Part 2. Myth

Like a fish jumping from the frying pan into the fire, I leapt from the ocean of my mother’s illness into one of my own."

These years were as tumultuous as my childhood, not only because I carried the trauma of my past with me but also because I was becoming symptomatic with bipolar disorder myself. To make matters more challenging, I didn’t realize what was happening.

Had that been the extent of my struggles, my story could have been a compelling bipolar memoir. But the circumstances of my childhood raised deeper questions—How can anyone find happiness in a world rife with suffering, pain, and insanity, all culminating in death?

The search for an answer to that question led to many others. Questions about the nature of reality and knowledge—questions rooted in my mother’s illness and my own experience with bipolar disorder—became visceral. These were not academic debates or theoretical musings, but matters of life and death, fraught with drama and high stakes.

Thus, the issues of fragmentation, delusion, and stagnation that had defined my childhood reemerged as lived experiences, mirroring the intellectual history of the West. In that mirror world, I saw myself. And in my attempts to fix myself, I found myself trying to fix the very same problems I saw in the world. There was no distinction between the two.

I could not have survived those years without mentors, guides, and my own resilience and resourcefulness.

Like the other vignettes from my childhood, these years were marked by moments of drama, comedy, and tragedy, all interwoven with intellectual and spiritual exploration. But now, the backdrop had changed. It was no longer my mother’s insanity that shaped my world—it was my own.

Only after graduating from college did I realize that I wasn’t just escaping my past—I was awakening into a new reality entirely. A metareality, where life was no longer fragmented, but had pattern, meaning, and purpose.