Of a Thought: I Have but Pieces.
I have pieces.
I have pieces of a thought that I chase and wistfully dream about completing. I speak not in full sentences, but rather in fragments of a dream. My mind is fractured and pieced together by associative thought processes that garner neither satisfactory progress nor contemporary recognition. I am but a moment, chasing permanence in an imperfect world.
I have pieces.
I’ve wandered. I’ve wandered hungry and lonely, accessing the randomized patterns that come from engaging in too much outside stimuli and not enough reflection. I’ve searched the literal history books of madness, the philosophies and ways of life of every people, every place. I did not find my place.
I’ve reached the baseline of every cellular conundrum, every synaptic connection. I did not find my connection. I’ve reached the roach end of every blunt, the bottom of every bottle. I did not find my mirror image, I did not find a complete thought.
I found only pieces.
I sought heavenly bodies and mysterious entities from made-up lands of acceptance and supposed permanence. I prayed. I prayed for forgiveness and release from this prison of half-connected entities, surely caused by my unfaithful misdeeds upon this planet. The fact that I could not identify what those were only exasperated my supposed conundrum.
Soon I found that god was only useful as a target, as the personification of the cause of my kaleidoscopic plight. The opponent for my rage. I found nothing here but a boxing lesson. I found no connection, no relief, no faith, no hope.
I found only pieces.
I have pieces of a thought that I cannot remember. I merely have wafts of a faint odor of familiarity with symbols and colors of smells from another lifetime. Every day. Every damn day I change and morph, as the inner workings of my mind rearrange themselves to match the supposed functionality of processing stimulant entities from the outside world.
The world changes not, but I do. I simply cannot remember how to process the information in the same manner each and every day.
I have neither focus nor momentum in large enough quantities to maintain any sort of progressive equilibrium. I have encountered many aspects of organizational philosophy in an attempt to harness the power of my mind, and yet, I simply cannot remember how to follow the prescriptive nature of such endeavors.
I simply cannot remember from day to day the necessary mental acuity to follow any sort of step-by-step plan. I merely jump from my ladder to catch the dragonflies that hover in the air. The dragonflies of ideological misgivings, the raw excitement of a fresh thought, the logical outflow of hyper-extended associative ramblings.
As I change, so does the product of my mind’s eye. I have no time, however, to complete this product, as I am but a moment.
I have but a moment. I have but pieces.
I have pieces.
They tell me I have rapid cycling bipolar disorder, social anxiety, and paranoid twinges, with just a touch of schizo-affective gleanings. That was 16 years ago anyway. I was overly drugged and bagged for a decade, which did not solve anything. In fact, it probably made it worse, as I did not have my wits about me as the hurricane ripped through my mind repeatedly, reducing my world to rubble, repeatedly.
I have since dropped my antidepressant completely, and I am one pill per day away from dropping a ridiculously high dosage of lithium completely. It’s been a six-month-long process to do so. I still intake an anti-psychotic med. I have noticed no change whatsoever in my functioning. I still work full-time, I still engage family and friends, I still maintain my hobbies and likes.
I have not had any inklings of impending mania, as is the possibility from weaning off of the lithium. Yet, I still cannot complete my thought. I am still pieces of alternate realities. I still cannot complete my book, the apple of my mind’s eye. I have not the time. I have not the continued effort and focus.
I have but pieces.
This is my life’s work. Not the book, not working, not money, not children. not anything this world has to offer. My life’s work is the completion of a thought. The thought. I have crawled, I have walked, I have run, I have hobbled with my cane. I am an ancient soul, and yet I am but mere momentary existence.
My life’s work is the self-actualization of a fractured mind, the completion of a singular and sustained thought. Breaking through barriers, connecting synaptic expression through associative weapons of chain-link mental technology.
And the hunger.
I have tasted the permanence of the majority of human behavioral tendencies from time to time. They are fleeting moments of brief relief, but I have had them. Just a taste of complete functionality. Just a taste, a whetting of my appetite. And so I want more. I want to lay waste to the confines of my momentary cages, the disconnect of faulty synaptic wiring.
I cannot remember the vocabulary of my evolution from day to day, but I do feel the hunger, the desire to cleave my soul from the shackles of impermanence.
I have but pieces, yet I feel the hunger of existential glue. If you look at me, you may not see the activity, the endless sublime kaleidoscope of effort and training. Effort and training. I have given my life to connect the dots, at the sacrifice of supposed traditional success. You can call me ill if you so desire, but I am more successful than most either way. You can call me ill if you so desire, but I know what I am.
I am not ill. I have pieces. Pieces to a puzzle. The greatest puzzle of all time.
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Steve Imperato is a thinker and a writer, a wetware mechanic intent on unraveling the mysteries of his rapid cycling bipolar and consciousness in general. His main themes include the use of logical and spiritual techniques to enhance the fisticuffs that typically encapsulate the fighting inherent in the literal and figurative aspects of mental variation, which is typically labeled as mental illness. Check out his blog and his website on such matters. Currently a successful (relative to his situation) 9-to-5-er, he dreams of being a successful non-9-to-5-er. Recently married, he is creating a nice little conventional storyline while allowing his mind to flow wherever it endeavors to go.
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