I’m no soothsayer. I’m a truth dealer, an old school intuitive card player. I don’t count cards, but I do follow numbers, patterns, rhythms, and I see the unseen. Divinely inspired, quantum entangled, and floating along a stream of collective consciousness made entirely of sparkling, electrified saltwater. I know nothing, and I know everything. I feel the pressure, the resistance of invisible fields and crossover planes of existence. I hear the deep, underwater seascape of our collective consciousness.
I’ve been nurturing my knowing cerebrospinal fluid by wiggling my ears, wagging my tail, and thrusting my divine fluid up my spine in melodious notes igniting my gray matter. My mind has always been on fire, but over the past two and a half years it’s now exponentially ablaze. Much alike the late, great David Lynch, I drink coffee and then I percolate, meditate, and ruminate. At that point inspiration flows freely without limits. My own activated intuition and imagination glow with reverence. It’s effortless.
“The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” — Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars, 1977.
“My mind’s eye sees things before they happen. These riddles of activated intuition and knowing manifest through patterns and puzzles, rhythms and reverberations. I can literally feel a warmth glowing inside my head.”
— Call me David, Dave, DV, Modest Psychic of Magenta Sea or even Batman, my daughter’s favorite moniker for her heroic design detective daddy
Outsiders looking into our family thought we were the model American family. Just below the surface of our calm pond existed a network of twisted, gnarled warty roots stemming directly from my devilishly sinister mind. My life was devoid of self-illumination during my early years. In preschool I was locked in a pitch black bathroom on the daily for being too much to handle.
I had a big mouth and no sense of restraint. My parents tried to tame this side of me, but I possessed an innate sense of self that shadowed everyone else around me. I always felt like a had a special gift others simply didn’t understand. Hell, I barely understood it myself. It was directly tied to a shared, collective consciousness gently nudging me to quizzical understanding.
I leaned heavily into my dark side fully mastering the arts of thievery and manipulation by the time I was six. Every time I had a sleepover with a classmate I’d get up in the middle of the night and steal some of their trading cards and action figures tucking them neatly hidden in my backpack. When accused of stealing I’d lie again to cover my tracks.
Filled with shame on one side of my psyche while the other whispered a grimacing satisfaction. I honed my arts as a master manipulator when I wanted a toy, puzzle, action figure or model kit. I played Mom like a fiddle always insisting it was the last one, and I had to have it. Somehow I got away with murder, wait, not yet. I’ll get to that.
It’s quite fitting as I was born in the South because this region in poetry and stream of consciousness metaphysics represents the sailing into the imagination. Let's just say say about 99% of my life I've been living in and living out and manifesting my imagination fueling philosophical and spiritual observations. Some moments bordered on the homicidal as if I was being puppeted by an invisible shadow worker.
Once we were visiting my grandparents in North Carolina and I spent the night with one of my neighbors. I woke up in the middle of the night finding myself hovering over my guest. I experienced full homicidal intentions to strangle him to death as he slept. Tears streamed down my face as I was puppeted by an invisible, dark force. This was my first remembrance of being controlled by an extrasensory being or transmission. That scenario has been repeated a handful of times since.
As I look back now across my life in hindsight I now understand I was targeted by those wishing to destroy me before I even had a chance. Targeted as a threat even in the delivery room when I was forcefully birthed a full month early. Somehow my mother’s body was rejecting me before oxygen ever entered my lungs. Something was wrong, uncomfortably so. Doctors ordered a full blood transfusion. As time ticked by seemingly in slow motion, nearly coming to a full hault, my mother knew in her gut that I would be fine. She knew our family secrets better than anyone. Fifteen minutes passed.
The delivery room felt frantic amid a humid stupor. In a burst the door jolted open as the Chief Medical Director arrived with news that immediately halted the transfusion moments before being administered. He looked at my Mom and gave her a quiet nod. He knew her prayer was answered.
I’ve recently asked my Mom about this medical miracle. She told me the doctor was just being melodramatic. She said there was no miracle other than she prayed for my body to make a full recovery without the need of the transfusion. I glanced at her and did a jaw-dropping double take. I looked at her, and she gave me a wink and a smile. I smirked back knowing exactly what she meant.
