On Friday, January 6, 2013 at noon, I entered the examination room at my physician's office who now is the "jack-of-all-trades" for every last aspect of my medical care, and thankfully so. This was an emergency visit to discuss what has become apparent to many of you upon reading a great many posts from me lately on Facebook as well as the other symptoms my family has noticed much to their chagrin that has lasted now since June. I am battling a bout of severe mania, the "high" within the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and it was obvious now upon many months of speculation how this was easy to discern: I am averaging three hours of sleep or less per night and only about an hour to two hours of a nap during the daytime hours. I also have been extremely irritable towards my beloved family members, and the relationships with my mother particularly and to a far-lesser extreme, Dad, have become met with extreme tumult and tempestuousness. I also, as I just acknowledged, have been very guilty of radical, aggressive posts in my arguing my points regarding my many opinions on Facebook, for writing nearly a dozen E-mails to my father asking him to find for me a new place to live even if it means that I will reside within a cardboard box beneath a bridge or in a homeless shelter to maintain the peace within the house; and finally, I have taken the initiative to separate myself from any and all contact with my family upstairs other than to eat my meals in the kitchen or when I am called in order to avoid a very heated fight with my mother and even my father. You have doubtlessly read over the years about my struggles with the far-more recurring issues with severe depression which have crippled my capacity to function in daily life. Well, you now have seen the flip side to my medical condition; and it, too, is a damaging characteristic to my personality, perhaps even more dangerous in that I have lost untold dozens of friends whom I had known for the majority of my life over my abhorrent and bizarre behaviors which I displayed, and could have ultimately led to my experiencing legal troubles.
While at my appointment with my physician, we discussed a great many things. I realized upon my father and I revealing so many details to him about my behavior in recent months that there are a great many underlying issues which have been manifesting within my psyche, the greatest of which is my steep rise in severe anger over the years which rarely is channeled and only becomes so through very damaging, destructive means. I told him that I have become the world's biggest cynic with regards to how I look at the world around me, no longer believing in the best within mankind, but rather that it is mired in a steep malaise descending into an abyss of decadence. Since March, I have almost completely shut myself off from my watching the world of sports; I have only watched one sporting on television since then -- the Ohio State/Michigan game last Saturday -- and even it was not for more than the last three quarters of the game. I have completely boycotted all forms of entertainment and the mass media because I feel it produces nothing other than negative messages and images that trigger the insanity within our society, and I almost never watch the news because regardless of what channel I watch, there is a spin to the stories that are reported; and furthermore, I find myself watching depressing reports of murder, mayhem, corruption by our elected officials all across the nation and the world, and of our world today which may well be building up to a third and final war which I believe may destroy the status quo ante of humanity that we have always known throughout our lives if not wipe out mankind from existence entirely. These things, to me, have destroyed my faith in the world and my fellow man; but worse still, I now am questioning my own role in these phenomena, and what I have done to contribute to the destruction of humanity. When I noticed how all of these issues within my psyche have manifested into an overflowing boiling cauldron of such a terrible distrust of all with whom and what I have known and associated with my identity in life, I now realize that I am in major trouble as a person, and that there is no doubt in my mind that the most important person being destroyed in all of this is none other than myself.
I know now more than ever before that at the age of 32 years, I am at a crossroads in my life. There are divergent paths for all people in life, and Robert Frost wrote a beautiful poem about this called "The Road Not Taken." His lyrics strike true and are now most resonant within my mind and soul, and I will post for you his epic piece so philosophical amid its simplicity which may well be the most singularly important piece of literature ever penned in American literary history:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I have remained mired in a state of solitary confinement for the entirety of my adult life since I started college in August 2000. I have made many decisions, and most have ended ignominiously in abject failure. I can state, however, that I did complete my college education even though it took for me 11 years to earn my B.A. in History, but I never was more miserable in my entire life than during my college years. I find myself realizing more profoundly than ever after my latest failure at maintaining a job that I may well not be capable of holding down one for a period of time longer than one to two years without my medical issues leading to my dismissal or resignation somehow. At this point, I have come to realize that I am needing very badly need to take a step back; to reevaluate myself and the direction my life appears to be headed; and finally, how I am going to adapt to what I believe may be a completely new direction I need to recognize as evident in how I approach living my life for the remainder of my days. My physician discussed with me what I have known for many years to be true and yet attempted to avoid the issue: I need to do whatever it takes to make myself happy, since the most important person in the world today to please is no one other than myself. And that is my newest and, forevermore, eternal and lone quest in my now final odyssey in life which will carry me into the sunset of my years on God's green Earth.
