The Summer I Became a Prophet

Overwhelming two-dimensionality; it is the visual symptom of my anxiety.

Re-calibrating my identity and position in the world following university was the cause of my first nervous breakdown. The sudden thrust from the warm waters of deluded Cambridge optimism to the ice-cold reality of the London urban struggle lead to extreme isolation. And isolation lead to my developing suspicion thatthe world was not real.

In acute moments of anxiety – fuelled by the aching desire for something to happen in plagues of loneliness – I would experience a physical dissociation from my surrounding environment. Everything in my visual field became quickly two-dimensional, as if the world was a flat pictorial representation on a thin sheet of paper. In doubting my immediate visual matrix, I became fixated – obsessive, even – over the notion that a tear in the fictitious plane of reality would lead me to “the essence behind everything.” If reality was a two-dimensional construct that I could not associate with, then I was not to trust it.

This niggling feeling that beyond what I saw lay a cavernous offering of alternatives catalysed my “eureka” moment – “I am a prophet.” It was my destiny to locate this tear; only then could I escape my solitary confines – to disappear and fuse more physically and intimately with the infinitude behind the two-dimensional. What was my prophecy to others searching for salvation? That anxiety was the result of multi-dimensional, corporeal, animal human spirits, failing to coalesce with two-dimensional fictions.

Looking up at the stars, at the vast ocean, at nature’s geological idiosyncrasies – the peculiar thin smoothness of Saturn’s “rocky” belt - enforced my prophetic quest: “I know these formations to be deeply complex, yet I see them as drawings. How can I get behind – how can I move to the sumptuous organs of worlds beyond ours?”

The Summer I Became a Prophet

My attempts went as follows; when my body would sense the aura of a tear – the world turning flat, the rip ready to present itself – I would harness my energy and prepare myself to jump through. I would close my eyes, and feel a fire of light enrapture my skin, about to disintegrate, about to re-form, and when I opened my eyes, I’d be “there.”

No such luck. And after failed attempts to “cross over,” I had a redemptive realisation. The acute, overwhelming, physical, emotional, enveloping sensation of fire in moments of locating a “tear” suggested one inescapable truth – “I AM THE TEAR.” The all-consuming, mental, and corporeal experience of tear-hunting – inside me – was the very world I was looking for.

My prophecy is now simple: in pangs of dissociation, fully immerse yourself in that dissociation as a means to re-associate. Falling out of the matrix irrevocably throws you back into it, with heightened awareness.

N.B. It might also be worth adding that I took too many drugs the summer I became a prophet.