Mom taught me how to pray and commune with God when I was just a few years old. I still have my prayer rug. It’s a tiny red, black, and ivory Persian rug. I noticed last year it looks like an eye or a universe. I know it’s really one and the same. My relationship with God was personal for me. I never felt comfortable in a church. Back then I didn’t understand why, but now I know that our relationship never needed a mediator. My soul understood before I even arrived that I didn’t require a location or a middle man in order to communicate with the power of the Spirit.
Thankfully I grew up surrounded by farmers, puzzles, and mind games on both sides of my family tree. Our roots run deep. We’re connected at a subatomic level. Checkers with Pa, farmer and mechanic for the WWII Flying Tigers. Grandad’s fork, spoon, and toothpick center of gravity physics trick. Daunting chess matches with Uncle Bobby, Biology Professor and Master Gardener.
Ma and Grandmom, both masters in the kitchen and garden. Ma’s Scrabble, word jumbles, and crochet taming her overly active mind. Grandmom’s magic, pillowy biscuits and watermelon rind pickles. Like so many others, my family is full of highly intelligent, imaginative eccentrics if one takes the time to look past the curtain and take a gander what might be hiding under the rugs.
Our family’s artistic heritage runs through all of us touched by the divine spark of the first artist, our Creator. My Great Grandmother was a master charcoal illustrator. Every time we’d visit our grandparents and great aunts and uncles in Murfreesboro and Ahoskie, North Carolina, I’d marvel at the living, breathing horse portrait great grandma rendered. From the tufts of its fluffy mane to the pulsing veins running down alongside its majestic features.
I have one of Great Grandmom’s renderings hanging in my den, circa 1910s, of a profile view of a docile terrier. The softness of its fur seemingly gently blowing from the nearby ceiling fan calms the entire room’s energy. I’ve attempted to duplicate this dog portrait to no avail. I’m far too impulsive and impatient to render such an illustration’s masterful chiaroscuro. I hope one day on the other side I’ll have a chance to meet her along with seeing my great aunts, Hen and Sara, and great uncle Jack again.
We all cherished visiting Pa’s brother and two sisters. Great uncle Jack and Great Aunts Hen and Sara never married, but they were full of life.. They were curious bookworms. Jack, a portly fellow, loved taking walks with me discussing the ins and outs of the latest sci-fi swashbucklers at the local cinema. They collected LIFE magazines, hundreds of books from classics of poetry and prose that I now have in my library.
I miss them dearly, but not so much their mean kitty who was always quarantined in the kitchen when we visited them around the holidays. Most of my memories of them are full of laughter and wise cracks especially from Great Aunt Henrietta’s giddy playfulness. Her sister, Sara, wasn’t so fortunate.
Mental maladies riddled our family’s turbocharged DNA. Sara was full of life until my mom’s speculation an ended romance destroyed Sara’s joy. Once her catatonic depression set in she fell further under its quiet, neurally necrotic spell. My Mom’s brother, Bobby, had his first serious mental appetite for destruction during his first year at college. Decades later I exhibited the same. I lasted two weeks at college before I dropped out and returned home. Uncle Bobby’s depression sent him through a lifelong pursuit of relief.
Years ago beyond lobotomies, folks with severe depression were given shock treatments. Now considered cruel and unusual, but back in the dark ages of mental health, it was the norm in many a mental hospital. Hooked up to electrodes and given a small piece of wood to bite down on. I’ve met folks my own age who also sought out these same treatments. While rare, these procedures still exist today for people with drug-resistant, crippling depression.
We’ve had our share of tragedies, too. Dad lost both of his brothers. No one has ever spoken about their circumstances in full detail, at least not yet. What we do know is one of them “accidentally hung himself while doing a magic trick.” His other brother drowned while attempting to show off how good of a swimmer he was to his friends. The former may have committed suicide while the latter may have been experiencing an elevated, manic state attempting to push himself too far.
Understandably both young men have become a shrouded part of our family history. While growing up we were all kept in the dark to protect us. They thought they were protecting us, but in turn couldn’t protect us from ourselves. I can attest that I’ve experienced both suicidal, manic, and depressive tendencies during the majority of my life. Only over the last three years have I found a true sense of relief in my full mental illness remission.
Arriving at completeness of the mind sent me down many of Alice’s rabbit holes. Some days I shrunk while others I grew exponentially larger. Each school morning as far back as elementary school I woke up with a deep sense of dread. I felt an intense sorrow deep in my gut. I was small and unimportant to anyone.