My physician became the first individual to acknowledge what I myself have feared to be true for so many years and yet even I refused to reconcile this truth within my life: the acquisition of my American Dream may not be one characterized by pecuniary wealth nor the colossal mansion as so many believe is the lone reward worthy of acknowledging. I now realize that it is perfectly acceptable to believe in what I have known to be true for many years and yet attempted to ignore this voice in my mind as being "nonsense" or my accepting mediocrity and laziness as my two personality characteristics in life that would lead me to nothing other than my disassociation with our society as it exists today. We are a society hellbent upon the acquisition of riches from a materialistic perspective; we as a whole believe that in order to be happy, we must have the capacity to buy our way into this state. For me, now, I realize this is perhaps what has served as my ultimate means of self-destruction out of all of the insanity for which I have been so guilty of acting against the tide throughout my life, which stretches as far back into my past as the earliest memories I now recollect. I am no longer willing to acknowledge what the world seems necessary to perpetuate as a mythical truth of measuring self-worth; I am no longer going to tie myself to my source of happiness in life being measured by the acquisition of great wealth courtesy of a war chest that would serve me well in that manner, but will only leave within my heart a great void of emptiness and despair. I now am aware that if I do become wealthy materialistically, the Jonathan Henderson the world knows me as today will not be the same individual if I were financially rich; I would change in character, but probably not for the better. As divisive as my personality has proven to be throughout my life, I would become universally hated upon my acquiring material wealth.
I have always wanted to write books and articles. I love to research the world around me, and I find myself these days now that I am not currently working to be doing a great deal of that. But I also have noticed how I have shut myself completely off from the rest of the world in my daily interpersonal encounters with people in the flesh, and this is not at all healthy. While I do use social media, I do so now coming to the realization that I communicate with others in one extreme format or the other -- either manic or severely depressed -- and this has wrought upon me nothing other than more misery rather than achieving the means of my speaking out to the world about the issues at hand. I see my friends who happen to be of the left-wing political persuasion raising their clenched fists and attacking those of my like mind on Facebook, and yet I respond by attacking them, which only leads to greater discord, divisions, discontent, and tragically, the loss of our longstanding comradery. The first time this occurred was between last fall and early this spring when I found myself blocking nearly a dozen individuals after debates led to insults and accusations of moral profligacy that ended long-lasting friendships. I finally decided to not only largely stop writing these posts, but to also adjust my settings on Facebook in order to no longer be able to read their disparging remarks on my news feed so that I would not fall into the same trap again. That was also when I decided that the best means for voicing my discontent with my government and the society it molds is through blogging on my current site, which I choose not to send its URL to others unless I feel it is safe to do so. Now, however, I have returned to many of my old excesses amid growing extremes in my reactions, and when I see that my best friend in all of the world is now deleting the majority of my posts because of this fundamental truth about my current mental state, it is time to act and to do so decisively. The remedy may well mean that I completely shut myself off from all social media, though I have yet to determine whether this should be a temporary solution or one that is permanent and final.
