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I’ve had a big black cloud of darkness following me around my entire life. 

For reasons I won’t get into here, I was a pretty disturbed child. I had nightmares almost every night and slept with the lights on until I was about 14. I slept walked all the time and, to the horror of my neighbors who would see me, I left the house on more than one occasion while doing so.

I used to vividly fantasize about dying. I was told that if I killed myself I would go to hell for all eternity, so instead of jumping off a building, I would just daydream about dying in a school shooting, or a plane crash, so that way I could finally stop existing without being punished for it.

I don’t know how psychosomatic disorders work. Everybody talks about the body-brain connection but - even though I have ChatGPT - I’m not a doctor. What I do know, though, is by the 8th grade my body stopped working completely. I never suffered any acute injuries, and yet the joints in my knees started hurting so badly that I had to spend 3 months on crutches, and an additional 7 months in a wheelchair (which obviously, at that age, made me the target of bullying).

“Attachment issues” doesn’t even begin to describe whatever was going on in my brain at the time lol. The first crush I remember developing was on this girl named Shelby who was in my pre-algebra class. For months I thought she was so cool and pretty. Eventually we ended up sitting next to each other, talking, and hanging out outside of class. I really liked her, and apparently she really liked me, because after a few months she asked me if I’d like to be her boyfriend, and wanna know what I said in response? “Why the fuck did you think I would ever be interested in someone like you?”

This was a recurring pattern for me. I’d start to develop feelings for someone, but then as soon as they reciprocated, or things became real, I would immediately lose interest and sabotage the relationship. In hindsight, and with lots of therapy, it’s obvious that I was just afraid of intimacy and had severe avoidant attachment, but it definitely didn’t feel like that in the moment. Our brains are weird like that. I would go from being interested in somebody for months, to being fully convinced that I never even had feelings for them in the first place.

I would fantasize all the time about being in a relationship with people that I could never realistically be in a relationship with: teachers, ex-flings that were no longer interested in me, moms, girls that went to another school, God, celebrities... I desperately craved intimacy, but was too afraid to actually experience it, so I would just imagine experiencing it with people that I could never actually be with, and therefore could never actually hurt me.

Then when I was 16 I met Amber. She had brown hair, listened to cool music, wore clothes with personality, and every guy thought she was super pretty, but those weren’t the things that made Amber special (there were lots of pretty girls who wore Dr. Martens and listened to Macklemore). The thing that made Amber special is that she had a boyfriend.

Because she was in a committed relationship, she didn’t pose an actual threat. In my mind, no matter how strong my feelings got for her, they would always be buffered by the fact that she was ultimately unavailable, and that dynamic was like crack for me.

We had two separate classes together - English on A days, and World Geography on B days - and we sat next to each other in both of them, so I got to talk to her everyday. We developed inside jokes, and texted, and we’d give each other little back tickles in the back of the class while ignoring the teacher’s lecture. It was basically the 16 year old Mormon-equivalent of cheating.

This went on for about 9 months. Under normal circumstances I would’ve bailed and sabotaged the relationship a month in, but there was no need this time, because she had a boyfriend. So, I progressively kept leaning into my feelings even more and then eventually - after seeing, and touching, and talking to the same person every day for 9 months - something new happened. For the first time, in my life, I started to get attached to someone.

The reason I knew I was attached is because when her boyfriend broke up with her (I mean obviously, she was cheating) I didn’t freak out and end things. Instead, I was excited, which was weird and uncharted territory for me. I’d never trusted anybody in my entire life. Ever. I sure as shit didn’t trust my parents - or my siblings, or my friends, or my religious leaders, or my teachers, nobody. But I did trust Amber (which in hindsight, probably not the best idea to trust the person cheating on her boyfriend, but hey, the things we do for love I guess).

The weekend after they broke up, her and I went to a house party together. Partway through she asked if we could leave, because the ex-boyfriend was there and she didn’t to be in the same place as him, so we went and got in my car. I asked her if she wanted me to drive her home, and she said no, she just wanted to drive around for a little bit, so we went and parked the car on this little dirt road overlooking the Utah County valley at night.

After sitting there for a few minutes and listening to music, she starting crying because she was feeling overwhelmed about the breakup and asked if I would get out and give her a hug, so I did. She cried into my shoulder while I told her that I was there for her, and that everything was going to be okay.

Every 30 seconds or so (it was a really long hug) she would pull back a little bit, look me in my eyes, then briefly down at my lips, and then go back into the hug. She probably did this 2 or 3 times before I even began to register what she was implying. Once I realized, though, my brain went into complete and utter panic mode. Not only had a never kissed someone, I’d never even considered kissing someone. I got horny all the time (obviously, I was a teenage boy) but the thought of actually kissing somebody in real life absolutely horrified me. I always viewed it as such an intimate, sacred act that you would only do with someone you deeply trust and care about, so the thought of kissing her literally hadn’t even cross my mind.

She knew I’d never kissed anybody (we’d talked a lot about it) so she knew how big of a step this was for me but apparently wanted to take it anyways. On the 4th or 5th time that she pulled back and looked at me, I internally said “fuck it, I guess we’re doing this”, leaned in, and kissed her.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I didn’t care, because I was feeling feelings that I didn’t even know existed. I was elated, and horrified, and safe, and self-conscious, and just throbbing hard all at the same time. It was such a potent neurochemical cocktail that I’m surprised it didn’t literally knock me unconscious. After we finished making out for like 10 minutes, I drove her home, immediately called my friends, and then went and got into my bed and spent the rest of the night staring at the ceiling in pure euphoric unbelief.

So obviously she got back together with her boyfriend the next day. They met up at some park, made out, decided they wanted to try again, and I found out the following Monday at school. I didn’t feel sad, I felt disoriented. My brain physically couldn’t understand what happened, so I spent the next two months walking around in what felt like a drunken haze.

I still saw her and talked to her everyday (it was the last month of the school year, and we still sat next to each other in English and World Geography) and we just went on pretending like nothing ever happened. We still laughed, and gave each other back scratches, and we kept hanging out once the school year ended and summer began, even though she had a boyfriend again.

During this time I stumbled on some text messages that my Dad left open on his office apple computer, where him and my Mom were talking about getting divorced. I mean, I think “divorce” is probably a scary word for any kid, but the fact that we were living in Mormon-Conservative Utah (where family is everything, divorce is a sin, and every Sunday you sing hymns about how your purpose on Earth is to live righteously, so that one day you and your family can live together with God in the Celestial Kingdom) probably didn’t make things any easier.

I didn’t grow up in a “let’s fight about everything” type of dysfunctional family, I grew up in a “everybody shut up, keep your problems to yourself, go into your corners and pretend like everything is perfect because we have to impress the neighbors” type of dysfunctional family. So, when I read those text messages, that’s exactly what I did. I shut up and pretended like I never saw them.

Two months after Amber got back together with her boyfriend, the exact same thing happened. He broke up with her because she was basically cheating (with me) and then she came crying to me for comfort. Now, you might be thinking that it would be a bad idea to welcome her back with open arms, but who introduced logic into the conversation...? I was still insanely attached (if anything the heartbreak deepened those feelings) and whatever I had with her was the closest thing to intimacy I’d ever experienced so...

A few days after the breakup I asked her if she was free to hangout that night, because there was something I wanted to talk to her about. She said yes, so I picked her up and we drove to a nearby church parking lot, got out, sat in the grass, and started talking. I told her that my parents were going to get divorced, and that I didn’t know who to talk to about it, and then I started to cry.

This was another first for me because it was (barring as a baby) the first time in my life that I cried in front of another person. I never cried in front of other people. Ever. The only other times (in high school) that I cried in front of someone else was after my best friend told me that he attempted suicide, and in the locker room after a high school basketball game when the opposing student section (I had transferred, and was playing against my old high school) chanted “We don’t miss you!” every time I touched the ball.

She handled it about as well as any teenage girl thrown into that situation could handle something like that. She hugged me, and told me how sorry she was, and how everything was going to be okay, and then that weekend she made out with one of my best friends. When I found out something in my brain broke. I’m not a psychologist, or a neuroscientist, so the only language I have available to me is my life, as I experienced, but in that moment something inside me snapped and I was never the same.

That was the first time I ever became truly suicidal. I’d always wanted to die, but killing myself was never an option because I would go to hell for that. This was the first time, though, that I felt like maybe hell would be worth it. I didn’t cry one singular time about it, publicly or privately, because I was completely numb. I couldn’t feel or articulate a single coherent emotion. I stopped responding to all of my friends and transferred schools a few months later.

Like I said, something changed that day, but it wasn’t just my superficial mood or behavior, it felt like there was a fundamental, axiomatic shift in my psyche. Out of nowhere I started becoming interested in things that I’d never been interested in before. I started obsessively thinking about the most fundamental questions of human existence: Who am I? Is death permanent? What is the purpose of all this? What does it mean to be a good person? What is the nature evil?

I started enjoying weird music, watching pretentious films, writing poetry, drawing morbid pictures, and developed a really peculiar sense of humor. I became obsessed with philosophy and religion because it was the only type of language that scratched this incessant “meaning” itch I had in my brain. I read everything I could get my hands on.

I started failing all of my classes; I would just dissociate and daydream the entire time because my interior world felt so much richer and more interesting to me than a teacher’s lecture. I started to feel increasingly alien compared to my peers. I felt like I didn’t fit in, and that there was nobody I could discuss the topics I was interested in with.

I spent most of my High School life in the notes app on my phone incessantly writing down whatever thoughts came into my head. I’d have intense, 30 minute, sometimes several hour-long bursts of heightened mental activity where I felt deeply creative - like every thought and connection I was making was meaningful. Intellectual creativity felt like a flow state where time was distorting around me - simultaneously moving both faster and slower than normal. I never actually went back and read most of my notes, but nonetheless I was obsessed with making sure I documented everything I was thinking.

The first time I vividly remember doing something like this was when I was 17, and I was rewatching Inception for the first time. I sat in front of the TV for 6 hours because every word, every frame, and every stylistic choice in that movie felt meaningful to me. I had a notes app titled “Inception” and would pause the movie every couple minutes to analyze the themes, symbols and dialogue, write down my interpretations, and then move on to the next scene.

There were times when I was at church (where I couldn’t bring my phone) or school (where I couldn’t take it out) that I would start to have mild panic attacks because I didn’t have the ability to write my thoughts down. I would ask to go the bathroom multiple times a class period just so I could document what I was thinking about in my notes app, and when I got self conscious about leaving too much I would just write them down with pencil and paper, and then take a picture of them after class.

My psyche felt split. There was a part of me that loved my newfound creative and intellectual interests. I liked that everything felt meaningful because, obviously, it meant that life was meaningful (and therefore beautiful, and worth living). However, there was another part of me that felt increasingly lonely and alienated. Nobody wanted to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, at the level of depth that I wanted to talk about them. There’s this quote from Carl Jung that I stumbled on during that time that really resonated with me:

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

I felt this discomfort most strongly in the domain of religion. In principle, religion is supposed to be the place where you can go to talk about the deepest, most meaningful, most fundamental topics in life: God, beauty, ethics... However, there was an unignorable internal dissonance that I felt every time I went to Church. I watched people, week after week, stand up at the pulpit and say things like, “I know that Jesus Christ died for our sins” or give discourses on things like universal love, repentance, or pride, and even though the words that were coming out of their mouths were technically pretty, they always felt spiritually dead to me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Mormon sacrament meeting but they’re absolutely surreal, and you should attend one just for curiosities sake. They say the prettiest words, about the deepest topics (finding meaning in suffering, being a virtuous person for its own sake) but in an emotional tone and speaking cadence that is so detached, performative, and non-colloquial, that it feels eerily hollow. The words always felt rote, and “auto-pilotey”, and zombified. They sounded like dead dogma; people parroting cliches because it’s tradition, and the “right” things to say - not because they felt it, or believed it in some real, embodied way.

Even worse, it became increasingly obviously to me that (some) authority figures in the church didn’t give one singular shit about “virtue” or “righteousness” or anything like that, they just knew that those traits are considered socially desirable in this culture, so they weaponized spiritual language in order to climb the Mormon hierarchy and impress their community. Being “a good Christian” was a way for them to get attention and seem important, not a principled way to live their lives; they got off on the fact that when they walked into a room, everybody else stood up and looked because of how special, and righteous, and particularly deserving of God’s blessings they are. It ethically disgusted me in a way that I don’t even have language for.

What’s ironic about all of this is that I was literally the quintessential prime target for religious conversion. Most religions have a hard time getting Gen Z kids to care about God, or duty, or scriptures, or anything like that - but those were the only things that I cared about! I was never interested in money, or status, or casual sex, or any of the other “worldly things” growing up, I just wanted to live a meaningful life and explore the deepest topics possible.

For most of my life I wanted to be a High School seminary teacher. I was perfectly happy to take a shitty salary, and live a simple life, just so I could spend all day, every day, talking about things like meaning, and beauty, and virtue with other people. I mean it makes sense, because that was already how I was spending my time. I just sat in my room and wrote my thoughts down in my little notes app, because that was the only place I could go to that made any sense.

Anyways, I hated high school. I had friends, and girls asked me to school dances, and I was the captain of the basketball team my junior and senior year, but I spent the entire time feeling lonely and sad. I didn’t pay attention in any of my classes, cheated on every assignment, and spent my weekends alone in my room illegally streaming movies and writing thoughts down in my notes app. I didn’t go to my graduation ceremony. My Mom had to guilt trip me into putting on the cap and gown in the backyard so there was at least one photo to commemorate it with.

