I cannot live my life as if I will one day turn a corner and find myself out of my mind. I cannot live in fear of it, for to do that would be to succumb to it — I must trust that I am okay. I know the danger is there, as I have fallen before, but when I look back on those times, I understand that the circumstances were rather extraordinary. I did not go psychotic my times that I did without extreme stress to my psyche, mostly in the form of drugs being taken. If I stay this course of a normal, functional, decent, productive life, it is a process that autocatalyzes: being good helps me to be good. My past madness need not be something that looms always over my head, that there be no escape from, something that I must always wonder if some word will trip me over the edge. I feel that I am a little bit stronger each day, balanced of sanity, far from the ledge.
I know what I once was. I will recollect at times those periods where I was far from this waking world, but I know it is merely to sift through ancient history, at the bones and artifacts of the past. I do not think that that makes me any less credible, that I detach myself from that which I was — I think I must, or else, after all, be caught up in the maelstrom, leaving logic strewn in my wake, to comprehend only my inner demons. I must wonder, too, how much of it I truly understand, how much of it I will never really know what it meant, if it meant anything at all. Some of it is still confusing, if I think back on it, still out of order in my memories. But all of us have that, don't we? Things in our past that we don't understand why or what? I'm guessing that mine were just a little wilder, walking in lands not all of us go, places some never come back from.