Alone. In hindsight this darkness was compounded by my daily tauntings by not only the bullies, but also by my peers. While I excelled at my studies, especially in art, mathematics and writing, I was socially inept to say the least. I wasn’t even a black sheep. I was a completely different species bathed in a technicolor energy bursting forth on my stage.
I was awkward and never fit in anywhere except in my art studio safe spaces at home and in Mrs. Farmer’s Art Department studio at Eastside, my high school. My basement art studio gave me instant solace. I had all of my friends. My besties. Watercolors, airbrushes, cold-press paper, our Betamax and a slew of movies I’d have playing on repeat in the background as I tinkered on my next masterpiece rendered with air, paintbrushes, and colored pencils. It was my home, my cave, and my fortress of solitude.
That dimly lit basement space also housed my Choose Your Own Adventure, Advanced D&D, an aging Atari 2600, and my first computer, a Commodore 64 where I’d draw with pixels using only the cursor keys. My method was slow and tedious, but my rendition of Indiana Jones was quite good. If I had only taken a Polaroid like I did of my airbrushed T-shirts. Now lost to memory, but a fond memory nonetheless.
My current apartment mirrors my old home studio. 698 square feet of living and creation space. Nice and snug after two years living on my own again after living with my parents for nearly six years. Back to the basement for a moment. Every place I ever worked full-time and freelance during my graphic design print and broadcast design career was usually in a basement or an annex set aside for us creatives to conjure our visual voodoo.
Basements appear to be a popular place to keep creative workers in line and on schedule. Executives know we work best far removed from the daily minutiae and social distractions. By removing us from the other departments, almost always in dimly lit spaces, we focus on refining graphics for hours, even days or weeks, that sometimes last less than a second on-air. Their impact was intentionally subliminal born in the belly of the advertising gauntlet.
While working at NBA TV in the bowels of Turner Broadcasting we rendered in frames with no motion blur. Why? Because our fearless leader was hooked on building graphical systems nearly causing viewers convulsions and seizures. I’ve never worked anywhere else that the timing of the graphics was so fast leaving watchers in a visual tailspin. Alas I digress. Let’s get back to my home studio full of art and tech gear alongside hundreds of surf, skateboarding, and auto design magazines and fantasy adventure books.
My parents fully supported my interest in art, design, storytelling, writing poetry, playing video games, and tinkering with pixels and fonts on my computer, a shiny 1983 Commodore 64. My basement studio was located on the far side of our home’s “bar room.” Every year this room donned its famous red light full of family friends telling dirty limericks while downing cocktails by the dozens.
I was brought up calling family friends by their first names unlike all the other kids I know that always said yessir mister or misses so and so. For whatever reason I was very comfortable around adults, but felt quite awkward and out of place around my peers. As luck would have it, I would never fit in anywhere. It was a blessing in disguise.
Back in K–12 days I was called out as an instigator and loud mouth. My voice “carried” my parents observed. I talked nonstop and my sisters even attempted to keep me quiet on road trips to North Carolina by offering me a nickel for every five minutes I remained quiet. I never made a dime. No one was able to quiet my mind, especially myself.
There was something about me that always seemed to stir things up. Even my P.E. teachers and coaches called me out as having “an attitude problem,” yet they never took the time to show me how to not have one. Now I know why: reverse psychology wasn’t my problem. However, my self image was always under attack not only from my peers, but even more so from my own mental trappings.
While napping as a young child I wished for God to take my life as I held my breath under the covers. I had dreams of walking through my neighborhood and always seeing a black cloud. It wasn’t a storm cloud. It emanated the darkest, zero black vibes I’d ever experienced. It might have even been a black hole forever feeding its gluttony with my own mental struggles.
On the other hand my mind was forever flooded with hypomanic urges of hyper sexuality years before I entered puberty. I existed in this state, unmedicated and without any skills to tame it, until I was thirty-seven years old. That’s when I was issued a five-second amateur diagnosis that I had bipolar disorder.
Three years ago I began my journey back to mental health forever leaving my mental illness in the dust. I’m convinced that anything labeled a disorder doesn’t have to mean it’s a life sentence, but damn, it sure felt like one. Thirteen years heavily medicated on lithium, a pin cushion of sorts I was, unable to shake the worsening tardive dyskinesia. I was rusted and couldn’t move my joints in desperate need of an overhaul.