6 days after I graduated High School I got on an airplane and flew to Buenos Aires, Argentina to serve a Mormon mission. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Mormonism, it’s customary for boys to go on a “mission” once they turn 19, where they spend 2 years in a separate location teaching people about The Bible, and The Book of Mormon, and trying to convince them to join the Mormon church.

“Technically” the decision of whether or not you want to go on a Mormon mission is up to you, but in reality-land I didn’t have a choice. I grew up singing songs like “I hope they call me on a mission” and my parents would say things like, “I wonder if God guided you to take Spanish classes in high school because you’re going to serve a Spanish-speaking mission” and there’s an insanely strong cultural expectation that men go, with an accompanying attitude of moral skepticism and shame towards those that don’t (my Dad was nervous about my older-sister marrying her now-husband because he didn’t serve a mission).

It’s funny, there’s a part of me that always felt like if I could just be a good enough person then maybe God would take the pain away. From the time I was old enough to walk I was inundated with messages about “the joy of the righteous” and “the blessings that come to those that are obedient” and “the peace and comfort that comes to those that are worthy enough to deserve the companionship of the Holy Spirit”.

I read scriptures like this:

And I listened to discourses like this:

And I sang hymns like this:

When I was in pain these were the types of things I turned to for comfort. I knew that God had a plan for me, that there was meaning in all of this suffering, and that if I could just stop sinning and turn my life over to him then maybe I could finally feel this transcendent joy that everybody else was always talking about. So, in my mind, there couldn’t possibly be a better way to demonstrate my righteousness to God (and therefore be deserving of this joy) then by sacrificing 2 years of my life to serve a Mormon mission.

There was always a certain awe and reverence that I felt towards missionaries, because in Mormon culture they’re talked about as paragons of wisdom and virtue that were set apart by the power of the priesthood, and guided by the Holy Spirit to do God’s work on earth. So it was kind of worldview-shattering to me when I finally went on a mission and realized that they’re just a bunch of 19 year old boys that still make fart jokes, and are mostly just there because it’s culturally expected of them to be there.

It’s hard to describe what my internal experience was like serving a mission. On the one hand, it took that part of my brain that was insatiably obsessed with profundity, poured gasoline on it, and then torched it with a flame-thrower. I loved it. Every moment, every interaction, every thought felt like it was imbued with meaning (it’s literally called a “mission”). The stakes always felt life-or-death. As missionaries we were constantly talking about salvation, souls, purpose, and virtue.

Unlike high school, the mission was a place where I was not only allowed, but actively encouraged, to talk about “the important things in life” with the people around me. Missionaries aren’t allowed to listen to music (that isn’t Gospel-related), watch TV, or read non-church related books, and I only had a few hours once a week to email my friends and family. There were no “worldly pleasures” to distract me, so I was free to dedicate my entire life to thinking about the nature of God and the universe and then discussing it with other people.

That quirk I had in high school, where I found meaning in documenting what I was thinking, got kicked into overdrive. Everyday we woke up at 6:30, exercised for 30 minutes, showered, ate breakfast, and then studied the Bible and Book of Mormon for three hours. Every morning, every day, for three hours, for the entirety of my mission, I would get into an obsessive mental flow state similar to when I rewatched the movie Inception. Every single last word in the scriptures felt meaningful, and it would take me (I’m not exaggerating) hours to get through a single verse.

When we left the apartment after finishing our morning studies - so we could go out and knock on strangers doors in order to teach them about Jesus - my mind would incessantly run at a million miles an hour. Mormons believe that they (especially missionaries) are “blessed with the gift of the Holy Ghost” when they’re baptized into the Church, and that “the spirit” is a special medium who communicates God’s will to you on earth. So, as a 19-year-old boy walking the dirt streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 100-degree humid weather wearing a suit and tie, I (literally) believed that I was constantly receiving revelation directly from God.

The mission experience (in all of its weirdness) scratched the meaning and profundity itch in my brain that I’d had for years, and I fucking loved that. On the other hand, it was completely emotionally crippling.

Missions are already challenging and isolating for mentally stable kids. You get thrown into a foreign country and culture, are forced to learn a new language immediately or you can’t communicate, you’re only allowed to do (church approved) hobbies or extra-curricular activities once a week for a few hours, you spend every waking second of your life with another person (there are rules that your mission companion must remain in eyesight of you at all times), you can’t relax and ground yourself in entertainment, or music, or tv shows, and you spend your entire day getting doors slammed in your face, running from stray dogs, and hoping you don’t get stabbed (my first month there I was robbed by a guy with a knife the size of my forearm).

You can’t even escape into your own mind. If you believe (like I did) that you were called by God to serve the people of Buenos Aires, and that happiness comes from righteousness, and that God is omniscient and listening to everything you think - then you start to moralize your own thoughts.

Near the beginning of my mission there was a girl missionary named Maddie that I thought was super pretty and, because I was a teenage boy at the height of my sexuality, I remember getting hard just from seeing the way her body looked in a certain dress. I started to daydream and think about whether or not she would be interested in going out on a date with me once we both finished our missions.

I then immediately felt guilty, couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the day, and spent 10 minutes that night on my knees praying to God for forgiveness, because I knew that when you’re on a mission you’re not supposed to think about anything other than missionary work (especially girls) and I promised God that I would never let anything like that happen ever again.

My thoughts weren’t the only thing that were moralized.

One of the very first things we were given to read on our mission was this talk called “The Fourth Missionary”. The thesis is pretty simple, Elder Corbridge (an authority figure) posits that there are four “types” of missionaries (ranked by morality) and he describes them in detail.

The first type of missionary leaves the mission or gets sent home. The second type of missionary is “disobedient” and doesn’t work hard. The third type of missionary is obedient, and “does his duty”, but doesn’t enjoy it. The fourth (best) type of missionary not only does his duty, but he does it with a smile and enjoys every second of it.

He then goes on to justify his framework by saying stuff like this:

To be fair to Elder Corbridge, I think there’s a lot of principles in here that are good, true and interesting. I think when you strip people of their agency, and tell them they’re incapable of change, that always has disastrous consequences. I’m a big fan of hard work, and selflessness, and being kind, and being knowledgeable, and developing these traits to the best of your ability. However, I find it incredibly interesting that within a moral framework (he’s literally using the language of light and darkness) he snuck in something that has no business being there: emotions.

Do you want to be happy or miserable? Certain or insecure? Confident or afraid? Cheerful or despondent? At peace or with internal conflict?

He’s talking about emotional states with moral language and then implicating that because you are an agent - with the capacity to choose - if you don’t make the choice to feel happy, and confident, and certain, and cheerful, then you are a bad person. Even if you’re doing everything right (waking up on time, reading your scriptures, not listening to music) if you don’t also enjoy doing it then you are the lesser missionary, and therefore a morally inferior person.

This wasn’t some one-off talk from an abnormal guy that I just happened to stumble on, it’s perfectly emblematic of both mission culture, and the Mormon attitude towards emotions and mental health writ large. Take this quote from Elder David F. Evans:

President Hinckley described what happens to the heart of every missionary who commits his or her life and work to the Lord when he talked about his own missionary experiences. It was early in his mission, and he was discouraged. The work was hard, and the people were not receptive. However, there came a time when discouragement turned to commitment. For him, the beginning was a letter from his father in which he read: “Dear Gordon, I have your letter. … I have only one suggestion: Forget yourself and go to work.” In describing what happened next, he said: “I got on my knees in that little bedroom … and made a pledge that I would try to give myself unto the Lord.

“The whole world changed. The fog lifted. The sun began to shine in my life. I had a new interest. I saw the beauty of this land. I saw the greatness of the people. … Everything that has happened to me since that’s been good I can trace to that decision made in that little house”.

President Hinckley continued by saying: “You want to be happy? Forget yourself and get lost in this great cause, and bend your efforts to helping people”.

To every young man I would say, do you want to be happy? If so, come and join with us, 52,000 strong and counting, and serve your fellow man as a missionary for the Lord. Make the commitment to give two years of your life to the Lord. It will change everything. You will be happy. The fog will lift.

I was the third missionary. I was almost pathologically obedient and hardworking. I didn’t sleep in past my 6:30 alarm one singular time, I refused to speak in English, I would have mild panic attacks if I thought I was going to get home after curfew, I did everything right... but the fog never lifted.

In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious that sending an already mentally disturbed, introverted, suicidal teenager to a foreign country - where he has to spend every waking moment with a person that doesn’t speak English, spends most of his day getting doors slammed in his face, can’t do any of his hobbies, and is shamed for feeling any emotion other than happiness - isn’t going to be great for his emotional and mental health.

It was hard for me to metabolize the ambiguity of feeling absolutely thrilled that I was doing something meaningful with my life, while simultaneously feeling like I was collapsing in on myself like a dying star.

One of my only coping mechanisms and respites on the mission were the two journals I kept: my regular journal and my dream journal, both of which I still have to this day.

On December 12th, 2016, I described a dream where “I start off as a real boy, with flesh and blood, but when I get thrown into a large body of water I transform into paper and slowly start to disintegrate as the waves wash me out to sea, but nobody cares because the book continues”. Years later one of my favorite tv shows, Bojack Horseman, reminded me of this dream when the titular character said, “I felt like a xerox of a xerox of a person, you know what I mean?”

It’s ironic that those authority figures used the language of “a fog being lifted” because foggy is exactly how I felt. It was like I wasn’t real. Interactions with strangers felt like scenes I was performing instead of moments I was living. The world around me felt like a backdrop piece on a movie set instead of a three-dimensional space that I was actually interacting with. Sometimes when I spoke it felt like my voice wasn’t actually coming from me; it was coming from behind me. I journaled about how I felt like a robot, and an automaton, and how I no longer had a personality.

For the most part, I didn’t allow this to impede with my missionary work. I did my duty, woke up on time, and knocked doors with a smile on my face. However, every once in a while, the fogginess would get so overwhelmingly disorienting that I would simply ask my companion “No estoy sentiendo bien, puedes hacer las lecciones solo?” and then I would lie to the people we were supposed to be teaching and say “Lo siento, todavia estoy aprendiendo la idioma, no me puedo comunicar bueno, asi que mi companero va a decir todo hoy si esta bien consigo?” so I didn’t have to interact with anybody.

There was this one family (Solange, Agustina, and their Abuelita) that we used to visit at least twice a week during my first month in Argentina. They lived in the outskirts (campo) part of Buenos Aires where the roads were dirt, and during the winter when it rained you had to walk through mud that went up to the lower part of your shins. There were stray dogs everywhere, and every 2 minutes you had to bend down and pretend like you were picking up a rock to throw at them, or they would keep following and eventually bite you. They lived in a “house” with no doors, and no plumbing. They got their water from 10-gallon jugs they bought from the grocery store, and the bathroom was just a bucket on the dirt ground with a makeshift curtain separating it from the living room. They called me Elder “Wayshmon” because they didn’t know how to pronounce American names, and in Argentina they speak in a dialect called “Castellano” where the double-ls are pronounced with a “sh” sound instead of the standard Spanish “yuh”.

One night when we went and visited this family, I vividly remembering feeling particularly foggy. The mate cocido tea that they always made for us wasn’t making the fogginess go away, so I politely asked my companion if he would do the lesson without me, and explained to the family I wasn’t feeling well, so I could just sit back and not have to be performative for a few minutes.

I remember sitting there, looking at the scene in front of me, and feeling like I was watching life happen through a television screen. The real world was over “there” in this weird box, and I was just an observer. I remember looking down at my hands and not recognizing them; they felt like somebody else’s, and I started to panic because I didn’t think they belonged to me.

Moments like this became more and more frequent as time went on. The world started to feel uncanny, flat, and dreamlike. My body started to feel increasingly alien and I didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the mirror. Throughout this entire time I never felt sad, or overwhelmed, or anxious, because those were emotions that only existed in the real world, and besides, I didn’t have a body to experience them anyways.

In the same way that I used to disappear into my notes app in high school, I started to retreat from the real world into my own mind. Whenever we got home from a long day of missionary work, I would spend the next hour before bed obsessively documenting the thoughts that I had throughout the day in my journal. I would write down (what I thought were) incredibly deep, philosophical questions and observations, but never actually took the time to explore or answer any of them, because my brain was too busy immediately bouncing on to the next great idea.

I wrote down most of the philosophical, or intellectual thoughts I was having, but I was pretty trepidatious to write about anything associated with my emotions or lived experience. Like I said, Mormon missionaries are told that as agents with free will, their emotional states are a choice, and to feel “sad” or “anxious” is to be actively choosing darkness instead of light. I wanted to be a good missionary, so I told myself the story that I was having a great time, the mission was so fulfilling, and serving the Lord made me happier than anything else ever could.

Every once in a while when I was journaling about my experience, though, a few honest things would slip through the cracks. I still have most of those writings intact in my journal, but I ended up cutting out a couple statements and using them for a collage that I made years later.

I never explicitly told anybody that I was emotionally struggling on the mission, but it was pretty easy to pick up through context clues. Even though I was a good missionary, that worked hard and did everything right, my companion (obviously) started to pick up on the fact that I wasn’t quite right. We spent every second of every day together, so he knew I preferred not talk, liked keeping to myself, and would just disappear into my journal the second we got home. He ended up calling the mission President, who notified my parents that it’s possible I wasn’t doing well (which you’d think they would already know, given I stopped emailing them a few months into the mission).

A few days later I got an email from my Dad talking about the joys of missionary work, and attached a story about this guy name “Jerry” that he always shared with his employees. Here’s the first couple lines just to give you a flavor.

Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. When asked how he was, his response would be, “If I were any better, I’d be twins!”

“I don’t get it!” I told him one day. “You can’t be a positive person all the time. How do you do it?”

Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, ‘Jerry, you have two choices today: you can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.’ I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining, or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.”

