I can’t breathe when I’m at school. I don’t know how noticeable it is, but if you sit next to me, maybe sometimes you’ll hear me gasping for air, or attempting to deep breathe and calm down during a lecture. Not to mention I’m either completely out of it, or really hyperactive; I’m always half-asleep or constantly fidgeting.

Sometimes I have these moments where my entire body freezes up, and after one or two violent spasms everything returns to normal. I’m pretty sure these occur when I’m morbidly sleep deprived; like I’m fading away from reality, my mind and body are distancing, then everything snaps back to reality. Each day I go to school, the only objective is to just get it over with. I have nothing associated with it but scorn and dread. The weekend always seems like an eternity away, but just yesterday I was still a child. How has the time passed so fast and yet I have nothing to show for it except broken branches, a few battle scars and an internal echo chamber that screams of unfulfilled potential?

I love to blame the world, I love to think that the only reason everything’s going wrong is that the world is plotting against me, that everyone and everything that disagrees with me is senseless, and that the issue is not me. Like, fuck society, fuck what everyone else thinks is classy, fuck the normal, fuck the noise, fuck the silence, where’s my sense of shelter in this perpetual hailstorm that drowns me, chokes me, suffocates me until I’m on the verge of self-destructing? Some days it really does feel like I’m shouldering the weight of the world, like I’m a feather away from collapsing, when the reality is I’m just getting through one day of school just like everybody else is. What can everyone else do that I can’t?

Sometimes I think that drugs could solve my problems — psychedelics, LSD — and I begin to buy into that “opening your third eye” bullshit just for a little bit. I almost want to put myself in dangerous situations for that slight off-chance that my problems will magically dissipate. I want to go on an acid trip and see the vibrant colors in this depraved world of black and white. I want to get drunk as fuck, the type that makes me wake up the next morning in a spiral of fear, confusion and nausea. It could make for a good story, or it could ruin my life forever, which I guess is a good story in itself. I know drugs and alcohol aren’t a good solution. They’re not. They’re not a good solution. They’re not. Are they?

Why do I want to hurt myself? Why do I want to do the things I know I shouldn’t? Why do I wish for a failed overdose? Do I want the attention? Do I just want everyone to feel bad for me? Surely pity points don’t equate friendship or popularity but why does it seem like it does? Why do I think it’s so cool to be deranged, to the point where after I heard someone’s clearly fucked up story with using excessive sex and hookups with strangers as a coping mechanism for their mental illness, I idolized them? Why do I admire those who throw their bodies away due to their cynical hatred of the world? Why do I think it’s cool to be numb to all the characteristics that make us human? It’s almost like it’s a competition and I want to show everyone that I’m the most fucked up. I always tell myself that I want to be in pain. That I deserve it. That everyone gives everything to me and I always fuck it up even if that’s not always the case. There’s some sense of solace in self-pity and you can’t fall short of expectation when it’s already at rock bottom. What’s life anyways if it doesn’t feel like everything could explode at any second?

I want to push everything to the extremes. I want to be dependent on drugs or be in perfect health. I want to be addicted to sex or have none at all. I want to act on every impulse, or intently think everything through. I want to study to the point where I could collapse, or have straight F’s. I want to be on top of everything, or seek that exhilaratingly stressful high of severe chronic procrastination. I want to be the best in the world at my craft, or I want to be the worst. I want to work so fucking hard and achieve all my dreams, or I want to be at rock bottom. I want a storybook type of romance, or I want to be completely heartbroken. I want existence to feel so fantastically perfect, or I want my life to be in grave danger. I want to have everything I could ever want, or I want to have absolutely nothing. I want life to feel like one misstep could break everything. That’s the byproduct of obsessively seeking perfection anyways.

I enjoy shows like Thirteen Reasons Why and Euphoria not because of the plot but because they’re so brutal and extreme. And they almost give me a glimpse of what my life would be if I just let everything go. Usually when people say that they wish their lives were what they see on TV, they imagine those reality television shows, the ones where there are super attractive men and pretty females, and they fall into some superficial love trance. There’s always this desire for some sort of utopian purity, and these innocently misinformed slices-of-life, but my slate is already tainted so red, and instead I reach for the polar opposite. When I say I wish my life was what I see on TV, I mean like Clay Jensen, Rue Bennett and just about every other character involved; they’re fucking psychotic, and I, I desire insanity too.

