Science of Change

Mental Illness has taught me maybe a few things about grander schemes in life. Just a few. Like on my bike ride to Allison this morning and I’ve been mulling it over for a while but never worded it—there is not an end to everything. Anything. I was thinking of this because I was thinking about how I have always pushed and pushed myself to just “get better” and to make it go away and cure myself, heal, recover, that the hell would end. But the thing is “recovery” is a sinful word. Because it implies getting back what you lost. You never do. What is lost is gone, irrevocable CHANGE. But it’s like evolution. You change. You change, change, change—good or bad, your choice. Like the springs that shot from that embodiment of the death–that piece you lost– are now fueled with a new strategy, protons and neutrons and whatever-the-hell-have-you imploding your neuroplasticity, and you wake up, and one day you just know, chemically in your soul—the science of your heart–that you are of some kind of substance. So many things that kept you transparent, floating about as a million different selves, had ruptured, and made you sick. Made you mad. Made you hide from the world out of fear that you were dying, when really parts of you were. A midnight bloom. Jacynth. And like I said, you wake up, and you actually look down at your hands, your forearms, your thighs, to your words, to your feelings, to your thoughts and reactions—and they are there, you can actually feel these things as you–as your own. Your own—like living in a world where you were owned and almost destroyed by others—yourself, your one God given right, was never given to you. And one day, after what so many faiths and poets call the darkness—you emerge not in grandeur and answers, but in your own skin, under your say, your command, your voice. “I AM THE CAPTAIN OF THIS SHIP, THE MASTER OF MY SOUL.” Walt Whitman wrote something like that.
And this realization has proven wrong to me another theory of mine. Are we invincible if we are good or bad? Is there such a thing as bad and good?
We don’t recover; we do not heal because healing implies “better,” we change, and that direction is partially choice and partially what our mental capabilities will. The “soul” is not either good or bad, and neither is the body, but they are both amazing, and they are both beyond our comprehension, but they can also both be toxic, and they are not friends. But merging a mind of logic and skill and emotion and function with the destruction of its parts to the mending or altering of its parts (the uhhh fall-out of your, well, death in a way—a nuclear sub-atomic-spiritual-soul-against-the-sweating-wall-poetic-flim-flam-waste-of-a-dying-star)—change as far as we have seen has purpose, and brighter and darker things can come of it. Do come of it.