To be fair to my parents, I think there was probably a part of them that was genuinely concerned about my well-being, and I wasn’t being communicative, so they didn’t really have any context for how bad everything that was happening actually was. However, I think there was another part that was a lot more important to them. “Leaving a mission early” is considered shameful in Mormon culture, especially for “mental health reasons” which is already a taboo topic in Mormon-world, so I was very cognizant of my parents sensitivities; and how me coming home would both reflect poorly on them as parents, and make them look bad to their Mormon neighbors.

Eventually the Mission President (leader of the mission, ex BYU law professor, old white guy in his 60s) brought me in to talk to him, because my companion had emailed him multiple times saying that I might be depressed. It was pretty clear that anything related to “the mental-health-world” was uncomfortable and foreign to him, so he sat me down, we exchanged some pleasantries, and then he euphemistically danced around the elephant by asking, “So, Elder Wellman, you’re not feeling disheartened, or unmotivated, or anything like that are you?” and I looked at him directly in the eyes, lied, said I was doing great, and that I was super excited to keep serving the Lord.

A few weeks later I had a really strange experience. Normally when I got into those states, where I felt like the world was changing around me, it wouldn’t last for more than 30 minutes or so (a couple hours if things were really bad). It would usually go away once I ate a meal, or we started walking out on the street, or I had to interact with people, and worst case scenario it went away once I fell asleep.

However, I remember one time things started to go foggy but then they just never stopped. It lasted about 5 days; I would wake up and immediately feel like I was still dreaming. From a distance I watched somebody else get out of bed, brush their teeth, say their morning prayers, and start exercising. I was a passive observer watching an avatar of myself interact with the world around him through a television screen; the words that came out of his mouth existed in a separate reality, and some unknown force was puppet-ing him around like a little play thing.

I was usually pretty good at masking my internal strife, but these 5 days were probably still a bit surreal for the mission companion that spent every waking moment of their life with me. When he asked me if I was feeling okay I’d avoid eye contact, mumble something about how I was just tired, and then change the subject. He started freaking out and called the mission President (again) at some point, so I ended up back in the exact same chair, having the exact same conversation a few weeks later.

When he asked me (again) if I was feeling discouraged or sad, I lied. I didn’t want to disappoint God by choosing misery instead of joy, I didn’t want to disappoint my mission President by admitting that I wasn’t happy serving the Lord, and I definitely didn’t want to disappoint my parents by getting sent home and embarrassing them in front of their fellow church members.

I was pretty resolute about not admitting anything, but it was obvious that I was depressed and my mission President couldn’t understand why. I’m not surprise that he couldn’t understand; he’d been inundated with the exact same cultural conditioning that I had: the joy of the saints, the 4th missionary... Hell, I wouldn’t even be surprised if his Dad sent “The Jerry Email” to him when he was serving a mission at my age.

Unpleasant emotions were associated with sin, and Satan, and disobedience in this culture, so, I guess because he was unsure how any missionary could possibly be sad, my mission President then looked at me and said: “Elder Wellman, I believe you when you say that you’re doing well, it’s just your companion Elder Taylor is worried about you, so I’m going to ask you a question that I need you to answer honestly: have you ever struggled with thoughts of homosexuality?”

At the end of our meeting (probably less because he was worried about my emotional-well-being, and more because he didn’t want to get another phone call from my companion) he insisted that I meet with a therapist. A few days later my companion and I took a bus out of the campo and into the city so I could do therapy for the first time in my life. The first thing they did when I walked in was ask me to fill out a document that would help assess my mental state. It had statements like “I feel hopeless” and then asked you to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 how much you agreed with it.

After I finished filling out the questionnaire the psychiatrist took it, went into the back room, and tallied up my scores. When he returned, the first thing he did was look at me, chuckle, and in a cavalier tone remark, “Well, Elder Wellman, it looks like you’re depressed!”

I didn’t think a single swear word my entire mission (God is always watching your thoughts) but in that moment something inside me snapped. I thought to myself, “No shit, you don’t have to be a fucking shrink to figure that out, I could have told you that 30 minutes ago.” I glared at him and said nothing. He paused, looked back at me uncomfortably for a bit, and then proceeded to say,

“How has nobody ever told you that you’re depressed? I mean just looking at you right now, like your attitude and your face, I can just already tell that you’re depressed.” For a brief moment I thought about what it would be like to watch the warm blood pulse out the front of his neck while I increased the pressure of the serrated edge that I was slowly dragging across his soft flesh.

It reminded me of my teachers in high school. There was this one history teacher, Professor Ecalono, who everybody liked because he was a “cool” teacher. I kind of liked him too. We would play jeopardy to study for the tests, he helped coach the soccer team, sometimes he showed funny YouTube clips in class, and he had long hair (which I liked, because it was abnormal for teachers in Utah).

He was well-intentioned (I think) but I remember one time he pulled me aside after class and was like, “Look kid, you gotta learn how to have fun in life. You just kind of sit in the back of the room, chew your gum, don’t talk to anybody, and you seem angry every time I look at you.”

I got that a lot. I remember one time a friend of a friend noted, “I feel like you carry your sadness around with you.”

Now that the psychiatrist was done with his diagnosis, the therapist came out of her room, greeted me, and beckoned me to come in and sit across from her. This was the first time in 9 months that I was alone in a room with somebody that wasn’t a missionary. She asked me how I was doing, and I said I was fine. She asked me how the mission work was going, and I said it was fine. She asked me how my relationship with my companion was, and I said it was fine.

I had no idea how to “do” therapy, and it pretty quickly became clear that this tactic wasn’t going anywhere, so eventually she said, “Here’s a pen and paper. I’m going to leave the room, and I just want you to write down whatever it is that you’re feeling, okay? Take your time, I’ll come back in a little bit.”

I didn’t understand the exercise. I didn’t “feel” anything...? I had lots of thoughts about stuff - I wrote about those all the time - but how was I supposed to write about feelings?

I just sat there and stared at the little white piece of paper, unsure what to do with it.

After 30 minutes she came back in and asked (if I was comfortable with it) if she could see what I wrote down. I agreed, because there wasn’t much to see. The only thing I wrote down was “I feel angry.” When she asked me what I was angry about I said I didn’t know, so she patiently prompted me to try and come up with something (anything) that I was angry about. I paused for a minute, and then told her I was angry at the psychiatrist for the remark he made earlier. She nodded, said that would make her angry too, and then asked if she could give me a hug.

After I left the therapist’s office she called my mission President, told him that I shouldn’t be on a mission, and requested that I be sent home immediately. A week later (against my own will) they contacted my parents, bought me a plane ticket home, and sent me back to Utah.

When I got home the first thing my parents said to me was, “We’re so grateful that you’re choosing to prioritize your health, and we want to be totally supportive with that decision, so we’re going to check you in to an intensive wellness center, nip this ‘sadness’ thing in the bud, and get you back out there.” They then lied to the neighbors about why I was back early (claimed it was an annoying stomach bug) and declared that I would be returning to the mission shortly.

If it weren’t for the whole mission fiasco I might have never gone to therapy, so I guess that’s one good thing that came from it. I spent the next 3 months going to this place called “Suncrest Counseling” in South Jordan, Utah, where I met with a different therapist every hour, for 4 hours, three times a week.

It wasn’t super helpful (I was a pretty unwilling participant that constantly lied, and avoided talking about anything too scary) but I did learn some interesting phrases and (thank God) they told me that they didn’t think it was safe for me to go back out on a mission, and then held my hand and roleplayed with me how to communicate that to my parents. When I told the therapists I was still too scared to tell them, we decided to invite my parents into a therapist session, so the therapist could say “it’s not safe for him to go back out on a mission” while I was in the room, and then I could just say “yeah, what she said” and then stand up and leave.

In the fall of 2017 I started going to University and I liked it; I liked being surrounded by smart people. I started getting into weightlifting at the same time, which was a great emotional outlet for me, and I liked the attention I got from people who noticed. These things became my new obsessions and reinvigorated my desire to... well... not kill myself. I had a 4.0 through three semesters of university, and I put on 25 pounds of muscle in that same time period. Unsurprisingly, I was still clinically depressed, completely numb, and things would still get foggy from time to time, but I was at least a “functioning” adult with friends, a career path, and a hobby.

In the summer of 2018 my parents pushed me to go see a “holistic doctor” to try and figure out what was wrong with my brain. They couldn’t wrap their heads around why a healthy, smart, attractive, and financially stable kid could ever possibly be depressed.

Initially, they tried to “un-depress-me” by brute forcing therapy for 4 hours a day. When that didn’t work, they figured that I must secretly be sinning (and therefore wasn’t deserving of God’s happiness) so my dad made me a “depression spreadsheet” of tasks to do every day to fix my mental health. It contained things like “stop listening to music with swear words because that scares away the Holy Ghost” and “get a church calling so you can forget yourself and serve those around you”.

When listening to Enya didn’t fix my morbid clinical depression, they figured it must be some weird, ethereal, random chemical imbalance, or that there was something wrong with my diet: hence the holistic doctor.

The first thing this “doctor” did was tell me to go on a juice cleanse; she said fasting would lower inflammation, allow the body to heal, and that the juices would help strip my body of heavy metals and toxins. She encouraged me to learn about “the-gut-brain-connection” and explained how poor diets can cause or exacerbate mental health problems.

To be fair, much of this was true and good information, but I wish had the self-awareness (and courage to stand up to an authority figure) to discern that just because changing my diet would likely improve my mental health, doesn’t mean that going 3 weeks without eating solid food was a good idea.

Obviously I was always hungry, and lost energy, and my libido disappeared, and all of that stuff, but I figured those were just temporary pains I had to suffer through in order to come out stronger on the other side - and this hypothesis was seemingly confirmed when 2 weeks in something in my brain started to shift.

Those moods I would get in - where I was obsessively writing stuff down in my notes app in high school, and reading the scriptures on my mission - would usually last 30 minutes or so, and occasionally (at most) several hours (like when I rewatched Inception). However, this time it started, but then it never stopped.

Out of no where I felt like I’d unlocked my “true self”. I finally had 24/7 access to the hyper creative and intellectual side of my personality that usually only showed up in short bursts (and I had to go out of my way to try and bring it out). Every neuron in my brain was firing from the moment I woke up. I walked around with a newfound confidence that I’d never felt before, and I couldn’t believe that all this time, all I had to do to lift the fog was stop eating the unhealthy foods that were causing weird chemical imbalances in my brain. I felt like I was finally seeing the world in color, and everything around me started to feel beautiful and imbued with meaning. I felt a newfound love and appreciation for my friends, family and God. I wanted to make the world a better place, and help everyone around me feel what I was feeling. I struggled to fall asleep at night because I was so excited by the almost revelatory thoughts that were racing through my head. Every time I started to fall asleep I would have a new thought, that I couldn’t afford to forget, so I’d open my notes app, jot it down, and then try to fall asleep again but then the same thing would happen. I was only sleeping 3-4 hours a night but it didn’t matter because the second I woke up I was overflowing with boundless energy. I started strategizing about how I could most effectively bring this light and joy I felt to other people. I thought about starting a business, or a YouTube channel, or writing a book, or becoming a pastor, or becoming a professor, or becoming a public speaker, or becoming a musician, or becoming an artist, or becoming a poet, or becoming a politician, or becoming a monk, or becoming an influencer, or starting a student body organization, or becoming the student body president, or becoming the actual president, and I thought about reaching out to old professors, or friends, or religious leaders, or cold DM’ing CEOs, or celebrities, or academics, or prophets, so that I could show them the thoughts I’d written down in my notes app, and they would realize how valuable they were, and they would feel the light that I was feeling, and then together we could strategize about how to lift the rest of the world out of the drunken, fallen haze that they’ve all been experiencing, and not only did I want to do this, but it was my moral duty because I was a conduit of divine energy, and I didn’t care about all of the money, and the fame, and the attention that would come when everybody realized the brilliance of my ideas because it wasn’t about me, it was about God and the fundamental unity and one-ness of all living creatures, and I could see it everywhere, and how could anybody possibly look at a pencil, or a spider, or the moon, and not be completely overwhelmed with the sheer sacredness and beauty of the universe and

It lasted about a week. I casually mentioned to somebody that I was probably going to drop out of school to start a business, which prompted them to look at me for a second and then simply say, “That’s super cool and I wish I was as motivated as you are, but shouldn’t you wait until after you actually have the money to start a business before you drop out?”

I mean he made a good point. I hadn’t really thought about that. I just kind of assumed that the money thing would take care of itself because God is omnipotent and I was doing his will, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that even though I was divinely inspired, I couldn’t really pay employees without money, so maybe this wasn’t the best idea.

Wait a second, if that wasn’t a good idea, what about the rest of my ideas...? I’ve spent the last week writing down ideas for 8+ hours a day, are some of the other ones bad as well? Are all of them bad? Can I trust a single thought that comes into my head? Is there actually meaning in the universe or was I just making that up?

I started to spiral. That night I tried to continue brainstorming ideas for my business, but I no longer felt any sort of creative spark, so I decided to abandon the project. I started sleeping a lot, which made sense considering I hadn’t eaten in 3 weeks and was sleeping 3 hours a night. I fell into a deep depression. My whole life up to that point had basically been a deep depression, but this one felt different because it was so starkly juxtaposed with the transcendent joy that I was feeling the week before.

I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand what had happened, and I was so ashamed of the fact that I almost dropped out of school to start a business, that I didn’t tell anybody about it.