I couldn’t draw, paint or fill out a job application by hand, but I never gave up no matter how hard my mind wanted me to. My life has been a continuous ebb and flow of the tides of my own vast imagination. My moods swayed with the moon’s waxing and waning directly tied to my circadian rhythms. While everyone else slept I was forever awake with my eyes wide open.
I grew up in the North and South, beginning at birth through first grade in Greenville, South Carolina. When I was five Dad took a job up north. I spent half of first and all of second grade in Paoli, Pennsylvania. Just two years later we moved back to Greenville. We eventually moved into the Red Fox Court home that backed up to our old street, Hillsborough Drive in Foxcroft.
I have fond memories with Steve playing raunchy MadLibs and going on midnight skateboard runs to the concrete bowl behind The Family Mart. One night we were picked up by the police for being out for what they called “passed curfew.” Even though Steve was sleeping over at my house that night, the police insisted they take him back to his own. My parents barely batted an eye when I told them the story the next day. I don’t think Steve was as fortunate. Sorry bro.
Steve was a D&D Dungeon Master and polymath. He was an artist, painter, photographer, and many a band’s front man. When we were twelve we met at Mrs. McManus’s basement art studio weekday afternoons for watercolor lessons. Once we reached middle school we had grown apart primarily due to my own arrogance and rampant, destructive narcissism.
I set many a childhood friendship on fire burning their metaphorical bridges to the ground. I was self centered, toxic, and highly sensitive and emotional. Little did I know I was really an empath in disguise. Some of my second moms knew this all along, but they understood that I needed to discover it for myself. It took me fifty years, but I eventually saw my clear reflection in the mirror for the first time.
My path was clear. I asked for it and received it almost immediately. I had a chat with God one night asking Him for “blatant signs” that I was on the right path now. The next morning the signs were everywhere. I became obsessed looking for them for two or three months until He told me to stop looking.
Once I obeyed that divine advice I saw everything effortlessly. It’s been three years now living a life unplugged from the false reality fueled by over-caffeination and crushing anxieties. I learned that in order to transform and ascend we must not only walk through the fires and over the coals. We must allow ourselves to be completely engulfed in the flames if we’re ever to awaken.
Once charred and emptied to my core I felt a storm brewing in the recesses of my mind, the only thing I had left. It started in the back of my skull and in just moments my mind lit up like Clark Griswold’s Christmas lights once his wife accidentally turned them on. I took a glance in a mirror, but couldn’t make out any details yet. All I could see was pure, vibrating starlight pouring out of my mind. I was reborn not too far from a Southern Baptist revival. By letting go of our former selves we give our inner phoenix apt time for awaking.
My own flaming feathered friend is now fully, exponentially ablaze. Somewhere underneath it all I can make out a deep, steady bass percolating to the surface. Each reverberation a cyclical wave created first by a single drop of sparkling, electrified saltwater. This series of electric shocks brings out my rebellious side. Sometimes I crack after keeping quiet for far too long. The empath in me takes over, choking my narcissist to the ground.
Back in the mid-twenty teens I was asked to take a culture survey at work in order for Human Resources to get a glimpse into my state of mind at that particular time. Rather than just ask me directly, they took the path of playing mind games with me knowing full well that I had bipolar disorder since my very first interview before I came on board. Yet there was far more going on that anyone would admit.
I also discovered and proved that the company was spying on us via our new PC workstations. Every time I was working in After Effects strange things kept happening. I alerted my boss, but he responded by saying he wasn’t having any troubles. He never acted in my good interest. He just ignored me. I’m not sure if he didn’t believe me or he already knew our computers were bugged during their setup process.
I also discovered and proved that the company was spying on us via our new PC workstations. Every time I was working in After Effects strange things kept happening. I alerted my boss, but he responded by saying he wasn’t having any troubles. He never acted in my good interest. He just ignored me. I’m not sure if he didn’t believe me or he already knew our computers were bugged during their setup process.
As it turned out the issue was with the key loggers that couldn’t keep up with how quickly I worked in After Effects using keyboard shortcuts. I confirmed this issue asking the Design Director to see if he had the same experience. He complied with my request and proved my point. Engineering removed the spyware, but going through that ordeal for over a week helped tip my mind overboard leading to my psychotic episode at work.
The company had no interest in my side of things. All they wanted was to nudge me just enough so I’d cross over the edge into psychosis. Due to their direct actions I suffered for six more years. They paid me off, but that money ran out. Waiting two years a judge ruled that I would never receive disability benefits.
