Paranoia’s Purpose? Please.

A call to contraction accompanying Bipolar highs

Always just around the corner. Seemingly unpredictable. It appears “like lightning from a clear blue sky” as Patrick Rothfuss wrote of his fantasy series’ Illuminati stand-ins, the Chandrian. But is there a pattern to it? When does it show up for me, and why?

Why do I constantly feel that people are looking for reasons to jettison me from their lives? 

Why have I repeatedly found myself peering into white vans parked by the side of the road as I pass on foot, concerned of an impending CIA kidnap? 

Why is it that snarky aloof men who undercut the precious little rocks I try to share can send me into a spiral of not creating anything, struck with crunching self-loathing for weeks—or longer—at a time?

Is depression just creativity’s refractory period?

From my poetry collection, Journaling in Verse

I shared a similar image a few essays back, without the paranoia detour in the upper right hand corner. 

I’m happy with this image as an explanation of paranoia’s origins, if not its purpose. It almost gives me a sense of mastery over the phenomenon.

When I wrote that one-line poem in 2020, about depression’s relationship with creativity, I didn’t have this image.

I thought that the darkest depths of sincere self-loathing were an inevitable byproduct of briefly getting the muse on the line. 

Still, I was past the point where my moods seemed to sprout randomly. Where I experienced life with my neurodivergent goggles on at all times, the goggles’ lenses shifting between light and dark like transitional sunglasses, but my sleeping mind only ever stopping to notice occasionally. 

Consciously, I’d be thinking things like, “damn it’s dark in this world. Everything is obviously misery, doom, and isolation, forever.” Or when the lenses were in the phase where light abounds, I’d be rapt with the crazy ambitions to capture the distant horizons I could suddenly see. 

I was going to cure all suffering with my poetry, or I was never going to write anything of value ever again—if I’d ever even done it in the first place. Back then, I would fully believe whichever shading of the world I was currently perceiving as though it was unimpeachable. 

My moods did not believe in each other. Each felt as if it might be permanent. The One True Reality to rule them all.

Step one was accepting I was Bipolar.

I had to acknowledge that my moods tinted my experience in order to get Depressed Me familiar with Manic Me.

Like Peeta in the Hunger Games, I’d go around asking people for reality checks: “do you really hate me, or am I just being tricked by anxiety?”

Still, it was a while before I built the evidence necessary to doubt the stories I was telling myself. 

I was past that delusion when I wrote Journaling in Verse, but I still hadn’t grokked the grander pattern.

The truth is, my moods have always followed one another like swings of a pendulum. Maybe I wasn’t mindful enough to note every stage of the waveform for a long time, but I have to believe they all still existed.

When my neurodivergent goggles were bright, I’d be drawn into brighter environments. Realities where Possibility, Hope, Love, and Belonging were abundant. An infinite field of technicolor wildflower superblooms in the Spring sun that chases away storms.

But like transitional sunglasses exposed to daylight, the metaphorical lightness of the expansive environment would always cause a reaction that began to darken my lenses. 

Unable to see, I’d be driven indoors. 

Condemned to an isolated prison cell. 

Solitary in the dark, sucking on a shirt button because water was only a memory.

I didn’t get it then, but now I understand the only thing worse than being gradually dragged out from Belonging With Source by my mood swings was when I tried to light my own way in defiance to my inexorably darkening perception.

Early on I’d use cannabis or sleep deprivation. Later booze, caffeine, conversation, creativity or even a sort of desperate, striving, effortful productivity.

You’ve heard of spiritual bypass? This is the chemical version. Ignoring the pendulum swing can be painful.

I’d be trying to lengthen the mania, as far as I could. 

But that torch drove my glasses to dim even more. 

The eviction from daylight would happen, unnoticed, and I’d plummet like a stalled plane. 

Puttering out. Tripping into a pit.

Paranoia's purpose?
Please.
To highlight the anxieties
subconscious mind
is screaming
“Treat!”
Forgetfulness,
low self-esteem,
a deficit
of empathy,
or irresponsibility.
If you beat its tendency
to freeze you up, prosperity
is very nearly guaranteed.

My poetry journal

Paranoia was the mechanism my body invented to inform me that I wouldn’t yet be able to handle that Nirvanic garden of wildflowers. 

It continues to serve this purpose when I stay too high for too long. When I strain against the end of my leash.

Like a dog brought short by its electronic collar as it tries to escape the front yard, paranoia was the zap my brain issued to keep me in my lane.

In anthroposophy, there’s an Entity responsible for this boot from Heaven: the Dweller on the Threshold.

The Dweller guards the gates to enlightenment, giving individuals the boot back into base incarnation when they haven’t fully burned off their unique karma and need to spend more time learning the same lessons.