Going 3 weeks without food made me lose some weight (obviously). I wasn’t obese, or anything like that, but in the process of building muscle I put on a few percentage points of body fat as well, so when I stopped eating it became noticeable. My abs got more visible, my jawline became more defined, and people started compliment me on my physique change. Part of me thought that if I could just get my diet right, then I could access that creative, confident state again (just without all the other bullshit) and people kept telling me that they loved how toned and skinnier I was, so I started to associate losing weight with “emotional wellness” and physical attractiveness.

I’d learned a lot about “the-gut-brain-connection” so I was afraid to eat anything that might make me more depressed, and now I knew that I could go long periods of time without eating, so my relationship with food slowly started to change. I started eating 2 meals a day, then 1, then every other day. I avoided anything with gluten, or refined carbohydrates, or sugar, or seed oils, or dairy, or oxalates, or lectins, or phytates, or phytoestrogens, or aspartame, or red dye 40, or PUFAs, or FODMAPs, or trans fats, or soy, or too much Vitamin A...

I was confused about why my body was starting to break down, because fasting made me feel so good the first time. I was sleeping 12 hours a night, lost my libido, constantly dreamed about food, and was so devoid of energy that when I got home from school it would take me 30 minutes to gather the willpower to finally leave my car and walk up the stairs to get to my apartment. When I looked in the mirror, the only thing I could see was the love handles on the side of my stomach, and the lack of definition in my jawline.

In January of 2019 I dropped down to 111 pounds. For reference, I weigh about 155 now. It’s possible I got smaller, I don’t know, I stopped checking the scale after a while.

I think my body was a good physical representation of my inner psyche at the time. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to stop existing. I felt small, and frail, and lifeless. Animalistic pleasures like food and video games were the only things I looked forward to in life. I’d never watched porn before (I was a good little Mormon boy) but one night I opened porn hub just to see if I could still get aroused (I couldn’t). I withdrew from all of my friend groups, took the semester off from school, and just worked full time so I had something to do and could pay my bills.

Around this time my old bishop reached out to me and asked if I’d like to meet up for lunch. I think he intuited that the reason I returned home early from a mission was because I wasn’t doing well mentally, and he wanted to help in whatever way he could. He was the CEO of a company with a half-a-billion-dollar market cap, and he’d just built a house that got featured in the Utah valley parade of homes, which I’d actually toured. There was a basketball court, a masonry oven built right into the wall, an elevator, and twice as many rooms as there were people in the family.

We met in the lobby of his company’s building, and we got our customized flat-bread pizzas from the cafeteria for free because he owned the place. Every 5 minutes somebody would come up and interrupt us because they wanted to kiss their CEO’s ass for a bit; just a little smooch, if you will.

He was really good at making eye-contact and made a point to keep using my name. “Wow, it’s so good to see you Braden. You’ve changed so much since I last saw you Braden. I’m so excited to hear about everything you’ve been up to Braden.” He smiled the entire time; which was impossible not to notice because of the perfectly white, perfectly straight veneers that he had in.

Like my mission President, he was afraid to ask me about my mental health directly. He asked if coming home from the mission was stressful, and whether or not I was enjoying college, and if I liked my new Bishop. I politely told him that yes, coming home from my mission was stressful, and that I actually decided to take the semester off from school to focus on some health issues.

Unsure of what to say about that, he paused for a second, and then said, “Look, I know what it’s like to try and navigate emotional problems. My wife actually has anxiety, and it’s something that we’ve struggled with for a long time, but I know that there’s ways to deal with it, and I know that God has given you these challenges for a reason. One day you’re going to look back on all this, laugh, and thank Heavenly Father for his foresight.”

It reminded me of what my Stake President (one level above the Bishop in the Mormon hierarchy) said to me when I returned home from my mission early. He could tell I was struggling so, in an attempt to be Christ-like and comforting, he quoted Matthew 14:24-27 to me:

It was customary in Jewish and Roman culture to divide the night into four watches: 6-9 pm, 9 pm - 12 am, 12-3 am, and 3-6 am. Jesus, my mission President explained to me, is a “fourth watch God”, which means he usually waits until the very last moment to step in, but if you just put your faith in him, and be patient, then eventually he’ll “save you from being washed out to sea”.

I haven’t checked my DM’s in over a year, but besides messages like this

there were 2 types of messages that really stood out to me.

The first was people expressing their incredulity about how I could ever possibly be depressed. A lot of my social media content (in case you didn’t already know) is joking about mental-health-stuff, and making light of otherwise pretty serious and heavy topics. Idk, it helps me cope.

A lot of people get angry about it, though, and seem to think that I’m “playing a character” for likes and attention (which of course I am to some degree, it’s an exaggerated, silly cartoon version of myself, and it’s hard not to be performative on social media) because they can’t wrap their head around how somebody could possibly be both attractive/social-media-famous and sad (which I always found so funny because like how many examples of teenage Disney channel stars turned unhealthy adults do we need before we learn the lesson that fame is not fucking good for people?)

The second type of message that stuck out to me is one where empathetic, genuinely-well-intentioned-followers, would reach out to me with advice. They’d express how they’re sorry I’m hurting, that they’re grateful for my content, that they can totally relate, and then share the things that have helped them throughout their mental-health-journey.

Oftentimes it’s things like meditation, gratitude journals, and fasting. Sometimes I’ll get (genuinely thorough and well researched) diet advice, with lists of toxins that I should avoid, and foods that are common sources of inflammation. I’ve been sent countless versus from the New Testament, or the Quran, or the Torah, that describe God’s love for me and explain how peace - and freedom from anxiety - can only be found through him. I’ve been sent quotes from Jung, and Marcus Aurelius, and Rumi, and Herman Hesse. I’ve been sent podcast episodes, and YouTube videos, and blog posts, and people have even offered to buy me their favorite self-help-book and ship it to a P.O. box near me.

Anyways, after my ex-Bishop finished explaining how he was empathetic, and could relate because his wife has anxiety, he challenged me to perform some tasks that he thought would help with my mental health. Earlier in the conversation when he asked me if I was dating anyone, I told him that I hadn’t gone on any dates since high school, so he challenged me to ask somebody out on a date. He also challenged me to start weightlifting again, re-enroll in school, and to make sure I was reading the scriptures and praying everyday. He finished his soliloquy by offering me a job in the statistics department (my declared major), but only contingent on me completing the tasks that he challenged me with, and agreeing to meet up with him for lunch again in a few weeks.

After I left I blocked his number and never talked to him again.

It was true, I hadn’t gone on a date since my junior year of high school. After Amber, I decided I was never going to put myself in the position to get hurt like that ever again. But also I was a teenage boy with raging hormones... So over the course of the next year I casually hooked up (well, the PG, Mormon-version of hooked up) with a few girls, but then I started to feel icky about it (I was so emotionally detached that it felt like I was using another person to masturbate) so I decided to swear off girls completely. I didn’t go on a single date, or kiss a single person, from the time I was 17 to the time I was 23 (when I tentatively started dating again).

My last couple years of undergrad were pretty uneventful. I lived a boring, basic-college-student-life. I went to school, worked part time, studied, spent most of my free time at the gym, occasionally hung out with friends, read a lot, watched lots of basketball, and eventually forced myself to start going on some dates. I was still depressed, and anxious, and sometimes things would still get foggy, and all of that, but I became so overwhelmingly emotionally numb that life just kind of started to become manageable. Idk. The days blurred together, I followed a monotonous routine, and nothing really excited me, but I started eating again, and had lots of stuff to keep me busy, so I guess I was happy just not being in crisis mode for a change.

In spring of 2021 I started making TikToks. I randomly posted a few old videos I’d made that I thought were funny, a few of them got attention, so I made some more, and then eventually I was just like “eh, why not keep doing this?” It came with its downsides (comment sections stressed me out, I posted lots of cringey stuff, and the high of seeing a video do well for sure turned me into an addict at the beginning) but overall I think it was really good for me. This was the first time in my life that I had a consistent creative outlet, and it encouraged me to start a blog, and a little podcast a year later. Pretty early on I stopped checking metrics completely. I didn’t want to stress about whether or not a video was “doing well” or what people were saying about it, I was just happy to have something to work on - besides the gym - that I liked, and was completely mine.

Dating was pretty lackluster. I went on my fair share of dates for a year and a half, and they were all just... fine. I didn’t have any bad experiences, it’s just I would get home from them and think, “Eh, that was fine.” I struggled to connect. It wasn’t that I couldn’t keep a conversation going, it’s that I always felt like the back and forths just didn’t have any spark; they felt unlively, dull and unimaginative. I never got excited by the thought of seeing somebody again, and started to feel like maybe my personality was just too... outside of the normal distribution? (and my trauma too heavy) to realistically expect to deeply connect with someone.

But then I met Maddie.

Years later she would note, “our chemistry is fucking electric” and I agree. That was a great way to put it. It was fucking electric.

It reminded me of this quote by Carl Jung:

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

I didn’t know that people like Maddie existed. She reached out on social media so we started texting every once in a while, then frequently, then every day, then multiple times a day, then every hour, and then a few months in we were staying up till 8 am because neither one of us wanted to put our phones down and go to sleep. We were disgusting and I fucking loved it.

Talking to her was like a drug. Texting her was the first thing I did in the morning, and the last thing I did before I went to bed. We talked about everything. We could take the most obscure or mundane subject and turn it into a 3 hour convo. I loved telling her about how bad parking was that day, or about the weird guy I saw at the gym, or about how annoying my Stat 123 teacher was.

One time I asked her what she ate for lunch, and she asked me to guess, so I said, “barbecue?” and she said “wtf no, I hate barbecue food” so I set a recurring 11:30 am alarm (1:30 pm her time) so that every day I remembered to ask her, “how was bbq?” and then every day she would respond with an eye roll emoji 🙄 and then tell me what she ate for lunch. (Eventually she made me retire the bit, but it went out kicking, fighting and screaming, trust me.)

I started texting in all lower case because she texted in all lower case, I started using the 😌 emoji a lot because she used that emoji a lot, she introduced me to this 😠🔪 emoji combo, I introduced her to this one 😔🤘, and one time she told me that this emoji 🤮 looks like he’s giving head to the hulk.

One day we decided that we were going to adopt a pet for our chat, and after mulling over all the options we ended up going with this little guy 🦭 who she named “Bubby”. If either one of us was ever super busy, and couldn’t take 15 minutes out of their day to respond (we texted in very long, paragraph-ey, multi-thread responses) we would just feed Bubby some apple juice and pretzels 🥨🧃 so that he wasn’t hungry (sometimes I would try and give him cookies 🍪, but she usually shut that down) and to remind the other person we were thinking about them (like I said, disgusting).

We had so many inside jokes it’s impossible to keep track of all of them: true art, “™️”, standing woman, Kevin the mechanic, yum-yum-slurp-slurp, my bald uncle, Jeremiah “The Bull” Evans, much like Van Gogh, help with my chemistry notes, the moon, bbq, spaghetti and meatballs...

There was a 2 month stretch where every day, when I sent her my good morning text, I would try and come up with a new nickname for her. She liked the cute ones, but I always knew which ones were going to get me an eye roll emoji. “Good morning Sunbeam” “Good morning Biscuit” “Good morning Gummy Worm” “Good morning Beansprout” (like I said, disgusting).

Eventually we started calling each other “Baby”.

It was such a fitting pet name because she brought out a side of me that was so playful, and earnest, and silly, and trusting, that it was almost childlike. One of the phrases that I kept coming back to whenever I tried to describe why I liked her so much was, “She makes me feel safe”.

In the same way Amber having a boyfriend allowed me to drop my guard around her, Maddie living across the country was this perfect little cushion for my attachment style, and besides, I constantly had this little “it can never actually work out because she’s not Mormon” voice yelling at me in the back of my brain if my feelings ever got too real.

She comes from an insanely “Type-A” family so she was laser-focused on getting into med school and didn’t want a serious boyfriend until she did (she was also worried about my very obvious red flags), and my attachment style wasn’t interested in me committing, which created this absolutely surreal, dream-like space where we could both just lean in and revel in this weird, intoxicating, non-committal dynamic that we had going on without worrying about getting hurt. I got to keep making my “aww I’m so sad because I’m still single” social media content, and she was able to just focus on school, because we both knew a serious relationship wasn’t realistic anytime soon.

Those weren’t the only ways she made me feel safe though. I remember one time she was going to a birthday party that one of her exes was going to be at. They were still on good terms (she was on good terms with all of her exes), had lots of friends in common, and (understandably) he was still super in love with her. She knew I was insecure about it so partway through the party, completely unprompted, she stepped aside and sent me a text that said, “hey, i just wanted to let you know that you’re the only person i’m thinking about right now. i can’t wait to talk when I get home”.

Little things like that were common and second nature to her.

I was so cynical, and accustomed to people only being nice to me when they wanted something. My whole life I was surrounded by the type of people whose lives were changed by reading How To Win Friends and Influence People. I spent half of my mission learning how to emotionally manipulate people, to gain their trust, so that I could try and baptize them. Call it projection, but kindness always felt transactional, manipulative, and calculated. Compliments made me uncomfortable and I never, ever took them at face value. But then I met Maddie...

Have you ever been unironically uplifted without ulterior motive? She would tell me all the time about how much she loved my creativity, and the way I made her laugh, and how attractive she thought I was. When I told her I was nervous about starting a podcast she told me how beautiful my mind is and how if people don’t like it it’s because they’re stupid.

One time she said, unprompted, “i know that objectively there’s some people in this world that are more attractive than you, but i love you so fucking much, and i’m so attracted to your mind, and your personality, and your body, that if timothée chalamet or somebody like that walked into the room right now, i wouldn’t even look. it would be like i was wearing fucking blinders”.

I didn’t know that people could say things like that...? More importantly, I didn’t know that people could actually mean it. She made me feel emotions that I literally didn’t even know existed.

