Self-Generated
I can’t distinguish where the fantasy of it begins. Objectively I drank some drugs that subjectively acted like a catalyst for a paradigm shift. I’ve seen a measured difference in my interpretation of reality - measured by me, a fallible tool of measurement. As far as the fantasy of it goes, what is the benefit? It's something close to empathy, but different, like I'm unable to ignore the complexity of other people. I’ve always experienced empathy, but it’s a bottomless pit; the more I understand about other people, the deeper I descend, and I’m certainly deeper than I was.
Going back to when I was injected with valium before my surgery, I had this radiant realization: my anxiety is self-generated and ultimately means nothing outside of the focus I put on it. I'm poisoning my equilibrium with thoughts; I’m torturing myself with ideas; I’m paralyzing myself with things I can conceptualize instead of what is actually happening. In the moments before the surgery, worried I was going to mess everything up and look stupid even though I was the patient, a lady asked me if I was feeling anxious. Eyes wide, I said yes. She put her hand on my chest for a second in what felt like a gesture of compassion, and she said:
“I’ve got something for that.”
Within seconds, all of those worries melted away. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t aware of being anxious.
I know the effects of valium are chemically temporary; I said something about it to my mom a couple of months later, but she dismissed the idea without attempting to consider what I was actually saying: It was the absence of anxiety that helped me understand that I’m sustaining anxiety with my imagination. Even though valium was the catalyst, and the effects of the drug are temporary, the realization was permanent. I equate that to a paradigm shift and even that pales in comparison to this new paradigm.
At first, it was like playing a part in a play for so long that I'd forgotten I was an actor. My house, my garden, and my workplace were part of the set, and all the people I knew were part of the play. Like an anthropologist travelling to another planet to study an intelligent society, only to discover it was always humans and that they weren't an anthropologist. But now it’s like trying to compare a bicycle to an exploded drawing of a bicycle. This doesn’t feel like a quality-of-life improvement; it feels like a quality of reality appraisal.
I’m constantly looking for it now any time I get even the vaguest sense of that perception, whether it’s memory or it’s happening in front of me, I immediately shift into that perspective again, sober or not. I can almost visualize a data cable flailing in the wind, and whenever I’m able to grab onto it, I can sync up with it again.
I want to recreate the first experience without the fear; instead of shrinking away from it, run into it.