Only an Outcast

Society is fucked.  All kinds of people will tell you that this is true; most of them are, however, too shielded by the economic structure of our world to have actually tasted the mire.  Fortunately, I am a schizophrenic which means I am among the most intimately familiar with the misfortune of living on the fringes of culture.

How did it come about that I would situate myself over the precariousness of madness?  Why don’t we, before I go into how I came to be an outcast, go into what madness isn’t?  A broken mind is not an event isolated from its environment—and not simply a chemical imbalance.  In many cases of diagnosed mental illness there may not even be any great disturbance of the brain at all.  Understand that psychiatry has been broadening the arena of maladies which it attempts to treat for centuries.  But let’s focus on schizophrenia, just for now.

I do believe that there is likely to be a chemical imbalance related to schizophrenia.  There are studies which suggest that it is not, and studies that suggest it is.  But scientific studies are imbued with bias.  My experience, in my own healing journey, suggests that my mind saved me from the harmful elements of society.  Waywardness—often associated with schizophrenia—is a reaction to a repressive culture.  Madness is the result of poverty, incarceration, drug use, alienation, and abuse—as it is manifest in, certain, eccentric people.

Society cast me aside and instead of rejoining I decided to go further into exploration of solitude.  At the age of twenty-two I set out to do a four year meditation; as part of this meditation I chose to remain abstinent.  Right in step with my decision to follow a solitary path to seek higher wisdom, I began believing I had a rat in my brain. 

My time of abstinence went on well after my decision to finish my isolation—my meditation.  All told I went eleven years without joining with another person in an enduring intimate relationship.  And this is where I say that I have seen, first hand, how society is one big propaganda campaign.  Because of my extreme spiritual desolation, I attempted suicide.  Because I had no hope for rejoining with the world, I acted to have myself incarcerated in both jails and psychiatric institutions.

And then I turned my life around.

After living in solitude for so long and rejoining the living world, I have seen something very interesting.  I’m working.  I’m very active in leading a fulfilling life.  But I’m still an outcast.  And it is not because there is anything wrong with my brain.  Society is one big orgy of gross misrepresentation.  Lies are perpetuated that blind us all; society claims to celebrate non-conformity, and radicalism; but in reality, all the real non-conformists are silenced; and the only form of “radicalism” which is supported is crap ass bourgeois hypocrisy.