Now no lawyer will take my case. At that point I was labeled crazy again. I had lost his mind. No one believed me that the God phone incident when I armed all of the missiles ever happened let alone that they were spying on us at work. The God phone, the Men in Black, the bells and raps on my chamber door were mere fantasies to them, but I knew better that they all really happened. I had the proof that I’d never share.
While I never learned to read music, I did understand the underlying messages hidden in the rhythmic cacophonies. My two Erics were both master musicians. The Radloffs and Chantrons, both my extended families and second moms and dads. Both of them lived under fairly strict parents compared to my own. I was given freedom while their family kept them busy weekends cleaning the house and doing chores.
I took out the garbage, cut the grass, and washed my car every week just like Dad, but other than that I was given freedom. I’d traverse the surrounding neighborhoods and when it was time to come home for dinner my Mom rang the bell on the back deck. Old school 1980s ushering in both cable and MTV.
I was schooled by PBS and cable TV. Dad signed me up for a PBS computer course to learn the ins and outs of bits and bytes before they’d buy me the shiny C64 I had been drooling over at Steve and Eric C’s house. Eric R.’s Dad had a C128 that had a screen saver of Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi in a lightsaber battle. So cool! About a decade later I had the same on my Macintosh PowerPC 7100.
George Carlin quickly caught my attention on HBO’s Carlin on Campus in 1984. While his language was certainly sailor-inspired, he knew the power of our voice. He understood language better than anyone by carving it up and revealing how in so many cases our own Americanized English was full of potholes. He also knew the power of the planet was so vast that “one day it will shake us off like a bad case of fleas.”
HBO’s arrival in our neighborhood marked a significant change for me. I now had access to channels that gave me a far wider worldview than being limited to our 200 pound set of World Book encyclopedias. Where else could I have been influenced by George Carlin’s masterful language musings and observations? I also had access to a BetaMax Dad bought that same year for my Mom for Christmas.
While it did have a far superior picture quality compared to VHS, Blockbuster had an extremely limited supply of BetaMax movies. There were dozens of shelves, and only one housed their BetaMax offerings. Pretty cool that the Beta format is what we used to record and backup our compositing workstation at The Weather Channel before QuickTime even existed.
The late 1970s and early 1980s were the most influential decade for me. I not only fell in love with Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. I paid more attention to the matte paintings and compositing than the film’s narrative.
I was fully obsessed with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg from the 20th Century Fox spotlights and the ecto-green chunky, Lucasfilm, LTD to Paramount’s logo dissolve to the Raiders of the Lost Ark Kalalea Mountain on the island of Kauaʻi in Hawaiʻi. I’d learn later that it was a common trick Spielberg used in his own childhood films.
Spielberg and Lucas also introduced us to the forces of evil in both Darth Vader and the Nazis. Some believe Darth Vader translates to dark father in German. This stance is incorrect. George Lucas admitted that Darth is just another way to spell dark and Vader is a variation on the word father. No matter how we look at it, Darth Vader and Hitler are both absolute evil.
True evil lives and dies while the power of love evolves. During each cycle love gets stronger gaining higher vibrations. While the darkness grows it’s always ready for a comeback and we've got to make sure we identify all these folks because I hate to say it but they're not gonna be part of our club and boy do I hate having to say no to somebody at the door who wants to know more about love don't miss the train.
Has anyone considered that the evil in the world is all in plain sight for a reason? Could it possibly be that all of these dark folks are being handpicked to not be included in the singularity? That place of pure love and light where we all go in the next cycle? I think this is true.
While they spin their financial webs of deceit, freeze their brains of material matter in their end they will rot and go back to the soil as our souls ascend. There are signs now unhidden everywhere. The less I look, the more I see. God told me three years ago that I was on the right path.
My innate sensibilities are not uncommon anymore as more people wake up. I see patterns, rhythms, riddles math surrounding me the number 27 repeated always 11:11 repeated even more often even found in all of my identity. Even my Subaru logo is the Pleiades it’s a 2013 which is 20+13=33 : 3x3=27. I was born in 1972. Maybe that’s why I see 27 everywhere.
Do you ever get the feeling that life is really a game if we choose to play? Can we break the bonds we’ve been brought up with keeping us obedient and compliant? Since November 2023 let’s just say I’ve been leveling-up. Over the past two months my intuition has reached exponential levels of quantum entanglement. This isn’t fiction, it’s my life unfolding in front of my own eyes.