When I reflect upon my life living with the diagnoses of severe bipolar disorder and OCD since April 2002, I realize two things about myself are true: I have been living a life mired in denial and lies of who and what I am rather than accepting what is true and acting accordingly to mitigate my circumstances rather than ignoring my personal demons, and; I realize now that in my life, there has been no greater person guilty of unbridled, sheer hypocrisy than myself since through all of my attempts to address my circumstances, all I have ever done is posit forth solutions amid my self-manifested truths that have done nothing more than lead to more of the same problems, and I have therefore built a mound of an ant hill out of what should have been an earth filled with a few granules of dirt. The logic of who I am according to others I now realize is in direct diametrical opposition of what society sees of me: I am identified by my illnesses. I now know that I have to step back and reevaluate my life, my modus operandi, how and what should be my goals in life as to what my contributions to society may well have to be in terms of self-implemented limits in order to better serve the greater good of mankind. But most importantly, I have to usher in for myself a new era characterized by a new sense of happiness. If living a life of asceticism void of all attempts at ever again attaining material indulgences and faux creature comforts is the answer to my troubles with abject misery, that will be my new approach to living my life. For me, the concept of my living out the remainder of my days as a researcher and writer of books and poetry regardless of the financial rewards I may or may not reap may well be greater than any acquisition of monetary prosperity I could ever hope to gain. And if I have to divorce myself completely from ever again reading what to me is nothing more than a media blitzkrieg of sad and depressing stories about murder and mayhem that nearly all were caused by mankind's avarice amid the acquisition of power or the disharmony between human beings one, I will do so, not because I do not care about the poor victims who died or suffered the wrath of those who are malevolent souls, but because I myself have become a victim of these events destroying not just my faith in humanity, but most of all, myself. When I find myself lying down on my couch at night prior to falling asleep for the evening (I never sleep in my own bed), and I always recite this same prayer to myself, "God, please see to it that You take me Home to Heaven in order for me to avoid having to reawaken to another day filled with abject failures in life," there is a major problem. I recite this prayer both because of my failures in how my illnesses led to my actions of gross misdeeds and poor decisions have affected my parents' lives, but also because I have lost my way and no longer have the stomach to continue forward with living my life with the same, staid approach as I have for as long as I can recall living. It is time to act, and I am going to act.
For Albert Einstein, perhaps the most important singular figure in the modern history of mankind, his approach at addressing the self-destructive nature of humanity was worded in the most simplistic method possibly; and yet out of all of his contributions through science that were so abstract in their levels of thinking amid the postulates upon which they were predicated, this might have been his greatest contribution to humanity as we know it today. His quote was stated as follows:
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
As I live with society's designation of an insane human being, I do believe that the greatest source of my insanity has been my falling prey to practicing the same methods which have contributed to my misery amid a self-perpetuated state of mental decay rather than changing my approach as to how I live my life from here on. The future should always be looked upon as being filled with infinite possibilities, and I have yet to ever read a page in a history book that told the story of what has occurred in the future. The future is ours for the taking, and we all are capable of molding it in accordance to our own devices and the image of ourselves that will ultimately be our legacies in life for our friends and fellow family members who survive us to recall about what we accomplished for ourselves and contributed to others. I hope to now change my course in life regardless of how I choose to do so, and it is my sincere hope that whatever choice(s) I make in this endeavor will lead me to an eternal spring of happiness and hope, and a posterity of feeling accomplished rather than the perpetuation of what always has been characteristic of my life in accordance to the Shakespearean paraphrasing, "Tis the winter of [my] discontent."
In the end, the immortal portion of a famous book's title about the self-discovery of mindfulness by Jon Kabat-zinn that states "Wherever you go, there you are," is perhaps the most profound piece of logic that may ever result in the realization of one's inner peace. And I plan to travel today and each day down that road never before taken as if the present is all that matters. I now realize, more than ever before, that living in the present is not only essential for the acquisition of one's own peace of mind, but also because what I do now will forever translate to my destiny and, ergo, my future. I have never truly been in love with a woman nor been in a relationship of any kind, and it may be true that it simply is not meant for me to know this phenomena since my mental health condition and the consequences of my own actions they manifest have largely precluded me from many women feeling comfortable with associating with me as a result, and I am now fine in accepting this realization and will no longer swim against this current. The skipping of a pebble will forever alter the surface of a pond through the ripples it manifests throughout all time and space, and yet there can be nothing more simplistic than this most natural of phenomena. And that, for me, is where I am beginning my new odyssey, as I seek to cast my new pebble in order create a new set of ripples in the pond of my life.
