A coherent self depends on time. You cannot have a song without a beat, or a tree without a trunk. Prior to medication and understanding I had no coherent self; I had achieved all these things and worn all these masks but none of them were me, and they had all fallen away apart from the familial ones.
What aripiprazole gave me is a self, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement. It’s worth noting that a lifetime of meditation likely helped.
So all these parts are floating around and they begin to coalesce. This is in-progress right now as I sleep. I am waking to memories I had forgotten, and they are imbued with colour where previously they were not.
Anyway I digress.
These asteroids have been pulled together and made coherent by the understanding and the processing freed up by treatment. I can now take parts of my past and try to build a ‘real self’ based on my intent, rather than impulse.
So we will flip analogy now. The tree is a planet. A newly born planet.
Early days - childhood - the land is easily malleable and the weather tumultuous. Your endocrine system shapes your nervous system. Then over time the land cools and becomes less malleable, the tempest calms, and you have a ‘normal’ brain where solid neuronal structures hold the bull share of control.
In my brain the weather never calmed down so I developed some pretty wild land as a result, to try to funnel it in productive manners. It worked until it didn’t; now I have medication and the storm has passed, I feel like I can see this underlying structures.
So I feel like I can see a coherent self and just need to warp him out of my unconscious. Which is what I’ll be doing here.
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