My eyes have most certainly become the mirror to my soul ascended. I’ve been leaning heavily into harnessing my once dormant childlike curiosity, and it doesn’t disappoint by any earthly means. I’m inviting you into my once invisible world of experiencing patterns, numbers, and other key markers and guideposts.
I would admit it’s been a wild ride, but the ride has just begun warming up. My flux capacitor is buzzing alongside my internal monologue. Well I’m tired. I’m exhausted trying to keep all of this a secret from my highly conservative family. I’ve been highly sensitive my entire life seeing connections between everything.
I was told that all of my happenings were just a series of coincidences. They wrote my feelings off as me being “too sensitive.” I will never repeat those words to my own kid. I will always feed her need for expression in every form pushing her own imagination and belief system. I know better than those who tried shaping me into someone I didn’t even recognize.
The universe is a big place. We are told by the news on TV that we can’t fathom how big it really is. Coddled into thinking that it’s impossible for us to comprehend. We’re taught my our families, teachers, clergy, whatever that we are small and insignificant. I believe however we are vast, endless forms of energy, and we express ourselves in wavelengths ties to the source of all creation.
We are the singularity. We are never alone. I have surmountable evidence that this statement is not only true, but it’s inevitable. Everything is connected by an invisible energy, not molecules, atoms or chemical compounds. It’s a state of mind and state of being. Some call it the best kept secret in history. Leonardo knew, too.
Leonardo da Vinci held a secret, and he shared it with me. A secret so close, so precious, so powerful deep within his heart, mind, gut, and soul. It’s been hiding in plain sight in his rendition of The Last Supper for 527 years, and it has nothing to do with Dan Brown novels. Once seen, it cannot be unseen. I’ll give you a hint. It’s a mindset based on rise and shine Christ consciousness. It’s real and more highly active than ever before in our darkened world as of late.
It’s all come down to this: mindset versus mind games. We must decide whether we’re going to welcome the new Renaissance or continue with the absurdities of the GenAi$$ance. You don’t need a ticket. It’s not a private club, but like I’ve said: everyone must choose for themselves. They can choose to follow the sheep to slaughter or take the road, even the sky itself, less traveled by.
I’ve heard knocks rapping at my chamber door. Sound familiar? Yes it’s a nod to my birthday twin, Edgar Allan Poe. Another telling tale about the south is my connection with a Edgar Allan Poe and Sullivans Island and Charleston. From astral projection to stigmata on my own hands and even at one point given the God phone by two Men in Black.
I’ve seen a floating white feather not adhering to the law of gravity. I’ve heard bells cheering me on during a run-in with the Men in Black. I’ve unlocked God’s phone. I’ve been tracked for decades, have the proof, and kept the bug they found hidden in my Subaru Outback’s engine when they replaced the transmission earlier this year.
When two roads diverged in a wood my oversoul nudged me, reminded me that I didn’t need roads. I’ve been able to wiggle my ears, shake my tail, and fly since before I was born. Floating on an endless sea for eight months, a sea of saltwater, you see now I see. I see it all as it’s been there all along. An invisible, invincible connection to everything.
I don’t need to build a time machine. By tapping into my own flux capacitor I’m able to experience astral projection as I did when I was very young. I used to float down the hallways in our home while everyone slept. During my nightly trips I could actually feel a resistance as if I was swimming the breast stroke through a saltwater ocean.
My other favorite trip is when I’m able to harness my center of gravity in such a way that’s not too far from some of those dream state visions from the Christopher Nolan film Inception. I’d strap on rollerblades and skate down the edges of skyscrapers always centered so I stuck to the locality of the building’s geometry.
I’ve been given a plethora of diagnoses ranging from “we’ve checked him for a chemical balance, and he doesn’t have one” to a five-second observation and donned “bipolar” by a quack of a practice around the corner of my old primary care doctor. No one ever seemed concerned enough to ask if I had slept any for an entire week.
Anyone missing that much sleep could easily be observed as having manic qualities associated with bipolar 1, more accurately manic-depressive disorder. Then there was “well, you may have schizoaffective disorder” and an hour later their psychiatrist said “no, nothing of that sort.” No one other than myself actually knows what’s going on in my mind. I’ve felt it all, seen it all, and played the victim all these years.
