a personal preface for the chronically curious
~Resistance became futile long before day 5. At some indistinguishable point earlier that week, the temptation to fully submit to the inviting embrace of mania reached a magnitude so great that I simply couldn’t resist it any longer. I had awoken more than 120 hours prior and hadn’t slept a minute since, allowing the grandeur of mania to consume me completely over the course of 5 days. Upon the witching hour of the sixth day, I found myself gazing at a full moon and mumbling psychotic nothings to myself when, in between intermittent waves of nonsensical thinking and palpable delusions, I was forcefully struck with what seemed like a narrative bolt of lightning. With the starless night sky as the backdrop, I watched a horrific story unfold all at once in its twisted entirety. I felt as if I’d known each character personally for years: inside and out. I felt like I’d been where they’d been. I felt like I was there. The story consumed my thoughts for days. It became all I thought about. I wrote obsessively, attempting to rapidly sculpt a semblance of my vision with the urgency that all manic ideas entail upon synthesis. Still, despite several years of bipolar symptoms and the hundreds of seemingly ingenious ideas sprouting from each individual manic episode, I had yet to see any one of those ideas through to the finished product that I obsessively envisioned for a brief stretch of time before losing interest in completely. So, following the recording of barely coherent voice memos containing the story’s premise, I returned to the recorded babble with each subsequent manic episode, determined to finally bring a manic vision to earthly fruition. However, this particular vision is unique in that, to this day, I find it difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of the story, whether it be from a higher power, cast down from above via beams of moonlight at 3AM, or simply from deep within my psyche, pried loose by the frantic disinhibition of psychosis. Still, I am fully aware that this is my story to tell. Still, I remain adamant that, for the sake of my own sanity, this story must be told.~