I was so used to my friends giving me backhanded compliments about how it’s great that I was having success at something as cringey as social media, or my Dad telling me that he admired traits that I literally didn’t have, or weaponizing compliments as a form of self-fulfilling-prophecy and control: “You’re so obedient” “I love how forgiving you are” “You’re such a good peacemaker” “I’ve always admired your humility” “You’re so Christ-like” “I love how quickly you always repent (??????)”

There’s this quote by Tim Keller

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.

That’s how I felt. I felt like I was being loved by God.

That’s not to say that the relationship was perfect, or that she was perfect, or that I was perfect; it’s just, I was experiencing something completely novel. She opened up an entire avenue of experience, and range of emotions, that I didn’t even know existed. Amber was the first person I ever felt attached to, but Maddie was the first person I ever felt... well... literally all of the other things to. She was the first person I ever trusted enough to say “the L word” to.

Maddie was the first healthy, adult relationship I ever experienced; not just “romantic relationship” but relationship period. I was SO fucking bad at communicating when we first met, holy shit. Every time a normal, human conflict came up, I would immediately get defensive, lie, deflect, and attack because my brain did not know how to separate “you made a mistake” and “you’re a bad person and I’m going to leave you because of it”.

About 8 months in I started to realize that I genuinely loved this girl and was starting to get super attached, which meant that she now had the power to hurt me. Out of nowhere I freaked the absolute fuck out; we had been talking literally every day for months, but one day I woke up and decided I was no longer interested, and I had absolutely no idea how to communicate that, so I just stopped responding. I, as a fully grown man, ghosted the girl I was completely in love with.

I don’t know what story I told myself about why I ghosted, I just know my body no longer felt safe and reacted accordingly. It probably remembered what it was like to trust Amber and the way that worked out. Now that I was catching genuine feelings, it probably snapped out of the fairytale space we’d created and started to think about logistics: Am I going to have to leave the Mormon church? Am I going to hell? Am I a bad person that’s listening to Satan because I want to date her? Do I have to break up with her? How would I tell my friends and family I’m dating a non-Mormon? Can I trust a single thing I believe? Is she a bad influence? Am I going to have to drop my life and move across the country? Is she going to leave me just like everybody else in my life has left me? Is she going to leave me when she finds out just how bad my mental health has actually been? (She knew a lot about my trauma and mental-health-history, but I kept some of the more horrific incidents, and the full-extent of the dysfunction of my family-dynamics, to myself).

It was probably all of these things and more, I don’t know, but I went completely silent. I went from “head-over-heels-in-love” to “fully convinced that it wouldn’t work out, that it could never work out, and that I never even had feelings in the first place” in a matter of days. Our brains are weird like that (or at least mine is). A few weeks earlier I was crying just hearing about something sad that happened in her day, now I didn’t feel one singular emotion towards her and put her out of my mind completely.

She was pissed, and things were never the same after that, but she handled it like an adult (thank God one of us could). She asked me why the fuck I did that and I said “I don’t know”. She said, “No, that’s not an answer, why the fuck did you do that?” and I mumbled something about being stressed. She said, “No, that’s not an answer, why the fuck did you do that?” and after an embarrassing amount of time we finally got to the point where I could be like, “This is starting to feel real to me and I feel really scared because I don’t want you to hurt me. I’m so sorry.”

We were in a weird spot. Both of us clearly liked each other, our intellectual and emotional chemistry was ~fucking electric~, and we were wildly attracted to one another; but also we lived in separate states, weren’t committed, I’d just ghosted her for a week, I’d never been in a serious relationship, I was still learning how to communicate, and there was still clearly a bunch of trauma I needed to work through, and I still needed to figure out my beliefs and identity.

We kept talking everyday, but she encouraged me to start going on dates with other girls while she focused on getting into med school. She didn’t want to be the one responsible for me leaving the church; she knew that it would strain my family and friend dynamics, so she wanted me to figure that out on my own, and make that decision independent of her. She didn’t want to hold the weight of taking my virginity, or feeling responsible for a mental-health-spiral if things didn’t work out.

She loved me, but the thought of dating me (understandably) made her nervous. She knew that I’d been suicidal throughout my entire life, she knew that I had casual friends but no intimate friendships, she knew about my family dynamics and my relationship with my parents, she knew that I was still figuring out my beliefs, and obviously she knew that I still had attachment issues to work through considering I’d just ghosted her for a week. She loved me, and she told me that all the time, but she could tell that I was drowning and didn’t want me to drag her down with her.

I’ll never forget the first time she caught me lying to her. It was about something small, and stupid, and understandable, so I didn’t think it would be a huge deal, but it was definitely was. She asked if we could take a break from talking for a few days so that she could gather her thoughts, and then she came back and basically said, “You’ve broken my trust. I probably won’t believe a lot of the things you say going forward. Don’t ever fucking lie to me again. It ruins relationships” and then for some reason she stayed.

That decision changed my life. I was a walking red flag, and she knew it. She had every right to leave me when I lied to her, but instead she did something that no other human being in my life ever had: she held me accountable for my shitty behavior, told me how much it hurt her, and then told me she still loved me, and cared about me, and understood how I never had a good model of communication growing up, and feel so much shame, and she was so sorry about how hard my life had been, and that I was safe and she wasn’t going anywhere.

If I was a paper boy that had been thrown out to sea to disintegrate, then Maddie was a little life boat that pulled me out of the water and breathed life back into my body.

She was the first person, in my entire fucking life, that didn’t outsource her compassion to something else. She knew I was drowning, but instead of telling me to wait for a fourth-watch God, or to go to therapy, or saying “I’m here if you ever need to talk”, or giving me a bunch of tasks to “un-depress” me, or sending me a podcast link, or a scripture, or telling me that “everything happens for a reason”, or leaving me because she didn’t want to deal with it - she held my hand and showed me how to walk on water.

All of the romantic stuff was great (the cute texts, and the emojis, and the chemistry) but it was the mature adult stuff that she lovingly, patiently, and painstakingly taught me (healthy conflict resolution, fighting and making up, trust) that joined us at the hip. I would have killed for her. I would have killed myself for her. I didn’t know it was possible to care about somebody else as much as you cared about yourself. When she laughed, I laughed. When she cried, I cried.

I knew that I needed to protect this at all costs, so (unhealthily) my entire identity started to get completely swallowed up by “What would make Maddie the most happy?”

One time she very casually mentioned that in a perfect world she would be dating somebody that drank (she wasn’t suggesting I try it, or trying to push me, or anything like that). I was 25 at the time and had never tried alcohol (I don’t even think I’d been offered alcohol?) but as soon as she said that I immediately called my only friends I knew that drank, and then the next weekend I took shots of Tito’s without a chaser until I threw up.

The sex life was........... sexual.........

My entire life I associated anything related to sexuality with shame. I felt ashamed every time I made out with someone, I felt ashamed for wanting to make out with someone, and I felt ashamed for being so fucking horny all the time.

I grew up with stories about about how “The reason Ted Bundy became a psychopathic murderer is because he got addicted to porn and it deadened his conscience”. The only time my parents ever talked about sexuality with me is when (every couple months) my Dad would pull my aside and without making eye contact would very awkwardly say, “I know you never would because of how obedient you are, but I just want to remind you how evil pornography is, and how it ruins people’s entire lives.” I never saw my parents kiss. Ever. I never saw them hold hands, or cuddle, or kiss on the cheek, and they usually sat at opposite ends of the dinner table.

When I got “the talk” I walked away with the impression that sex was a super awkward, unenjoyable act that adults forced themselves to go through because it’s worth having children. I had this mental image of a man and a woman turning the lights off, walking into the corner of the room, closing their eyes so they didn’t see anything, and then awkwardly sticking it in and waiting for “the seed” to finally come out so they could hurry up and put their clothes back on.

The first time I got a boner I cried.

I was offered $1000 if I could go until I was 16 without a first kiss. When my Mom caught my 17 year old sister making out with her (2 year) boyfriend, she told her they needed to breakup.

The first church talk I ever remember reading about sex was Chastity: Of Souls, Symbols, and Sacraments where Elder Holland makese the claim that, well, you can read the highlighted portion below...

The moral authority figures that I was surrounded by at the time were part of the generation that could only obtain porn (hard core or soft) by walking into a seedy little store, going into a backroom behind beaded curtains, and paying for a magazine with a hoodie covering your face so nobody would recognize you; whereas from the time I was old enough to have an orgasm I had Instagram in my pocket pointing a super computer at my brain showing me whatever content would maximize addiction and therefore time on site (which of course was hot girls with their tits out).

I never watched hard core porn (I was an obedient little Mormon boy) but I was a suicidal teenager in a wheelchair at the height of my hormones with ubiquitous soft core pornography in my pocket, so of course I (like every other boy my age) started to masturbate. I didn’t do it often, it was usually just a way to numb out when I got super stressed, but I did it often enough that I permanently and irreconcilably felt like a bad person. I remember one time, when I was feeling particularly suicidal, getting on my knees and trying to strike a deal with God, “I promise I will stop masturbating if you please take the pain away.” I thought that the reason I was suicidal is because I was sinning, and therefore not deserving of God’s joy.

Needless to say, I’ve had a pretty complicated relationship with sexuality in my life. I never had a model for healthy sexuality in the home, I thought anything sexual outside of marriage was almost morally tantamount to murder, the first time I kissed someone (and they broke my heart) I suddenly became really interested in the concept of mortality, I thought the reason I was depressed is because I occasionally masturbated as a 14 year old boy, I thought the reason Ted Bundy murdered people is because he watched porn, and when I was suicidal on my mission the first thing my mission President asked me was, “Is it because you’re gay?”

I was so used to this weird fucking culture where everybody was ashamed of having sexual desires, but everybody was still super horny, and nobody knew how to navigate it. Sexuality (even “under the right circumstances”) always felt icky, and sinful, and taboo, so expressing any sort of sexual desires with another person always felt evil and shameful. But (again) then I met Maddie...

Maddie was a fresh of breath air (hahaha I didn’t realize the typo until just barely, but I’m going to leave it in because I think it’s funny). It was so refreshing to meet somebody with such a healthy relationship to sexuality. She helped alchemize my conceptualization of sex from “shameful thing that married people do to have children” to... well... a lot of other, healthier things.

My entire life sexual desires felt selfish. I really wanted the pleasure of an orgasm, but I knew it was wrong, so it was selfish of me to masturbate, or do anything sexual (even kissing) with another person before marriage. In this new, healthy relationship with great communication though, that whole paradigm got flipped on its head.

It was the first time I didn’t experience “Post-Nut-Clarity” and immediately felt ashamed, or wanted the other person to leave, or to throw my phone across the room. I enjoyed making her feel good and she enjoyed making me feel good. It brought us closer together instead of driving us further apart. It finally stopped feeling like “this super pleasurable thing that I want to do but shouldn’t” and started feeling like “the natural, healthy, emergent thing that people do when they love and care about each other.”

I never knew that sexuality could be uplifting, or playful, or communicative, or exploratory, or intimate, or passionate, or unapologetically animalistic, and I didn’t know that instead of being coy, or indirect with how you’re feeling, you could just say “i’m so fucking horny right now” and that would be met with enthusiasm rather than polite rejection or dispassionate tolerance.

We never went all the way (it was such a big step for me that we both wanted to wait until the relationship was more secure) but I knew that this was the person I wanted to take my virginity, and the only person I wanted to have sex with for the rest of my life.

Realistically, if I didn’t have Maddie (and her healthy relationship to sexuality) as an emotional crutch when the nudes got leaked, then I probably would have killed myself.

I didn’t take a single nude picture of myself until I was 25. Nobody had ever even seen me naked in real life up to that point, and I didn’t get my first hand-job until right before my 26th birthday. When I started going viral for the first time in the spring of 2021, though, something happened. Every time I opened my DMs there would be a new message from some random girl. I would always respond to the pretty ones, and then we’d start talking, and sometimes part way through the girl would start getting sexual: innuendos, risqué photos, descriptive texts...

At first I shut it down immediately if somebody started to go there; but also, I was an attractive guy in my mid 20s, with raging hormones and clinical depression, that was getting bombarded with attractive photos from gorgeous women that oftentimes didn’t even live in the country, so yeah, willpower can only get you so far in that situation... It took a long time to get to that point, but once I sent my first nude the flood gate opened; since I’d already crossed that boundary I pretty much just completely stopped worrying about it. There was a 3 month period in early 2021 where, pretty indiscriminately, I was sending nudes to basically any attractive girl that wanted to.

I was severely depressed, and lonely, and it was still COVID, and I loved how much attention I was getting, so I was really, really susceptible to something that addictive. It was a drug. I’d never watched porn, so not only was I now seeing beautiful naked women for the first time, but they were the ones actively pushing for nudes. It was fucking exhilarating, holy shit.

After a few months I finally came to my senses, though, realized how idiotic and reckless I was being, and stopped. However, about a year later I found out that one of (likely many of) the people I’d sent photos to was actually a catfish, had saved them without my knowledge, and was now selling them on places like Twitter, and Telegram, and websites dedicated to leaked nudes on influencers.

Obviously I was mortified. The thought of people in my community finding out, and word spreading, gave me a panic attack at least once a month for a year. It was an omnipresent, horrific, big, dark cloud of chaos that followed me around everywhere I went. I couldn’t wake up and not think about it. I couldn’t hang out with my friends and not think about it. I couldn’t sit through class and not think about it. I couldn’t play basketball and not think about it.

I’d already had a big, black cloud of darkness following my around my entire life, so this was like quadruple darkness. It was like exponential darkness. If it wasn’t for Maddie I would have killed myself. When I found out about the leaks I told her immediately (I told her pretty much everything, and she already knew that I’d sent a bunch of nudes during that time) and she immediately started crying.