I want to commit everything to an idea or goal. I want to spend thousands of hours relentlessly pushing to achieve absolute nirvana. I want to be the person that other people look at and think “that guy is crazy,” but with undertones of an odd sense of awe and respect. I want people to look at my flaws, observe my mental breakdowns, and think “that’s fucking awesome,” rather than seeing them as weaknesses.

I’m a hypercompetitive hyperfixater, a human embodiment of absolute bipolarity; either completely into investing everything towards a certain vision, or completely letting it burn to shreds. Usually, this doesn’t fare well, the slightest deviation tips the scale of the most delicate balancing act, and sends everything spiraling into the abyss. The deeper the descent, the harder to resurface. The greater the investment, the steeper the loss. The steeper the commitment, the sharper the blade. I lost it all.

When I sprinted at midnight slicing the cold air with every indignant “fuck” that escaped my mouth, when I went on a bike ride at four o’clock in the morning crying so hard I could barely see, when every night I went to bed my heart rate accelerated to Mach 10 and my breathing got faster and faster to the point where I had to get up and regain my composure, when I went to school with no sleep, biking with my eyes closed in hopes it would somehow combat the tenacious drowsiness and help me survive the day, when I screamed all the lyrics to Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u” at the top of my lungs while scalding my body in the shower, when I lashed out at the people that loved me the most, and when I told my therapist he was useless, was I crazy enough?

Somehow it gets worse than those times we used to brag about how little sleep we got, as we start to compare how mentally ill we are. How prevalent impostor syndrome is. How we discount our mental illnesses just because we’re supposed to hide our impurities, and instead we assume we’re weak, that comparatively our situations aren’t as bad as those of others. Yet, we never have a wide enough variety of reference points because of how stigmatized this particular topic is, however we continue to assume the worst. Even so, it’s in no way a competition. But just because you have a roof over your head, and you don’t have to constantly worry about where your next meal will come from, it doesn’t mean that every day can’t feel like you’re fighting for your life. Not all wounds are visible, but I think that we should be more vocal about them; a very unorthodox proposition, I know. After all, nobody likes messy.

Truth is, it’s exhausting to be close to me. I have a persistent desire for validation but I hate asking for help, and every few weeks I check out and completely disappear for a while. I have very high highs, and very low lows, and despite being a fierce individualist, I am terrible at coping alone. But I guess the people that have been by my side through and through understand my patterns and feel that the peaks are worth the troughs. And there’s a sense of peace in that.

I really do believe that if you’re not going crazy, there hasn’t been a momentous point in your life that caused significant enough character development for you to begin to question anything and everything. Trauma is almost always attached to a period of remarkable growth or remarkable success. Nobody deserves to reach such a polarizing sense of insanity, but those who do are often the strongest. And despite everything it makes you lose, undergoing a period of depression is objectively an evolutionary advantage.

Being crazy kind of allows you to let go, to do anything you want without fearing the repercussions, and that in itself is very powerful. I want my insanity to leave a lasting positive impact on as many people as people. I want to push myself to the limit, spread myself thin, take every risk possible. I want others to eventually realize that throughout my lows, I sacrificed myself even further for a chance at making things better, like a weird type of emotional deficit spending. I want people to understand that my decisions may not be the most rational, but they’re well thought through and give me an opportunity to change my current situation. I want to be the person to take risks to attempt to discover beauty, I want to help people find beauty within themselves, and I want to show them beauty in places they would never imagine. But most importantly, I want to be transient, yet permanent in the memories of others. I want to feel like a fever dream, that others wake up from and wonder, did we really do that? And by being crazy, by being wholly spontaneous, that is who I’ve begun to become.

I strongly resonate with Melanie Martinez’s distraught cry in “Mad Hatter;”

So what if I’m crazy, the best people are?

and I wholeheartedly agree when she says that

ALL THE BEST PEOPLE ARE CRAZY.