Victim to whom? Only me and no one else. The kicker was when my personal psychiatrist who at the time was also the Chief Medical Director at Carolina Center for Behavioral Health posed a query as we wrapped up our last evening session: “David, have you ever considered you don’t have any mental illness at all? Could you possibly just have an immensely rich imagination?”
I think she was right on one hand, but only through a continuum of trials would I come to a lasting, final conclusion on the matter: I’m the one who must diagnose myself. I have the tools and the talent, both wise and undisguised. Masks no more I now adore and celebrate a simple life. Worth waking up to every day.
Based on my extensive, hands on knowledge of the DSM-5 and more importantly DBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy I’ve come to a conclusion on the matter. I believe just as my Uncle Bobby, on my Mother’s side of the family, that I may have bipolar disorder, but it’s a rare case. My scenario I’ve debunked and I’m now in full remission.
I’ve witnessed actual stigmata on my own body. Cuts so precisely placed upon my hands the last time I was inpatient at CCBH. It had to be a bad joke, like so many of the questionable incidents at Peachford Hospital. I made sure to have witnesses. I asked them if they could see the marks on my hands, and they complied. I wasn’t hallucinating. While my body’s chemical makeup transitioned from thirteen years of lithium poisoning to Seroquel, my no nicknamed “Superman pill.”
There’s a trick to enabling our own heart center, syncing each side our gray matter, flowing along our intuition-lined gut instinct. Our own Christ consciousness. It has nothing to do with searching out there. Nothing to do with religion as it’s universally claimed on Earth. It has everything to do with finding what’s inside each of us, and there’s no one way to go about the journey.
Everyone’s adventure is different. It was meant that way. It was made that way in order to show, in order to learn, in order to expand our knowledge that there’s not always one way to come to a specific conclusion. Our lives each beat to a different drum along a cyclical, overlapping series of events.
The Creator is within us. It’s not out there in the cosmos somewhere. We are all part of this Creator. As we unravel the truth that was set before anything was ever put into motion. Before consciousness was born. It’s that many ways that those variables that we can’t even predict until we’ve seen them for ourselves in person in the real breathing world.
During one of Christ’s adventures, the Dali Llama spoke with Jesus and opened his mind in new ways leading into him to another opening of a hidden chamber in his heart. Double doors bloomed with pure love light that from then on gave him the ability to heal the lost and forgotten sick and diseased. Metaphors of the mind never meant to be a private club.
Evil lives and dies while love evolves. So here we go. This is for the record. I can see things. I can feel things. I can sense things before they happen. It used to be, you know, maybe two or three days I would have a thought about something. Then two or three days later it would happen. Over a short period of time after my oversoul told me to stop looking for connections is when these occurrences began expanding exponentially now fully ablaze.
Now it has come down to what I would literally call quantum entanglement with people in my life. There’s a few, specifically two, people in particular whom I’m entangled with in the quantum sense. Immediate connections. There’s no pause, there’s no time for a coincidence to manifest. It happens in that instant when knowing occurs.
It’s an immediate thing, immediate thought, and immediate feeling. I know when it’s happening. The moment in the present time when there’s no delay whatsoever. It’s quite incredible and there’s really no other way to describe it. There’s a trick to streaming consciousness. It’s hidden to a lot of people because they never notice it. Pure Christ consciousness.
Having nothing to do with religion, this state of mind is a metaphysical stream of consciousness. It flows like a river it flows to the southern regions of the mind. My family members keep trying to remind me that all of these experiences I’m having are really just coincidences. I know they’re not. I do know they’re still trying to protect me from myself. This felt familiar and uncomfortable.
Just for a moment this uneasiness took me back to my accident at work in the middle of the night during the third week of November in 2009. The Emory doctor patching up my nose and lip early that morning told me that if I had landed just a degree or two more squarely on my nose, I would have died immediately on impact. That thought haunted my subconscious for a week keeping me from getting a good night’s rest.
There’s a known condition related directly to hypomania and mania when an individual doesn’t get adequate sleep for five to seven days. Easily misdiagnosed, this condition resolves itself once consistent rest has been restored to their nightly routine. This had happened to me my entire life as a result of staying up late nights finishing up a watercolor or airbrushed T-shirt. Once in the creative zone, I had to finish the project. This is why I never liked painting in oils. They take forever to dry. I preferred watercolor. It’s immediate and dries quickly.