She didn’t shame me, or tell me how stupid I was, or avoid the subject because it made her uncomfortable, she just cried and said, “I’m so sorry, and I love you so much”. She told me to never make that mistake again, and asked me how she could best support me during this time.

(Like I said, it felt like I was being loved by God)

She was the only person that made me feel safe enough to finally start questioning my own beliefs. Marrying outside of the faith is considered heretical in Mormonism, so it never felt like an option, but my relationship with her finally gave me the emotional space I needed to safely explore the world around me, and figure out what I actually authentically believe, without feeling like I was a bad person, or going to hell or anything like that.

She brought out this side of me (that nobody else ever saw) that was so playful, and curious, and empathetic, and creative, and authentic. I don’t know how to describe what it means to feel like you can “be yourself” around somebody else, but I know it’s important, and I know that I felt it with Maddie.

Maddie was my little safety net. No matter how dark things got, or how foggy things felt, I knew that I could always turn to Maddie. I can’t describe with words what it means to be “known” by somebody, or to be “understood”, or to be “safe”, or to have chemistry that is “fucking electric”, but even though I can’t articulate it, I know what it feels like. It’s whatever I felt when I was with Maddie. And that’s why, on October 31st 2023 when she broke up with me, I died.

It was a long and very weird “breakup”. Technically we never officially dated. She was nervous about my mental health history, wanted to wait until she got into Med school, was trepidatious to commit when we were long distance, was nervous about the the fact that I’d ghosted her 8 months in, and she really, really didn’t want to be responsible for me leaving the church (and all of the chaos that would cause) so she wanted me to figure that out before we committed; but also we’d talked about marriage, and the wedding we were going to have in northern California, and what type of band we wanted to play at it, and where we would honeymoon, and what kind of house we wanted to build, and how many kids we wanted to have, and how we would navigate the holidays, and how our work schedules would fit together...

The breakup lasted for weeks, and I fought so hard for it, but eventually I stopped trying to argue with, “I love you, and you’ll always have such a special place in my heart, but I don’t think you’re the person I imagine myself having kids with” and we went our separate ways. She left the door open, saying “I’d be down to occasionally check back in, and maybe re-evaluate in 6 months?” but I was too hurt for that and decided no-contact would be the only way to heal.

Abstractly I knew that I was angry, and hurt, and sad, and lonely, and confused, but experientially I felt nothing. From that day on I didn’t feel one single emotion. I was a walking corpse.

I didn’t just “go through a breakup”, I lost my entire future, the only person that had ever known me, my best friend, my emotional support, the only person I ever felt safe enough to have sexual chemistry with, an intellectual partner, and a personality / side of me that only she could bring out.

I felt completely disoriented and had nobody to talk to about it. I wasn’t going to therapy at the time, and my friends knew I’d been talking to someone, but she lived across the country, and I was so protective of her that I didn’t tell them much about her anyways, and besides, most of them weren’t really the “let’s talk about our feelings” type of friends anyways.

I don’t know how to communicate this authentically without it sounding... pretentious? superior? but I kind of felt like talking about her would just make me feel even more lonely and alienated.

I think what Maddie and I had was unique and special. I think we had a type of chemistry (emotional, intellectual, sexual) and depth that most people never experience in their lives, and don’t even know is possible in the human experience. I didn’t know it was possible until I met her. I think few people know what it’s like to be in a relationship where you feel fully known, fully understood, fully safe, and fully loved - and where there’s a level of mutual respect and attraction that escalates it into something that feels transcendent.

Because of that, I didn’t want to tell my friends, or a therapist, “I’m feeling sad because I just went through a breakup” and then have them be like, “Aww, man, I’ve been there. Breakups are tough bro I’m sorry”. I was already feeling sad, the last thing I wanted was to feel misunderstood. I didn’t want the weight of my feelings to be minimized, or to hear “look on the bright side” or “everything happens for a reason” or “there’s plenty of fish in the sea” or anything like that.

The holidays had always been a hard time in my life; they’re supposed to be a time where you come together, take some time off from work, and spend time with your family, but I don’t like spending time with my family, the holidays reminded me of that, and I no longer had Maddie to talk me through it. A few weeks after the breakup, on Thanksgiving day, was the first time I remember my brain telling me to drink.

It started off super infrequently; a glass of wine because it’s thanksgiving, a couple glasses because it’s Christmas, because it’s the Superbowl, because it’s the weekend, because it was a long day...

I’d been able to take it my entire life. My childhood, and middle school, and high school, and the mission, and the eating disorder, and the nude leaks, throughout all of it I was miserable, but I was so fucking resilient. My entire life I’d demonstrated an almost inhuman capacity to just put my head down and weather the storm. Lesser men than me would have killed themselves a long time ago, and I took pride in the fact that no matter how bad things got I would always, always, always be able to keep going.

But like I said, when I lost Maddie, I died. There was no longer a “me” to keep going.

It’s funny, for a while I was watching myself parrot the “I’m not an addict, I can stop whenever I want” cliche to myself in real time. Even when I was drinking four days a week I still told myself that I had everything under control. Finally, in July of 2024, I stopped pretending. I stopped pretending like I wasn’t an addict, and just accepted that the real world was too painful for me to experience sober, and that this was the only way that I knew how to cope right now.

I started drinking every day. I’d wake up, go to grad school lectures, come home, do homework, and then the second the sun went down I drank. I was going through half a bottle of vodka a day.

That entire “post-breakup” year of my life was a drunken haze (literally). I felt like a xerox, of a xerox, of a xerox, of a xerox, of a xerox, of a xerox, of a xerox, of a xerox, of a xerox, of a xerox...

I’ve experienced a lot of truly horrific and traumatic things in my life (most of which I didn’t include in this essay) but Maddie breaking up with me is still the single hardest thing I’ve ever gone through and it’s not particularly close.

In late August of 2024 the lease at my apartment in Arizona was about to expire. The plan had always been to go live outside of the state for a year to get familiar with a culture outside of Utah, and then once my lease expired move out east to live with Maddie. Obviously that was no longer an option so, unsure of where to go, I moved back to Utah. I had been drinking every single day, for 2 months, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to force myself to get sober. I moved in with roommates in order to keep myself accountability, and quit alcohol cold turkey.

Utah was good to me. I was no longer drinking, I wasn’t surrounded by people who drank, and I was socializing a lot more. I finally decided that I was ready to start dating again, and I’d just finished grad school so I was excited to start working and put this chapter of my life behind me.

Slowly, my mood started to shift. I had more energy and was more clear-headed. I started to feel emotions again for the first time in a year; I felt like I was unthawing. I started reading a lot more, and writing, and spending lots of time at the gym, and hanging out with friends, and going on dates.

I started to feel like I was finally seeing the world in color again. I would go on long walks at night and just admire the beauty of the world all around me. I started reading several hours a day because every subject fascinated me. I started randomly calling my friends and telling them how much I loved them, and how grateful I was that they were in my life. I started to walk around with newfound confidence. I started doing things that I’d never done in my life; like cold-approaching pretty girls at the gym just to make conversation.

I started to write. A lot. At first I was just trying to get my thoughts sorted out; I was still writing in my notes app all the time, but I decided that instead of just having random thoughts sprawled across my phone, I would actually try and zero in on the important ones and flesh them out coherently. Even though I never formally studied English, or anything like that, I always felt like I was a decent writer, and usually got good feedback on my essays at University, so I decided that maybe I would write some scripts and start a YouTube channel as a passion project.

I felt like maybe, for the first time in my life outside of Maddie, the fog was lifting for a bit. Is this what other people felt like all the time? Is this what normal human life was supposed to be like? I remember thinking, “Wow, my entire life I thought I was an introvert, but maybe I was just clinically depressed, and I’m actually an extravert!” It made sense, my mood was very.. extraverted...

I woke up every day excited to see what life had in store for me. I talked to everybody: people at the gas station, people in my apartment complex, people at the gym, people on the street. I was feeling so fulfilled - my cup was overflowing so much - that I just wanted to talk to other people and help them experience the light that was radiating out of me. I started going into fast food drive-thrus, buying a bunch of food, and then driving around and giving meals to homeless people.

I started to struggle falling asleep because I was so excited about all of the ideas that were constantly bouncing around in my head. My body naturally woke me up at 6 am every day because it was thrilled to experience life in all of its beauty. I looked around me and everything started to feel sacred and imbued with meaning: bugs, plants, sunlight, food, water, air...

I’m sure by this point you can probably see where this is going. Maybe you even experienced it in real time, idk. The thing about the first really bad episode I had like this - where I thought I should drop out of school and start a business - is that I experienced it privately. Maybe that was for the worst, because I just internalized the shame and never spoke about it, but at least nobody else got wrapped up in it and I could pretend like it never happened.

This time, though, I had 350,000 Instagram followers.

In late September of 2024 I finished my YouTube scripts, filmed the videos, edited them, and they were ready to post. The initial YouTube videos feel twisty in my brain because there was actually some genuinely interesting stuff in there; I was talking about things like philosophy, democracy, existential risk and tech, and they were actually fairly well written, and delivered in a way that definitely came across as... different? creative? maybe a bit pretentious? anxious? but probably not unhinged, or a cause for concern.

The more I sat with those videos before posting them, though, (and the less I started to sleep, and eat, and all of that) the more I became convinced that what I was doing was deeply important. People NEEDED to hear what I had to say, and as soon as they heard my message their lives would be transformed in the same way mine was. I wasn’t doing this out of ego or anything like that, I was just authentically trying to lift people up to a higher spiritual plane of living.

This was my life’s work, and everything that had happened to me so far was just leading up to this moment. I felt like my purpose in life was to share these ideas with the world, and I knew that the right people would resonate with them immediately. I started to strategize about how I could most effectively get this message out into the world, not because I wanted attention, but because I knew it was the right thing to do.

I decided I was going to start an Only Fans.

Naked pictures already existed of me on the internet, people were making money off of them, and I was sick of that big, black cloud of darkness following me around everywhere I went, so I figured I would just start an Only Fans, put the pictures up, take the money for myself and stop worrying about it. That way I could alchemize my suffering, and fund my life’s work without ever having to worry about where the money was coming from.

On October 5th 2024 I posted my YouTube videos and linked to them on my Instagram. On October 6th 2024 I started an Only Fans, and then posted videos on Twitter and Instagram explaining why. My subscription fee was $25, so after Only Fans took their 20% cut I made $18,000 that day. I then took the link to my first YouTube video and sent it to pretty much every influencer I knew. I said something along the lines of, “Hey, I know this is weird, but I want to share this video with you. I just think it’s super important and thought that you might like it”.

In my mind, I genuinely believed that as soon as they watched this video they would have a spiritual awakening like I did, and immediately want to share it with everybody they knew. I wasn’t doing this out of ego, in fact it was the exact opposite; I was embarrassed reaching out to other influencers - I knew how it would come across and I didn’t want to do it - but I also felt like it was my sacred moral duty, like I didn’t have a choice, so I put my ego aside and did it anyways.

The next 4 months were pretty surreal. I knew I was making the right decision to start an Only Fans, but didn’t want to “explain myself” to people that weren’t spiritually enlightened like I was, so I put my phone on do not disturb and didn’t check to see what people were texting me. I didn’t read any comments on my videos, or check metrics, or read any of the DMs I got back, because I knew what I was doing was right and I didn’t want “worldly influences” trying to “pollute my mind”.

Pretty much every day, for 4 months, I woke up at 6 am, immediately started writing, filmed and uploaded a YouTube video whenever I finished a script, and then spent my free time either driving around town and giving meals to homeless people, or just walking around and being completely overwhelmed with the sheer beauty and sacredness of the universe.

I just woke up and wrote about whatever I felt like writing about that day: technology, psychology, philosophy, tech, anthropology, literature, computer science, history, game theory, existential risk, politics... Eventually it got to the point where I wasn’t even writing scripts, I was just waking up, showering, turning on the camera, and then filming 4 hour YouTube videos about literally whatever thoughts were in my head. Every word that came out of my mouth felt meaningful, and I figured everybody listening to them would feel the same way, so I didn’t even need to think about what I was saying, I would just record whatever thoughts were in my head and then post them without a second thought.

I never checked metrics (because I didn’t care, I knew what I was doing was right) but I acted like the whole world was watching. Sometimes I would start talking directly to the most powerful people in the world, and if there was ever a knock at our apartment door there was a voice in the back of my head that thought maybe it was the FBI, or the CIA, and that they were coming to assassinate me because they felt threatened by how powerful my videos were.

I would tweet, and post on Instagram occasionally throughout all of this. Usually it was just ramblings about whatever I was thinking. Sometimes it was half naked pictures to drive traffic to my Only Fans. I didn’t think, or care, about how all of this was coming across to my followers, I was too focused on the importance of my mission. I cried all the time on camera, and overshared tons of sensitive information.

I saw meaning everywhere. I started taking pictures of everything I thought was meaningful, started writing a bunch of (pretty cringey and bad) poetry, and one day I spent 8 hours straight tearing apart my old scrap book, and journals, and using them to create a collage to represent my inner psyche.

I started going to therapy again partway through January because I figured that even though I was thriving, there was probably still some things in my past that would be useful to work through. On February 3rd 2025 things finally started to shift when I brought up an event from my childhood that I’d never talked about before with anyone. Ever. I’m not a psychologist, so I can only hypothesis based on my lived experience, but it seems like the emotional weight of that conversation snapped me out of that state and forced me to come back down to reality.