Paranoia’s purpose seems to be to rip me from altitudes of ambition if I haven’t done the work to integrate or withstand that level of material success. I get paranoid about those snarky aloof men who dismiss me that I mentioned at the top because they represent a taste of what I’ll undoubtedly encounter should I ever succeed in my half-held ambitions to be influential via my art. My body becomes transfixed on them because its trying to warn me that I haven’t developed the self-love that would prepare me adequately for the portal of hate that virality always, always opens.

Like the dog’s collar or the Dweller, Paranoia recognizes when I’ve expanded beyond my limits and must contract.

Paranoia’s purpose is to remind me that there are habits, behaviors and beliefs that I’m still holding that are incompatible with me setting up residence amongst the flowers. 

As I’d abuse substances to light the field around me for as long as I could, the shadows would begin to deepen. The dancing darkness would grow menacing. I’d become acutely aware of the fact that there are dangerous people in the world, people who might find me in this very flower patch. I’d become increasingly concerned that I might turn my ankle in a pot hole or run afoul of some deadly predator.

The world would grow darker and darker. Climate disaster, civil war, theocratic fascism, global thermonuclear war.

And then I’d be forced to contract.

It was always my own deficiency that drew me into the pit in the end.

The predators and conspiracies gave a personified flavor to the anxiety, but it was always my own karma that told me I didn’t belong frolicking with flowers.

Paranoia’s purpose, it turns out, is for my subconscious mind to inform my conscious mind of every character trait it has identified that is incompatible with my authentic Will’s maximal, genuine expression.

It exists to shine a flashlight on the irresponsible habits—the karmic loops—that prevent me from being my best self.

Let me clarify this with a concrete example.

I’d be pushing myself to stay manic for as long as possible, hopped up on an entire gram of caffeine to keep depression from settling in, and something incredibly minor would set me off. Something like my charging cable for my phone beginning to fray. And I’d blame the CIA for making my life as believably difficult as possible to prevent me from continuing my activist work or writing my novel.

Really, it’d sometimes be that silly.

Decode that metaphor, though, and you see a stressed out pizza delivery boy who can’t afford to buy phone chargers that don’t break in a couple months. You see an alcoholic who is irresponsible with his possessions. You see a loner who doesn’t have anyone to watch his back and let him know the cave is safe.

These are Maslow’s Pyramid’s base layers. Physical security in the form of a living wage. Self-efficacy in the form of responsibility with your things. Sobriety. Relationship. All prerequisites to self-actualization.

I thought I could generate what Layman Pascal calls surplus coherence with my art, but I wasn’t even taking care of my body. There wasn’t surplus coherence, I was incoherent.

The narrative about the CIA—cobbled together from pattern-seeking derived from true stories of Occupy Wall Street activists being followed by the alphabet agencies or whatever—was simply calibrated to the scope of my dissatisfaction with the spiritual readiness of the material, embodied dimension of my life.

Ethical codes of conduct matter.

The base layers of Maslow’s Pyramid, the yamas and niyamas in Ashtanga Yoga, the sila steps to the Noble Eightfold Path, the laws in the Old Testament… even Nietzsche recommended a way of comporting ourselves in order to maximize self-development.

I don’t think it matters which one you choose, but as Mitch Horowitz points out, it seems that we can’t just make one up from whole cloth and expect the results we’re looking for.

A proponent of New Thought, Horowitz writes that we need the energy generated by ethics in order to manifest.

Why? It’s about living a fully embodied life.

My paranoia’s purpose seems to be to encourage me to contract back into the earth realm. To tend to the necessary matters involved in taking a human incarnation.

It’s about being a householder mystic. 

A friend recently remarked that my spiritual questions ought to disqualify me from a stable happy home embedded in society, but I don’t think that’s true.

Through being driven indoors by my darkening transitional Neurodivergent’s Goggles, I find myself… in my home. Where the other people are. There’s no one to connect with in that infinite field of limitless color, but I can huddle and cuddle in the dark with the people who ground me.

Now that I know that trying to light my own way through the gathering darkness produces paranoia, I can gently lean in to going indoors when the time arises for it. Now that I know my paranoia’s purpose was always to get me to attend to my body’s needs, I don’t need to cultivate more of it. I can skip the middleman and consciously choose to work on the base layers of the pyramid in order to drum up the self-efficacy, self-love and self-determination that are prerequisites to being able to actually handle the accomplishments my manic mind dreams up for this incarnation.

Through being called to contract from my expansive Heavenly ponderings and pursuits by my bipolar disorder, I am encouraged to handle my Earth business.

I can finally say I’m grateful for it.