Get Anything You Want: The World You Are In Is The World You Create.
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I’ve always been very extreme.
Whatever I did as a child, I did with big intensity. Out of these reasons my parents were always super careful with what they would let me do. For example, they wouldn’t let me play soccer with the boys. They knew I would take up a fight if it came down to it. I never was allowed to have a bunk bed either. They knew I’d jump out of it and break my neck one day.
What I want to say is that it’s a probably unchangeable part of my psyche to go extreme in everything I do. Psychological studies call it a sensation-seeking personality. Sensation-seeking is a personality trait defined by the search for experiences and feelings that are varied, novel, complex and intense, and by the readiness to take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for the sake of such experiences.
Just turning 13, a friend of mine died. This was the first time I faced a life/death situation. It was the first time I started thinking about death. It was the first time I defined the word alive.
What I learned from his death was that I have to maximize every second of this life to the fullest. I became the happiest, most motivated, optimistic, 14-year-old you could find on this planet. I started loving all the possibilities life offers. I started dreaming… dreaming about doing something big. By the age of 14, I realized that life can end at any second and you have to soak the best possible outcome out of every moment. For the first time, I defined who I am and what I was.
I was alive.
I basically thought that now since I’ve had faced the worst of all, death, I was invincible.
And I was.
Have you ever experienced the feeling walking down the street, feeling who you are, what you want to be, what you can be, and that you’re on the right way? Have you ever felt the endorphins in your body blast just because you feel connected?
I lived the following two years, probably the most influential years of a teenage life, to the fullest.
I was the most popular kid in school. I got kicked out of class on regular basis, but my grades were always perfect. I was the girl that beats all the guys in gym class. I played the drums and guitar in a punk rock band. I was the girl that made out with the boys’ girlfriends. I loved being different. And most of all I loved having the reputation as a badass whom everyone loves and admires.
It’s actually pretty easy to become popular. It’s not enough to just skateboard and skip school to get drunk. That’s the mistake most kids make. You’re not allowed to start a competition with the other cool kids. Be different from them on a level that won’t allow comparisons. Don’t let them feel like they are in danger. The clue is to win the not cool people as your friends as well. And you do that by simply being nice. Be really cool, but at the same time be really nice. Give the uncool kids the feeling they can be your friend. Let them think you understand them. And then you got them all.
I did all these things famous rock stars sing about in their songs, I did all these things teenage-high school-movies are about. From getting drunk while in class, stage-diving at rock concerts, to spending nights in the city dancing on Ecstasy.
From the first moment that I met Laura, I knew she would play a big role in my life.
And that she did. She was half-Italian, half-French. We instantly clicked. We got drunk nearly every day on the streets of Bruxelles. We shared our dreams. We shared our joints. We shared our deepest secrets. Our hopes, beers, beliefs and fears.
I was 16.
Falling for her, I was getting lost for the first time in my life.
But then Summer 2008 was over. Laura left to study in England, and I left to move to my birth country to finish high school.
Do you ever want a memory to pulse in your veins forever? The trick is to close the curtains at the right moment.
Everything has an end, therefore every emotion and moment will end someday. Or at least its memory will fade. But if you just leave at the highest moment, it will stay with you forever. If you don’t watch something go down, then there will always be the possibility of it being endless.
There was never an end to us. And because we never were together, we never saw us going down again. Eight years later, the tiniest smudge of her perfume flying by instantly takes me back.
Deadly romantic, isn’t it?
It was deadly for me, yes. For the first time, I had a reason to feel pain.
The next year I spent getting very deep into fucked-up art. I started loving all the mind-blowing depressional literature and music she had introduced me to. I wasn’t heartbroken as you would call it, not at all. I fell in love plenty of times over the next few years. I missed her, sure. But I was used to letting things go. After all, as a diplomat’s child, I spent all my life moving from city to city, leaving everything and everyone behind. We still had our awesome friendship and talked sometimes, our bond was still the same. I kind of enjoyed the desperation.
The dream was the bliss.