It took a couple weeks to fully come to grips with what happened. I slowly stopped feeling that “creative spark”, stopped seeing meaning everywhere I looked, and stopped feeling so confident about everything I said. I started to go back and watch old videos, and read old tweets, and was absolutely mortified. For the first time, in 4 months, I started to internalize the fact that I had started an Only Fans, willingly posted naked pictures of my body on the internet, and all of my friends, everybody in my community, people from High School, all of my extended family, everybody, probably knew about it. I started to internalize the reality of the fact that I publicly humiliated myself in front of 350,000 people, for 4 months. I finally realized, in an embodied way, that I had DMd tons of famous influencers, most of whom I had never met, and sent them my own YouTube video out of nowhere. 17 days after that therapy conversation I ordered an Airbnb in the area so I could be alone and, on my birthday, drank for the first time in 6 months.

I drank every night for a month. I lived with roommates, so I snuck alcohol in with a backpack, locked myself into my room, and drank. It was too painful to think about everything that happened. I couldn’t even begin to touch it. I reached out to a few friends, who I was hanging out with before things went south, and they politely agreed to go to dinner sometime, but you could tell that they had absolutely no fucking idea what to say to me or how to approach me.

I felt like a 17th century Salem witch, or a leper in the New Testament. I felt tarnished. I felt diseased. I’d hit rock bottom before, but this was a special, lower, rockier type of bottom. I’d felt suicidal for most of my life, but this was the first time I ever put together a date and plan. I decided that on April 1st, 2025, I was going to kill myself.

Sometime between March 20th and April 1st I decided to choose life. I wasn’t thrilled with either of my options, but I figured that between “make a fuck-load of money on Only Fans” and “kill yourself” the former was the better of two evils, so that’s what I did. I dissociated the entire time, and made about $40,000 a month for 3 months (April, May, June) to give myself an economic cushion and figure out how to turn things around.

As of the time of me writing this (11/19/2025) I’m happy to report that I’m officially 3 months sober. I’ve got my feet underneath me, I have people in my life that know about what’s been going on, I have professionals in the loop, I’ve got a stable routine, hobbies I enjoy, plans for the future, people to spend time with, all of that good stuff. So no worries.

---

Why did I write this?

In the first Harry Potter book there’s this trope where nobody wants to say the evil guy’s name, so instead everybody refers to him as “he who shall not be named”. It’s almost like they’re thinking, “maybe if I pretend it doesn’t exist then it can’t actually hurt me”.

In the Scooby Doo television episodes there’s always these big scary monsters running around terrorizing everybody. At the end of every episode, though, right after you think all is lost, they catch the monster, take off its mask, and learn the exact same lesson they learned last episode: maybe the big scary thing isn’t actually as terrifying as you thought it was.

In the first Batman video game in the Arkham universe there’s this character, Scarecrow, who attacks you with a “fear gas” that starts shaping your perception of the world around you. He becomes this big, scary, almost cosmic entity that you have to hide from, and the only way that you can defeat Scarecrow is by shining a big, bat-signal light on him.

There’s this one scripture in the New Testament that growing up I always knew was important, but I never really had the vocabulary to articulate why.

John 8:32 The truth shall set you free.

My favorite band growing up was Twenty One Pilots. They make this really angsty, earnest music, and I fell in love with it the second I heard it. There were a lot of lyrics that really resonated with me when I was a kid, but there’s one that I think is particularly germane to all of this:

Are you searching for purpose?

Then write something, yeah it might be worthless

Then paint something then, it might be wordless

Pointless curses, nonsense verses

You’ll see purpose start to surface

No one else is dealing with your demons

Meaning maybe defeating them

Could be the beginning of your meaning, friend

I only had 1 teacher throughout all of High School that I really liked, and I only got half a semester with him because I transferred high schools part way through. He was my creative writing teacher, and the only person in real life that ever encouraged me to express myself through writing. The first book we read in his class is about a high school freshman who becomes isolated after a traumatic event that she can’t bring herself to talk about. It’s just titled speak.

I believe that when a feeling gets trapped into language it immediately becomes less crippling.

All of this shit that’s happened over the past couple of years - the breakup, the nude leaks, the 4-month-episode, the Only Fans, the DMs, the alcohol - has just been this big, black, hazy, scary, Voldemortey, Scarecrowey, spider-webby, horrific pit of chaos in my brain. It’s been an omnipresent cloud of darkness that just never leaves me alone.

I’ve been soooo fucking embarrassed about what’s happened. I really try not to overuse the word because I want to avoid concept creep, but I think these last two years have been genuinely traumatic. I think that’s an appropriate use of the word. The 4 month episode last year alone was traumatic; it completely shattered my sense of self, identity, and made me feel like I no longer knew myself, or could trust a single thing I do or believe.

Then you add all of the other things I never processed on top of that - the breakup, the nude leaks, the fact that I became an alcoholic, the Only Fans - and it’s just been layers and layers and layers of trauma all stacking on top of each other.

Then on top of all of THAT I’ve had to internally grapple with a huge identity shift and worldview change. I’m no longer Mormon, and cognitively I feel incredibly comfortable and confident with that decision (I flesh out a bit of my worldview here, and will continue to do so on this Substack) but emotionally it has been (and still is) so fucking stressful.

My parents believe I’m going to hell and (like my Mission President) actively believe that the reason I’ve had “mental-health-issues” is because I’m a bad person. All of the people I grew up with think I left the church because I’m listening to the devil. My old friends think it’s because I’m rationalizing an excuse to not pay my tithing (give the Mormon church 10% of my money) and to have pre-marital sex (I’m literally a virgin) or to justify my decision to start an Only Fans (I did that against my own will, and I think pornography is bad).

No matter how confident I feel about my decision to leave there’s always this little voice in the back of my head whispering “you only did it because you’re a bad person”. People in the church reinterpret the 25 years of brainwashing that produced that voice as “the spirit telling me what is true” and use it as evidence to claim that “deep down I always knew that leaving is wrong, but I did it anyways because I’m a bad person”.

The church (all worldviews) has a lot of really useful protector memes that stop people from ever leaving or questioning the worldview: doubt comes from the devil, true happiness can only be found in the church, intellectualism is dangerous because no man could ever know more than God’s prophets, if you left it’s because you wanted to sin, if you feel at peace that’s proof that the gospel is true, if you feel unsure about your beliefs that’s Satan trying to pull you away, you can only go to heaven with your family if you marry in the temple, any criticisms of the Church are “anti-Mormon-literature” from anti-Christ archetypes, all good things that happen to you are blessings from God, all bad things that happen to you are either trials or because you sinned, when the Prophet speaks debate is over, people outside the Church “just don’t understand real happiness”, the burden of proof is on you to prove that the church isn’t true and no amount of evidence is ever sufficient, faith (belief without evidence) is actively reframed as virtuous, criticisms of the church are just proof that it’s true because only truth would draw Satan’s attention like that, people that leave just want an easier path in life, there’s internal language that creates an “us versus them” dynamic and insulates Mormons from the real world (set apart, endowed, stake, worthy, unrighteous dominion), they say there’s no where else to go and no one else who will take you in...

Take this quote from Elder Ballard:

If any one of you is faltering in your faith, I ask you the same question that Peter asked: To whom shall you go? If you choose to become inactive, or to leave the restored Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, where will you go? What will you do? The decision to walk no more with the church members and the Lord’s chosen leaders will have a long term impact that can not always be seen right now. There may be some doctrine, some policy, some bit of history that puts you at odds with your faith, and you may feel that the only way to resolve that inner turmoil right now is to walk no more with the saints. If you live as long as I have you will come to know that things have a way of resolving themselves.

It’s an entire memetic immune system that’s all encompassing. Any critique of the worldview, even within your own mind, is pre-framed as evidence of spiritual failure. It’s systemic, institutionalized gaslighting. If you question God’s prophets, or have doubts about the worldview, it’s because you are bad, uninformed, immoral, and diseased. You’re a heretic, and a witch, and an apostate.

Intellectually I understand all of this, but emotionally... leaving a cult is still hard even when you know it’s a cult. It’s super socially costly, and any worldview change (religious or non-religious) is incredibly stressful and cognitively demanding, especially when there’s nobody you can turn to in real life that believes what I believe.

The point is, my life the past couple years has just been darkness growing on an exponential curve.

For the longest time I couldn’t even think about the Only Fans without having a panic attack. It’s always been looming in the back of my head, but I’ve still just been trying to live my life like those stupid fucking Harry Potter characters, “Maybe if I pretend it didn’t happen, then it can’t actually hurt me”.

The issue is when things get swept underneath the rug they don’t go away, they fester. There’s this quote by Jung, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Just because I wasn’t consciously thinking about everything that’s happened doesn’t mean it didn’t have this insidious stranglehold over my life. I was anxious from the second I woke up to the moment I went to bed. I hid behind a persona every time I talked to someone because I figured that as soon as they found out who I really am, and everything that I’ve done, they would either leave me, or treat me the same way my “friends” treated me at that dinner.

To them you’re just a freak. Like me! They need you right now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out. Like a leper! See their ‘morals’, their ‘code’, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show ya, when the chips are down these... ‘civilized people’? They’ll eat each other. See I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve.

Besides Maddie, I never really had people in my life that I trusted enough to talk about this type of stuff with, so the primary way I expressed myself was through art and humor. I tried to draw what I was feeling, and found out that if I just hid behind layers of irony and sarcasm then I could tentatively speak painful truths into existence in a roundabout way.

Now I finally feel like I’m in a place mentally where I can just come out and speak plainly about what happened. Writing this has been super therapeutic for me; my primary audience was myself. Once I began to articulate what happened it immediately started to feel less crippling to me. Speaking it into existence (acknowledging that it actually happened in the real world) made me realize it’s actually way less scary than I originally felt it was. The big chaos cloud of darkness didn’t disappear (and never will completely) but it’s definitely started to feel more manageable.

I like giving my demons a seat at the table.

I like knowing that I can now look Medusa, or the Basilisk (or whatever metaphor you wanna use to describe a big scary Voldemorty pit of chaos) directly in the eyes without becoming paralyzed by it.

It’s real. It happened. My nudes got leaked. I had an eating disorder. I left the church. Maddie broke up with me. I became an alcoholic. I went through a public mental breakdown, DMd a bunch of famous influencers about my unhinged YouTube videos, and started an Only Fans.

All of those things happened in the real world and it sucks, and I hate it, and I wish they didn’t, but they did; but that’s okay because I can handle it.

I can look those things directly in the eyes, admit that they happened, and still believe that I’m a good person that’s capable of change, and worthy of both forgiveness and love. Maybe I’ll even come out stronger on the other side, idk. I mean if I can handle this then I can handle fucking anything, you know what I mean?

(I’d like to think that’s what I meant by “walking through the lake of rot” and “swallowing darkness itself” but idk, I wasn’t exactly myself at the time so who knows).

---

The second reason I wrote this is because on October 6th 2024 I (without my own consent) made my private life public. The other times in my life when I had severe, several day long episodes like I did last year, nobody else really knew about it and I was able to process it privately; but obviously I wasn’t afforded that luxury this time because I took my problems online.

I’m pretty detached from my social media. I don’t look at follower counts, or view counts, or comment sections, or DMs, and I have pretty strict boundaries with my friends in real life about how I don’t like talking about it. Social media, to me, is just a place where I go to express myself with really cringey videos, and also a business where I make money. I just make videos that I personally find funny, and then post them into the void and forget they exist. I don’t scroll, and I don’t pander to my audience because I have absolutely no idea how my audience reacts to my content; I don’t check.

Because I don’t have that type of para-social relationship that most influencers have with their followers, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about how my public mental breakdown landed with other people. Followers, to me, have always just been this abstract number on a screen. I don’t interact with them, and I’ve never viewed myself as somebody to “be a fan of” or “look up to” in any meaningful way. I’ve seen how dangerous it is when people become obsessed with metrics, and are always in their comments section, and the absolutely out-of-control narcissism that it breeds, and I want to stay as far away from that as humanly possible.

However:

1. My public reputation is still important to me (even though I personally feel detached from social media, I still want people to read my Substack essays and watch my content) and last year I completely obliterated it. I thought about pretending like it never happened and just going back to posting as usual, because most people don’t care about my personal life and just enjoy consuming the content, but I think I owe the people that stuck around at least some sort of explanation; and a simple “my bad guys, mental illness” doesn’t really cut it when what happened was that jarring. The only way my public mental breakdown becomes coherent is within the broader context of my life’s story; in a vacuum it just looks psychotic.

2. I don’t get approached a lot in public, but I get approached often enough to know that there’s a non-zero amount of people out there that care about and resonate with my content. I’m not claiming this is representative of my typical follower, but I’m reminded of one girl in particular that approached me one time at the gym. She didn’t tell me her life’s story, but it was just so obvious that she’d fucking been through it. She was clearly super nervous to approach me, afraid to make eye-contact, and was just like, “Hey, I don’t want to interrupt your workout, but I love your content and I follow you on everything, do you mind if I get a picture?” I said of course, we took a snapchat selfie, and then she walked away. There probably isn’t many, but I feel like I owe people like her an explanation and an apology. I’m sorry.

3. Maybe there’s an offhand chance that somebody out there has had similar experiences and reading this made them feel seen. I didn’t write this essay for them, I wrote it for myself, but I know that I would have loved to read something like this when I was growing up. Lots of people can relate to “mental health problems” but the specifics of my life just feel... specific... Like I’ve never met somebody that’s had a similar experience as me under similar conditions, but if there is somebody out there like that then I hope you find this comforting.

3b? Also, for what it’s worth, I left a lot of things unsaid. I don’t think it would be fair to make the really horrific stuff public when there’s other people involved. I understand that’s oftentimes what abusers and manipulators want (to make their victims feel too afraid to speak about it, or like they would be a bad person if they did) but I trust my judgement and think some things are better processed privately and professionally even if it might be comforting for someone else to read about it (though I’m still open to it, and reserve the right to change my mind at any time about that, because writing this has been really therapeutic).

