.

I ask, what if there is no one else? I look around, and I see nobody else even remotely angry. What if that someone else has to be you?

I’m officially over the idea of maintaining a legacy. I have no desire in being the person that covers the wound that is the human brain and getting praise for it. Simply, I want to understand, and then I want to perish. 

After twenty one years, I have realized what my purpose is. I am supposed to have felt the weight of mental illness, the trauma of subjectivity and the separation from others. It does not make me special or unique. I know if we all realized that we are not special and are all smaller parts of a whole, then we would be able to figure it out, I know. I know that I can’t do this alone, deep down. 

But nobody seems to be listening to me. Nobody seems to be hearing the cries from the brain, how much it wants to be understood. It doesn’t want to hurt us and fill us full of doubt. It’s just as confused as we are. 

AI is only distracting us further from the problem – that we have absolutely no idea what we are doing in neuroscience. And part of me wants to let go and stop complaining, because I look around and it seems I’m the only one flustered and upset. 

But, I have faith. I have faith that there are other people like me who can’t sleep because they’re thinking about what could be wrong. And they aren’t just thinking about what’s wrong — they want to be the person who changes it too.

I have recently found something to keep me awake again. I found something that provides some semblance of answers that it is leading me into curiosity like never before. What I thought was dead in me has been invigorated. 

The network theory of mental illness is a response to the common-cause theory of mental illness. Instead of the disorder being the cause and the symptoms merely side effects of the disorder, the network theory considers it differently. It posits what if the symptoms were the cause of the disorder? What if it becomes a “disorder” when enough of these interconnected, node-like symptoms are active together? And what if mental illness can be prevented by attacking the symptoms head on? (3)

This provides hope. This instills the notion that the thing that is wrong with you is not something fundamentally embedded in your core that cannot be scraped off no matter how hard you try, but instead something noticeable, plausible and fightable. It’s not a chemical imbalance. It’s not permanent. We have just been trying to solve the wrong thing this entire time. 

This explains how those with borderline personality disorder, the only curable mental illness known as of right now, can be cured when they go through DBT therapy because they don’t identify with the nine bullet points of diagnosis anymore. What DBT does is break down each of the symptoms of the disorder and teach them how to cope with them. It’s not because they are broken — they just don’t have the tools to help them just yet. This suggests a disorder is dependent on the symptoms, not the other way around.

But oh, what does this mean for pharmaceutical companies? I, frankly, have no care. I hope they all burn to the ground. I hope this is implemented more, and I hope we stop taking advantage of mentally ill people. Just because they don’t understand their brain, doesn’t give you any reason to take their money and exploit their confusion. 

I want neuroscience to be a marathon, instead of just merely running in place. I want neuroscience news to be as prevalent as astronomical news. I want more people to realize how much they love the brain too. And I want it to stop being seen as some enemy that needs to be silenced and handicapped. 

We don’t need to lock the brain in a cage until we find some way to exploit it – we don’t have to ruin the brain like we as humans ruin everything. We don’t need any ulterior motive for the brain. We just need to love it, and find that it has loved us back this whole time; it just didn’t know how to show the love properly. Aren’t we all like that? Can we not sympathize with the brain a little bit?

After all, the brain is human too, isn’t it? Isn’t it not what makes us human? Can’t we forgive it for everything it’s put us through, and realize that it is simply an extension of ourselves? 

And can’t we have the grace to ask, why? Can’t we be curious and selfless enough to ask the brain why it does the harmful things it does? 

We hate too much on the brain for producing evil. But I argue it’s humans who have let it fester as long as it has — evil is created by a cycle of trauma. It is the brain not being able to rewrite its own code. The brain is a victim. The brain is a sick patient. The human brain doesn’t hate mentally ill people — humans do. 

I’ve been comparing the brain to a child this whole article, and maybe I’m right. Maybe the brain is a kid that is in and out of penitentiaries, that can never learn its lesson, but those places don’t aim to teach. They aim to punish for not knowing.

We are punishing the brain for not being obvious. But that’s what I love about it — how it isn’t so obvious. I love the brain for what it truly is.

And I hope this article made some people realize how much they love the brain. Your trauma, your pain, it can go into this field. This field welcomes all imperfections: in fact the more the better! The more isolated you felt, the more together you will feel now. 

If you’re still alive and you’ve battled mental illness, you beat the brain. The only thing you can do for it in return is share everything you learned for those who suffer younger than you. 

No, I’m not going to end this article saying I’m the future, because I’m not. I’ve noticed in my life when you don’t wish for something, it happens. Just like penicillin. But what I plan to do to figure it out is talking to as many mentally ill  people as possible from as many cultures as possible and implementing Alan Watts’ notion that we are all organisms in accordance with our environment. I plan to live with Nature, and watch the answers fall into my lap.

I will not be somebody to celebrate, and I will tear down any statue they make of me. The brain doesn’t want to be profited for. They’ve taken everything else. The brain is the only thing I have left and it’s the only thing you have left. Be more scared. 

Everyone seems to be worried about conservation of other things, but I seem to be the only one worried about conservation of the mind. I want to preserve it like a national park. I want to speak to it in its alien language: I don’t want to translate. I want to kiss it.

I know what real love is, and it is what I feel for the brain. And I think neuroscientists should only go into the field if they feel the way I do. Then, and only then, will we be able to crack the code. 

We need to operate as one, but we are operating separately. Imagine if each wave roared in its own way, like pieces of hair made of water… now that wouldn’t make much sense. We are all going in separate misguided directions. We are just like the brain, as we are all children with parents who didn’t raise us right. We think we can’t take back our childhood, but I argue we can. 

We are taught to be separate so I don’t blame you. We are taught to compete. But science isn’t about competition, and only when it is does it get ruined.

I can’t stand to see the brain get soiled. I can’t stand to see Neuralink monkeys get killed due to a high ego about the brain.

Just because you are good at technology does not mean you will be good at the brain. All in human history, nobody has been “good at the brain.”

The only area I aim to be different in, is I want to be good at the brain. I want to understand it the way it wants to be understood. It hears this sincerity. It thanks me continuously. 

I hope you know what it feels like to not see your brain as your biggest enemy. I hope it is easily understandable one day of all days. I hope your brain is something you’re grateful you have, rather than feeling cursed by it. In fact. I will make it my mission to.

(1) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 

(2)  https://www.mynewlab.com/blog/accidental-scientific-discoveries-and-breakthroughs/.

(3) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28127906/