The long road to insanity

This month, in recognition of World Mental Health Day , I’ll be sharing 30 snippets from my book, All My Heroes Are Weirdos.

It’s a story about a lot of things; about love and life and dreams, but more than anything, it’s a story about how I lost my mind, and how I found it again – hidden where it had always been. A mind that went from one of great strength and assertion to one of complete and utter weakness. A deluded, poisoned, tortured mind.

It’s about a journey I went on, a trillion serendipitous moments that on their own look like a series of tiny coincidences, yet, as the story unfolds, every star emanates in the form of a character, a glance, a smile, a word uttered, a move made, a feeling felt and all play a role in this clever little script that is life.

The next two years are difficult to recall – really difficult. There are some moments I remember so vividly, they torment me with nightmares when I sleep and nightmares when I wake, yet there are entire months I can barely remember. Our twisted fairytale was over, love was lost and war had begun. 

One by one the enemy’s soldiers had landed on the ground of my once strong and determined mind. They’d moved in slowly, taking very few casualties at a time so as not to raise any alarms. Dressed head to toe in black armour, they’d navigated their parachutes with precision, landing so quietly and so softly on my each and every thought that I’d barely even noticed they’d arrived. The infiltration was underway.

Every day, more and more of them were swooping in and setting up camp, digging trenches in my limbic system and lining their troops along the edges of my hippocampus. Their operation was stealth and their tactics were well calculated. They were ready for combat. My defenses were weakening and as time went on, just like a black ink being poured over a fresh, white canvas, their artillery began poisoning the inner workings of my mind.