I woke up in the summer of 1979 as I turned 20, reading Dostoyevsky. I was struck by the knowledge that the human world I inhabited was false, off track. In contrast to the ubiquitous pain I had experienced in my own life and saw everywhere around me, (including in the novels I was reading), I had an intuitive understanding of some higher truth that exposed this suffering as a colossal mistake. I couldn't articulate my perspective but felt it deeply.

This incongruity between my intuition and the evidence around me has driven me throughout my adult life. I didn't realize until 30 years later that this core mismatch dates back to my infancy. I was born to toxically dysfunctional parents who were together only because of my existence. The suffering surrounding me was hell, and I knew somehow I was responsible for its existence. Without me, they wouldn't be together, she wouldn't be enslaved, he wouldn't be abusing, I wouldn't be burdened by a melancholy so heavy it poisoned every waking moment.

With this as my beginning, and with the blessing of a sharp mind, I was driven to find a reconciliation between my intutive grasp of a benevolent universe and the stark shock of obsession and oppression in the human world. If life as a human was this bad, I did not want to be here. Period. But as long as I felt on the track of a solution, a way to reveal the absurd mistake at the heart of all suffering, I was motivated to live. In retrospect, I can see this was an impossibly grandiose project for any single human being to take on.

The drama of my life-or-death quest was amplified when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 27. From a conventional medical perspective, my fraught existence was considered a consequence of bad brain chemistry. But I had studied enough science, and particularly enough brain science, to know how rudimentary the diagnosis was, and on what frail evidence the prescription for medication relied. And I had tracked my own inner cycles with enough awareness to know there was order to this chaos, beauty to this pain.

I vowed to make sense of it, and to undo the chains which bound me. Suddenly I had hacked my grand quest down to size: What mistake was I making? What perceptual mistake perpetuated my alternating experiences of abyssmal depression and unbalanced (and unproductive) mania? How was I sabotaging my access to the peace and elegance which I knew to be truth?

22 years later, I believe I have some answers. My bipolar disorder is long gone. And the mainspring driving my all-or-nothing quest has been unsprung. Today I am just a guy with a few insights I'd like to share with you.