---

The third reason I wrote about this is because I’m trying really hard to integrate bipolar 1 into my life in a way that’s healthy. You probably picked it up through context, but I intentionally avoided using the label throughout the piece because I wanted you to just feel into the texture of my lived experience without immediately making snap judgements because you heard a label with negative connotations.

I feel like the way I wrote about it is faithful to how I experienced it. For most of my life I didn’t know I had bipolar (and often experience derealization and depersonalization), so I never had that type of vocabulary to explain what was going on to the people around me. All I knew, and the only language I had available to me, was what I was experiencing.

When I took 6 hours to watch Inception, or was incessantly writing thoughts down in my notes app, or when I thought about starting a business, I wasn’t thinking “Oh, I’m manic right now” I was just naturally doing the things that my brain was telling me to do. When I was exploring creative ideas, and seeing meaning in the world around me, I didn’t have a little voice in the back of my head yelling “MENTAL ILLNESS”, I was just living my life and pursuing my interests.

It’s funny, even though I literally have bipolar - so I know the complex, 3-dimensional, human, lived experience of the whole thing - I still have this caricaturized, cartoonish version of it in my head. Whenever I hear “Bipolar” I think of Kanye going on antisemitic Twitter rants and making songs like “Heil Hitler”. I think of the horror stories of people running naked through the streets and claiming that they’re Jesus. I have this flattened, 2-dimensional caricature in my brain of social pariahs that can’t be treated like normal people; like a leper, or a witch.

But I never felt that way about myself. I’ve always lived my life like a normal, functioning (well, you know what I mean) creative adult. Just because I have bipolar doesn’t mean I’m this weird, abstract “thing” that people need to be afraid of. I’ve had silly teenage crushes, and I played basketball in high school, and I like Elden Ring, and I shop at Trader Joes, and I have friends and family that I play board games with. The really severe manic episodes are concerning, but have always been super infrequent, and never random, it’s always been immediately after periods of insane stress with little sleep: first heartbreak, eating disorder, Maddie breakup and alcohol withdrawals...

I’m not ashamed to have bipolar. It’s a trait that evolved to exist in a small subset of the population for a reason; like any other personality trait it just comes with pros and cons and needs to be healthily managed accordingly. Obviously the mania is concerning when it gets out of hand, but also I have access to emotions and avenues of experience that you couldn’t even dream of. I fucking love living a life where I get to see beauty and meaning everywhere around me. I can disappear into my own head in a way that you couldn’t even comprehend; I can daydream for hours and simulate experiences that are so vivid it’s like they’re happening in real life. I love spending several hours thinking about one single scripture passage, or being so emotionally moved by a song, or a movie, that it’s all I can think about for weeks. I love coming up with new ideas, and breaking boundaries, and I like being weird, and different, and actually having a fucking personality.

And also I realize that sometimes that same beautiful, sacred mental capacity can detether me from the real world, alienate those around me, and make me do things that are cringey, impulsive and socially unaware. Like I said, pros and cons.

Because this last manic episode was so severe - both in its length and its substance - it’s been really hard for me to integrate my bipolar without feeling like it’s shameful, or like it makes me defective, or diseased. This last episode made me question my entire life and identity. Creativity has always been my way out. When things got hard in life I could always fight my way out through words, humor, or art.

However, after this episode, I stopped viewing creativity as a superpower, and started conceptualizing it as “bad mental illness bipolar thing that’s ruining your life”. I felt like if I was un-self-aware enough to start an Only Fans and say all of those things for 4 months, then I’m probably too un-self-aware to objectively evaluate any of my creative work, or even my beliefs themselves. I stopped trusting my ability to discern truth from fiction, questioned my sense of self, questioned my entire worldview, couldn’t make a single decision, and started to spiral.

I’m being long winded; the point I’m trying to make is writing this essay has helped me frame bipolar in a more grounded, integrated way. If you (or I) just look at that manic episode in a vacuum it’s super cognitively easy to just chalk it up to this catch-all, abstract, “mental-illness” thing.

However, zooming out and contextualizing the episode within the broader arc of my life - and all of the events and minor episodes leading up to it - helps me retether myself

Like I recognize that talking about the time I got my heart broken by a 16-year-old girl, over a decade later, is kind of weird; but it’s a vital part of my “mental-health-journey” and demonstrates how the signs of bipolar have been there for a long time (and contextualizes why the Maddie breakup hit so hard, and why I would turn to alcohol after something that traumatic).

That 4-month episode was as disorienting for me as it probably was for the other people who experienced it, so I have to be able to tell myself a coherent story about it to orient myself in the world without feeling overwhelmed or like something completely out of my control happened.

It helps me conceptualize bipolar as a “valid, non-shameful, useful part of your identity whose excesses need to be monitored and managed” rather than a “eww mental illness bad, scary, can’t be trusted, nobody will ever love you when they find out” type of thing.

Oftentimes it’s really hard for me to delineate between “genuinely interesting and creative idea” and “unhinged rambling connections from a manic mind” - but writing this essay (which acknowledges that both are possible) helps give me the space to safely continue being creative without being paralyzed by the thought that everything I say is stupid and manic.

---

The fourth reason I wrote this essay:

In the late 1960s Martin Seligman popularized the idea of “learned helplessness”; you can read about the specifics of the experiment if you’re interested but one of the basic takeaways is that when animals are forced to endure repeated electric shocks, without a way to avoid them, then eventually they get to the point where even when escape becomes available they just lay down and take it.

I’d been drowning my entire life and (besides Maddie) not one goddamn person did one goddamn fucking thing about it. When I was a teenager morbidly fantasizing about killing myself nobody did anything. When I was getting bullied nobody did anything. When I was dissociating, and journaling about “my dull, inescapable, psychic pain” on my mission, nobody did anything. When I almost died because I starved myself down to 111 lbs. nobody did anything. When I went through a 4 month (public) mental breakdown - posting naked pictures of myself on the internet and going on manic social media tangents for several hours every day - nobody did one goddamn fucking thing.

I grew up in a home where expressing any sort of pain, or standing up for yourself in the face of abusive behavior, was actively punished and religious language was weaponized in order to stop it.

You have no idea how many times I was told “blessed are the peacemakers”, “contention is of the devil”, and “turn the other cheek”.

I was told that Christ-like people are submissive, meek, humble, patient, and full of love; that they’re slow to anger, and longsuffering, that they bless those who curse them, and pray for their enemies.

Whenever I complained about something the response was always, “listen to yourself, you’re angry” (which is immoral, and bad, and satanic) instead of addressing the substance of the actual statement. (They conveniently never mentioned the time Jesus attacked people with a whip because he was so angry).

I was constantly told “grow up and quit living in the past” “stop blaming everybody else for your own problems” and “learn how to be a forgiving person”.

Vaguely moral language was used to enforce emotional compliance and conflict-avoidance got reframed as spiritual maturity.

I have been in constant pain my entire life and the worst, most twisted, most inverted, most satanic part about it, is that I was made out to believe that I wasn’t even allowed to suffer.

I couldn’t even find solace in my own fucking suffering.

Anytime I tried to express my pain at home I was told to shut up and be a peacemaker. Anytime I tried to express my pain to my friends they would get uncomfortable and immediately change the subject. Every last authority figure in my life either didn’t give a shit, or told me to read the scriptures so that God could take the pain away. Anytime I tried to express my pain through humor online some dumb fucking cunt would say, “What could you possibly have to be sad about?” or “Don’t you realize other people would kill to have what you have?” or “You’re a attractive, grew up with money, and have social media followers, shut up and quit complaining, you don’t know what it’s like to actually suffer”.

I recently had a dream. I was sitting on a couch across from a therapist in a minimalist room on the 10th floor of a building. The entire wall behind her was glass, and you could see far outside into the dark night. It was raining heavily and there were lightning strikes every couple of moments. The therapist and I didn’t exchange any words, but after a few minutes a dark, shadowy figure appeared next to her. The therapist then turned to the figure and said “you are doing the Spanish inquisition in the name of Christ”. After she said that all three of us got transported out into the parking lot of the same building. Rain was absolutely pouring down and the sounds of thunder were now even louder. The therapist turned to the shadowy figure and tried to say something, but it got angry and started to walk away. I stepped in front of it and said “don’t you dare run away you fucking coward”. Immediately afterwards a massive glowing cross appeared on the side of the building and the shadowy figure got transported up and nailed onto it. The entire cross then got lit on fire and flipped upside down. The therapist and I stood there in the rain and watched the shadowy figure burn alive on an upside down cross.

I’m no longer sad. I’m angry.

And unlike that 19 year old kid looking at that little white piece of paper, I know exactly what the fuck I’m angry about and who the fuck I’m angry at.

I’ve been in fight or flight mode my entire life and, like a pathetic little puppy, I’ve just laid there and taken it. Not anymore. Now I’m choosing “fight”.

Most people in my situation would have turned to a gun and either pointed it at themself, or at someone else, but not me, I’m going to turn to words.

I’m going to write, and I’m not going to stop writing until every single last thing that I have to say has been written.

If I can’t make enough money on social media to keep writing then I’ll start modeling again. If that doesn’t work I’ll start posting on Only Fans. If that doesn’t work I’ll use my masters in data science from Northwestern to get a part time remote job. If that doesn’t work I’ll downgrade my apartment and work part time as a waiter. I don’t give one singular fuck what I have to do.

I love writing. It makes my brain feel less twisty. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me right now. Therapy is good and helpful, but this is the only place where I feel like I can just fully be myself, and say exactly what I’m feeling, exactly how I want to say it.

I’m not a danger to myself right now, and don’t imagine that I will be anytime soon, but I’m not that far removed from having a date and plan to kill myself, and this is helping a lot right now, so I’m going to keep doing it.

I’m going to fight my way out with words.

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A few final things that I didn’t feel fit cleanly anywhere else in the essay.

There’s this quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti, “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. A lot of my depression, and anxiety, and mania makes sense within the context of my life and the trauma I’ve experienced, and hopefully that came through in the piece; but also, things are really scary right now. I think that anxiety is an adaptive, natural, useful evolutionary response given the circumstances (that still needs to be healthily managed, and I know catastrophizing is a real thing that should be avoided) and I think I would need to be a sociopath, and completely turn off my empathy, to not be worried about things right now.

When I say “I’m going to write my way out” I’m not just talking about personal trauma, I’m talking about all the ideas in my head that won’t leave me alone.

I write about it in my last essay, and plan on continuing to write about it, but I’m really scared about where we’re at in history. Right now, there are 9 countries with nuclear weapons and 7 of them have been involved in a direct conflict within the last year. We’re in the middle of an artificial intelligence arms with a 2 trillion-dollar market cap that threatens to render the entire entry-level workforce obsolete, and if it gets built incorrectly it could end life itself. We just officially passed our first climate tipping point, and yet the total amount of fossil fuels we use goes up literally every year. Climate can get you killed way before the venusification of the planet. As the world warms it’s the hottest countries that are affected first, like India with a billion (with a “b” people in it). Extreme weather leads to crop failures, leads to resource wars, leads to mass migration into neighboring countries like Pakistan, and that’s WW3 with nuclear weapons because of climate change. Our entire economy is dependent on oil, which is a finite resource that we’re about to run out of, and there’s no feasible way to power this same system with renewables anytime soon. We’re 38 trillion dollars in federal debt and on the brink of economic collapse, and we can’t do literally anything about any of this shit because of this stupid fucking 2 party system where every law and proposition wins with 51% of the vote and inherently polarizes half the population, so we can’t do any sort of long term thinking or strategic planning because whatever your side gets done in their 4 years of office will just get undone when the other party takes power, so all of our energy is just being wasted as heat in the form of political infighting. Meanwhile China (who hates us) has no internal friction so they can actually focus on building high speed rail and growing their military, while they just sit back and watch gleefully as we tear ourselves apart from the inside. We’re not just facing one existential risk, we’re facing several, and we have absolutely no effective strategy or coordination taking place right now because everybody in this country is too preoccupied escalating the fight with their own fellow countrymen towards civil war and dealing with the corrupt psychopaths in positions of power.

I’m not the fucking crazy one, you guys are.

The goal of this essay was not “feel sorry for me”.

I don’t turn to random people on the internet for sympathy and emotional support.

The point of this essay was to do the thing that that 19-year-old kid in Buenos Aires, staring at that blank piece of paper, couldn’t; speak.

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I’d like to close with two of the poems I wrote when I was manic last year, and then my favorite poem from someone else.

Holdfast: Robin Beth Schaer

The dead are for morticians & butchers to touch. Only a gloved hand. Even my son will leave a grounded wren or bat alone like a hot stove. When he spots a monarch in the driveway he stares. It’s dead, I say, you can touch it. The opposite rule: butterflies are too fragile to hold alive, just the brush of skin could rip a wing. He skims the orange & black whorls with only two fingers, the way he learned to feel the backs of starfish & horseshoe crabs at the zoo, the way he thinks we touch all strangers. I was sad to be born, he tells me, because it means I will die. I once loved someone I never touched. We played records & drank coffee from chipped bowls, but didn’t speak of the days pierced by radiation. A friend said: Let her pretend. She needs one person who doesn’t know. If I held her, I would have left bruises, if I undressed her, I would have seen scars, so we never touched & she never had to say she was dying. We should hold each other more while we are still alive, even if it hurts. People really die of loneliness, skin hunger the doctors call it. In a study on love, baby monkeys were given a choice between a wire mother with milk & a wool mother with none. Like them, I would choose to starve & hold the soft body.