What if life is a crazy trip and when you die you wake up as an alien holding a bong and your friends circle around you and ask you if you felt it?

I want to tell you that some of this is fantasy… that some of this is fiction. Because it would make me feel like less of a loony toon, and because it would protect me as much as its protecting the “bad guys”. Me, being my own personal and selfish reason to call it so.

There is a giant possible scenario, that I was discussing with my therapist last week that I have to consider. I have to consider the fact that I might really be off my rocker. That I have done nothing more than become a person who is too far gone, too far damaged and too far on the Road of Delusion… that I might have had a psychotic break and that just maybe, I’ve imagined a lot of the experiences I claim to have had.

With that shitty thing to type as I just did, and shitty thing to re-read… I still can’t disagree. It is very much possible (having just recently read my medical records of the timeline of traumas in my life, written by a trained professional) that I have dealt with so much, and lived in chaos for so long, that I don’t know what is reality anymore. Let me tell you how much it pains me to have to reflect on that, in the slightest. It kills. To the deepest, bottom part of my soul… it kills.

It leaves me feeling not only alone, but misunderstood, aware & yet questioning my self-awareness, and confused… Do YOU know what its like to have to question your own reality?

Reality means ‘real’, or: something that exists independently of all other things, and of which all other things derive. And… what I’ve taken it to mean in actuality (may seem a bit warped) from my own experience and observations… is that reality means in essence, status quo.

What ‘everyone’ believes is so, is so, and what the majority believes is non-existent, is. To delve deeper into this: I was taught, during my grooming period, to ‘not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. — originally by Thomas Carlyle)” To mean, in elemental terms: that people are sheep. People believe blindly, what they’re told. Rarely do they fact check, and rarely do they disagree or state their own opposing opinions, out of fear of not being accepted, and being rejected. Being alone.

Everyone walks around doing seemingly the same thing, right? We observe, sometimes we absorb, we critique, we analyze, we think of what we could’ve done differently or better… we imagine scenarios that could have happened, had we taken another path, and we fantasize. But isn’t what differs us from other species- our ability to make a choice? To be able to distinguish right from wrong? And perhaps that’s where the problem within in me lies… maybe I can’t tell right from wrong anymore. Maybe I can’t tell fantasy from reality anymore.

It is a scientific fact that our brains cannot differentiate between reality and imagination. That we’re just drafting versions of ourselves from present to past and we experience the emotional highs and lows of that situation, and again, back to the present. So that said, I am constantly thinking of the fact that I should have more control over my mind because I’m the driver… just as you are all in the drivers seat of your own emotions and reactions too. I’m a firm believer of this. Yet… I allow things to trigger me in ways that will ruin an entire experience I may be having in the present, because I can’t reign my thoughts in enough to stay in the moment. This has resulted in me leaving a corrective color hair appointment when I’m 2.5 of the 4 hours in… or instead of having a good day at the beach with friends, telling them after a couple hours that I’m going to run to the corner market for a few things, and instead, catching an Uber or Lyft back home. This can all happen because of a couple things someone said that didn’t sit well, freaked me out, and yanked my ‘You’re in Danger’ alarm right off the metaphorical wall in my mind.

Now, I try to give myself some slack in that, the people I’m around, I don’t know very well, and combine that fact with my trust issues… it becomes it very difficult to make any lasting friendships. I am so afraid of being duped again, or seeing what I want to see in a person, rather than the reality that is. After a solid year of being groomed and not having any inkling at all that something could be askew in that entire year, I’ve learned that not only can I not trust people to be who they say they are, but I can’t trust my judgement.

It’s a whirlwind of emotions, isn’t it… I’m in constant battle with myself.

I was regularly challenged with questions like, ‘who said?’ and ‘to who?’ when I would say/ask about something that was or wasn’t typically ‘OK’ or along the lines of ‘normal’ … There would always be a dispute, making me question and reconsider what I’d been previously conditioned to believe to be conventional or the ‘rule’. I have to be honest and transparent about this (because like with everything, there is good and bad… not all of the last 4 years was terrible): that I loved this. I loved that I was being taught to look at all sides of the trashcan. I loved that I was having my ‘rose-colored glasses’ taken off. It felt like I was finally seeing the truth about the world around me… the good, the bad, the ugly. It felt like I’d been sleeping and sheltered (A word I’d never have used to describe my upbringing until then) for so long and was now being awoken.

There was a personality test I took with them once, to see what my life objectives were. What was really important to me. The result? I live for life experiences and for learning as much as I can. I need to surround myself with people that light fires under my ass and have a different perspective to teach me. That’s what drives me. And I couldn’t agree more…

Another teaching that comes to mind is when I was in the passenger seat, late at night, running our regular drug slangin’ stops, and I don’t recall what exactly started this conversation, but I was getting a lesson about how I needed to trust my gut and believe in myself. I turned to them and responded, “But if I trusted my gut every time it was strongly telling me something… I’d have to see and accept how bad the world really is.” To which I got a head nod in confirmative agreeance. That was a profound moment for me. It felt like someone ripping the bandaid off.

I had a lot of respect for my ‘teachers’ during that period of time… I valued their lessons because they were real and they weren’t sugar coated. They may not be all bubblegum and gumdrops, but they were things that I knew I wouldn’t have learned from anyone in the ‘normal’, or ‘civilian’ world. I appreciated and felt honored that I’d been chosen to receive these life ‘secrets’. People in the regular, rose-colored glasses wearing world, were too set on projecting this façade of grandiose perfection, to ever have conversations like this with me. Too busy following the crowd and competing with one another for whose happiest and the most successful at this Game of Life. Too consumed with their own shallow, surfacy, self involved lives. Too comfortable being on auto-pilot going for the same life goals as everyone else. Too conditioned to go outside of the Status Quo.

… Part One…