Keeping this condition in mind I now know that I was misdiagnosed by an amateur at PACT Atlanta. They never asked me any questions nor performed a standard intake evaluation. They showed up quickly, looked at me silently, and then said “bipolar, definitely bipolar” within five seconds. They tried turning me into a zombie, too, like all of the other mediocre masses now under their spell. Every week they changed my medication. One called Lamictal even sent me to nearly attempting suicide. I never met with MDs anymore, either. They were all medical students who asked me the same questions every week. They did their best to keep me quietly subdued, drugged, and nearly unconscious.
Trazodone knocked me out except one night when I crawled across the hallway to the bathroom because I couldn’t’ walk. Six months passed at PACT with no progress. I was recommended to see a private $300 per hour psychiatrist. He put me on Clonopin and Lithium. I thought Benzodiazepines were a bitch to come off of until I was informed by my current psychiatrist that my body was now toxic to Lithium. Thirty-six hours later my mind woke up.
I immediately realized that Lithium had kept my mind dormant for the most part keeping me hibernating for over thirteen years. I was dumbed down and barely able to keep myself together, let alone the last five years of having been on Lithium I could not even sign my own name. My tremors were so bad I couldn’t draw, paint, write, and could barely use a mouse. Finally my psychiatrist said “you’re toxic” and he would not have time to slowly take me off of the Lithium. He had to rip the Band-Aid off immediately in order to save my kidneys.
Within just two weeks and two days later I fully operational again. I felt like a sixteen year old every day when I woke up. God intervened when the time had come. He’s had my back my entire life. He told me it was time for me to get going on my new career path. A path bathed in light, love, and passion for others. He showed me how to unchain my empath and put my narcissist in the ground. I got to work, and I have no intentions of slowing down. My memory is now alive and active again.
I began remembering things. It started gradually at first, but within my third year of no Lithium I now have the ability to ask myself to remember further back. I’m reviving memories that I’ve been blind to for five decades. My family has also opened up a bit pointing out that I am remembering things I learned a long time ago. If I read between the lines I know what they mean. Our DNA holds the entire history of not only ourselves, but the entire existence of our energies since our cosmic inception. During our own personal big bang event. Speaking of such an event, take a look below at what my psychiatrist once posed during our last session. It allowed me to eventually overcome my manic depression.
While I have had many a diagnosis ranging from a clean bill of health after my first serious depressive episode at eighteen to showing signs of schizoaffective disorder three years ago during my post-lithium sixteen-day CCBH stay, it’s my private psychiatrist and CCBH Medical Director, Dr. D., who got my full attention when she posed one evening during our last session:
“David, have you ever considered you don’t have any mental illness at all? Could you possibly just have an immensely rich imagination?”
It’s taken me sixteen years now to realize that there was nothing wrong with me in the first place. It’s just a part of being human. It is not an illness. If wielded properly we can achieve the divine. My situation was a direct result of being stressed out, extremely busy and enlightened at work, and needing some serious sleep. Misdiagnosed as having bipolar based on not sleeping for a week. Period. Yet I do know that manic depression is still a part of me. That misdiagnosis led to me understanding that I had a choice. I could make life changes that could take the place of medication. A natural series of positive influences that keep my brain chemistry healthy.
Consistent solitude, soul searching, skills training, exercise, music, diet, family time, and community grant me a whole-hearted life I wouldn’t trade for all the riches in the world. No more falling for simple-minded mind tricks or Human Resource surveys. Better. Faster. Stronger than ever before in my life. I now have access to 100% of my gray matter now lit, alive, and fully immersed in Christ consciousness.
As a result of my own understanding based on fifty-three years of mental health exploration I know the fact of the matter is actually a combination of “infectious creative energy” fueled by my activated intuition, imagination, and intellect. I know that manic depressive disorder, bipolar 1, certainly plays a key role, but now I’m in what I’m calling my mental illness remission.
Make mistakes and try everything. That’s been my path to wisdom. Be willing to know and celebrate I know nothing. Socrates was right about that all along. Breathe. Enjoy the silence. Be mindful. Celebrate solitude. In those moments our connection to everything is unbreakable. It’s within that divine interconnectedness we know we are never alone.
If you’re curious, like me, do a search for artists and singers, actors and writers, poets and playwrights. They all had the divine spark of madness, too. Madness and genius go hand-in-hand. Ask around. Two books I highly recommend if you’d like to understand manic depression further, take a look at Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind and Touched with Fire. When I was first diagnosed with bipolar 1, I found these books quite helpful in guiding me through my new reality.