Meanwhile I was fascinated by nihilistic art and literature. I was fascinated by fucked-up-ness. A passion for the darkest corners of people’s minds, for drama. An insuppressible interest in how deep the darkness can get. You know how I said I was always an extreme person? Well, I found a new extreme. The extreme of my own psyche and emotions. The extreme of mindfucks.
What I didn’t realize was how in this year the word optimism slowly turned into the word pessimism.
The more I devoted myself to art and emotions, the more my inspiration turned into desperation.
Its crazy how all these philosophers and artists have a point when they talk about pain. The feelings and emotions they describe are so real and appealing. They said life was a place of pain and hurt, and I felt that. They said love is suffering, and they were right. Slowly, I adopted their minds and absorbed myself deep, deep into their way of thinking.
My motto ‘I feel so alive’ had turned into ‘I feel nothing’. Let me correct that: it had turned into nothing.
And what did I do against it? I got more into drugs, partying, girls, art and those kind of things people call living.
And slowly I was losing my mind.
Things started getting pointless. I came more and more to the conclusion that everything was combined with suffering. Love was pure pain; love doesn’t exist. People who lived happy lives were naïve and didn’t see the real, disgusting, world. Everyone was sleeping.
And I must have loved it.
I would be lying if I would say I didn’t love getting depressed. I loved finding even more reasons to feel pain. The best part was sharing it. I surrounded myself with a lot of people who were in the same state of depression. It was so satisfying to lie around high, talking about it. Sharing your sickest thoughts. I had the feeling that it was a little competition of who is the most depressed. I felt recognition for my pain. We were a community. A community of hurt and pity. It was great to be fucked up.
We were artists.
I’ve always been a hard worker. At 15, I started doing an event management trainee program after school. I worked at a yearly lifestyle fair event. This year the manager said he had a big job for me. He needed co-management. I was in.
About four months before the event, I focused all my energy on this job. All my life I never had any problem with getting good marks in school, I wrote tests on drugs and still got good marks. School never was a challenge for me. More like a playground. So when I started this job, I finally had a great challenge. I didn’t care about going to class anymore. I would somehow manage to finish high school anyway. Working 10 hours a day was awesome. Soon it became 12 hours a day.
March 2010, a three-day event. I hadn’t slept two days prior because there was so much work. I loved testing my physical extremes. It’s weird how if you don’t sleep for about 30-40 hours, your body suddenly gets rushes of energy. After being tired, you become really, really awake, and enter an interesting state of consciousness. On the last day of the event, my eyes started getting really red and discharging white stuff. I called the makeup artist to get it fixed. She said I had some infection in my eye. I told her I don’t care. Five hours later, I went to the bathroom. The moment I looked up in the mirror, blood started dripping out of my eyes.
I smiled back at my zombie-like face.
My boss sent me to the hospital, they told me I need antibiotics and need to be blind for a day. I got a blindfold and fell asleep.
I woke up 68 hours later. From the next three weeks, I hardly remember much. I know that there was nothing inside of me. It felt like every last sip of life was sucked out of my body. The previous week’s work had given me a reason to get up. But the event was over. So why should I get out of bed? There was no reason. I slept about 20 hours a day. I got really sick. My ears got infected. I really didn’t care, and just smoked a lot of weed. My sinuses got infected too. I listened to some songs 50 times after each other. My throat got infected. I drank a lot of vodka against the physical pain. I could hardly hear anymore, I couldn’t talk, my eyes were okay-ish, but still really bad.
I just didn’t care. I didn’t see any reason to care.
Two or three times I blacked out. I was on my way to somewhere, and the next thing I knew was I was sitting on a bench in a park on the other side of the city; I had never been there before. Until today, I don’t know what happened. I went to see a doctor. He said that I most likely have a psychosis, and I need medical and clinical treatment immediately. He wished me all the best, and said, Things will all be okay for you, I’m sure.
I said, Sure.
Then I stood up, and said I’ll go have a cigarette. I smiled at the receptionist and walked out.
I never turned back.
I had just turned 18. And I had hit the ground.
I was kind of proud.
I officially fucked myself up. I even had it on paper now. I officially got myself a psychosis. Wow.
Congratulations! I laughed. I laughed about myself. So hard. I walked through Hamburg laughing out loud.
Been there, done that.
Awesome.
Strike.
For the first time in weeks, I was thinking, I was literally debating in my head. Thoughts rushed through my brain as if they were rockets in space, they were so many that I couldn’t hold on to a single one for longer than a second until the next thought jumped in its way.
It was all pointless, it was all just a joke. Ridiculous.
Fly high, fall low, oh yeah, pointless. There was no high, and there was no low. There was just emptiness.
And then I realized, I’m right.
It was the most calming feeling I’ve ever had.
It was more soothing than a direct shot of morphine into your system.
I was fucking right all way through.
There is no reason for life.
There is no answer.
I’ve never felt so secure as in this moment. What happened in this moment was that I had finally accepted it.
I finally stopped struggling, I finally completely stopped caring.
There is nothing.
But.
If everything around me is pointless and useless, then why am I suffering?
If there is no point in life, then there can’t be any point in suffering.
Suffering is a direct condition of human consciousness. The existence of human consciousness requires human life. Which again requires life and existence of everything. So basically if the big picture, meaning everything, doesn’t have a point, then the little picture, in this case my suffering, which invariably exists inside of the big picture, cannot have any point either.
This means, my suffering must be my creation.
Nothing outside of my thoughts is real. Nothing outside of my head has a meaning. There was only the meaning I gave things. And what I had done was to give them the meaning of being meaningless.
And with that I had given them the biggest meaning there is.
I had made my life into a place of depression by my own choice.
Once you truly realize that the world you are in is the world you create, you find yourself in front of two choices.
You can choose giving it up because you fucked up… or you can choose to create yourself a wonderland.
I sat down. 18 hours later, I stood up and walked home. I threw out everything I was attached to — all my books, every song, every poem I wrote. I cut nearly all of my friends out of my life.
Within the next half year I got healthy, learned meditation and Buddhism.
I was 19, and I had understood that your life is the output of your imagination.
It didn’t just happen. I hadn’t only got myself into a depression. A psychosis is an illness of the brain, which is described as the loss of contact with reality. It’s a psychotic disorder that took away all my ability to feel pleasure. It was a disease, which had to be healed. But I had understood, and I knew that if I was in the mental power to get myself into it, then I also had the mental power to fix my own chemicals again. I’ve been an independent person all my life. So I needed to solve this problem independently too. I got myself anti-psychotic medication, and I completely pulled myself out of everything.
But from this day on, I started getting over it.
I got over the drama.
I got over the search for a point in life.
I had finally understood.
From this day on, I was free.
It took me about a year of full self-discipline towards drugs, art and drama. After a year, I got back to partying, got back to art, got back to living my extremes. I still fuck myself up and get depressed sometimes. I never stopped being a sensation-seeker. And I never, ever, will.
But the addiction to pain is gone. I let go of the attachment of negative emotions. I gained control over my mind.
I found a bigger addiction.
The addiction to unconditional love.
The addiction to love every second of your life.
The addiction to love a piece of art.
The addiction to love a stranger.
The addiction to love a dream.
The addiction to treat depression as it being my own choice.
The addiction to being the master of my own mind.
Once you’re here, I can promise you the feeling of constant happiness is even more intense than any proper depression. It’s as if you like doing Valium, and then do heroin for the first time. The feeling will be so great that you’ll never want to get down from that trip. It is just that with love, it is actually possible to stay high forever. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I can approve. I’m talking about loving the universe. About loving every atom this world is made of. About loving every second of existence.
You know how they say You can’t always get what you want? Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just an excuse.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in these past three years, then it’s that you can get fucking everything that you want.
You just need to wake up.
And sometimes it needs a really hard crash to get you to reality.
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Alice Sadti was once described as ‘disgusting and inspiring at the same time’. With strong psychological and spiritual interest, she has made her life a mission to explore the greatest and most intense experiences this universe has to offer. She is a producer, business owner, DJ, photographer, lover, and sometimes a little out of her mind.
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