Crawling

I left her office ten minutes later. As I walked back to my sister's apartment, the magnitude of my diagnosis began to sink in. Mentally ill. It was a loaded label to add to my collection. My brain was drowning in cognitive dissonance, still struggling to believe it. I'd always been a little terrified of my mind, but I didn't think it was actually sick. All my life, I'd had a deep-seated feeling that I was walking towards some kind of bigger vision; that one day all the chaos in my life would make sense because I was going to do something impactful for the world. But now I had a word for that sick delusion: grandiose thinking. I felt small again. I felt ashamed of my ambition. I felt ashamed of who I was.

I recalled the psychologist's words. 'People with your condition can sometimes struggle to distinguish the external world from their internal psychotic experience. It's not uncommon to experience delusions of grandeur, or fantastical beliefs about your own abilities. It's just your brain chemistry playing tricks on you.'

My imagination was always leaking out into physical reality. There seemed to be such little separation between the two. But what was real? What wasn't? I couldn't tell anymore. I didn't trust my own judgment. I didn't trust myself.

I walked through the door of my sister's empty one-bedroom apartment and collapsed in a heap on the floor. Her fluffy cat, Bella, jumped off the dusty-pink couch and came to investigate. "Hello, princess," I cooed. "Your aunty has had a very hard day. Can I have a hug?" I opened my arms towards her.

Bella looked at me for a moment, then turned on her heel and walked towards the bed, her tail swaying elegantly in the air. "Nooooo!" I whined. I got up on my knees and shuffled towards her, hands outstretched like a zombie. "Love me! Love me!"

Bella ran under Alex's bed to hide from the crazy lady. I sighed and lay down on the cream-colored carpet, just as my phone buzzed with a notification from Facebook. My business, CodeMakers, had been tagged in a post.

What a fantastic way to start our week, with a HUGE HUGE THANK YOU to the CODEMAKERS team and amazing teacher CLAIRE 💃 for teaching our students the Minecraft modding.

After meeting Zac's German friend, Toto, in Colombia the previous year, we'd been running a pro-bono program at his school in Kenya. Several students had just completed our intermediate coding course. I knew I should be feeling joy and appreciation for the small impact my team was making on the lives of these kids. Instead, I felt nothing; complete and utter apathy.

Their teacher, Claire, had no idea I was about to make her redundant. She'd only have a job with me for another month, then she'd have to move on. She was an English teacher in the Philippines when I hired her, and I'd spent many hours teaching her how to code so she could pass that knowledge on to our excited students. I'd been very particular about hiring female teachers and upskilling them because most of our students were boys. I didn't want more boys growing up under the impression that the creation of technology was an exclusively male activity. There was already enough bias in the system without me making it worse.

But there I was, destroying everything I'd spent the better part of a few years building with my bare hands. There I was, ripping the limbs off the baby I'd given birth to and raised. There I was, inflicting my chaos on everyone around me. There I was, a colossal failure, yet again.

Tears began leaking from my eyes as I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. With my sister's help, I'd managed to do some work on the business' finances the previous day, and it wasn't good. I was behind on bills, and my accounts payable were piling up. I'd decided to stop trading and just focus on my health. Maybe I'd sell off the assets down the track when I had the energy. I had no idea how I was going to pay back my debt in the meantime. I'd never been in debt before, and I was so ashamed of myself.

Everything felt hopeless, once again. All the energy was sucked out of me. The universe was pinning me down on the ground like a blanket made from heavy chains. I just wanted to lie there and fall asleep and wake up when it was all over. I just wanted someone to swoop in and save me from the nightmare I had created for myself.

That day truly was the lowest point of my life. I lost my mind. I lost my business. I lost my team. I lost my money. I lost my identity. And I almost lost my spirit, too. I didn't know who I was anymore. I lay trapped inside the Belly of the Whale, and no one was coming to rescue me. No one was coming to save me. No handsome Disney prince was going to scoop me up in his arms and carry me out of this deep, dark cave. That was my responsibility. No one could do that for me. I had to save myself.

But where to start? I felt so helpless.

If all you can do is crawl, start crawling, a wise Sufi poet whispered in my ear.

I slowly pushed the weight of the universe off my chest, rolled over, and began making my way along the floor towards the full-length mirror by the closet.

I didn't like the girl staring back at me. She was weird and broken and vulnerable and lonely, with tears running down her cheeks. She looked so ugly when she cried. When I gazed into her eyes, I saw everything I hated about myself; everything I wanted to hide.

I stared intensely into my irises. Within a few seconds, the reflection in the mirror started to change. My face rapidly began morphing into different ethnicities and ages. Before long, my nose completely disappeared, then my mouth. My skin faded into a fuzzy mass of grey, translucent fog. Only my eyes and my clothing remained, like a Cheshire Cat.

That was a little trick I learned while living in Chiang Mai. I could stare into a mirror and watch my face morph. The experience reminded me of a passage from The Holographic Universe, where NDEers 'gradually became a kind of hologramlike composite of all of their past lives.' One time, I found myself staring into the face of an old woman with a lazy eye, which was incredibly unsettling. Her good eye was staring back at me in the reflection, but her lazy eye was looking off to the side.

I blinked and snapped out of the trance.

Stop doing that, my mind scolded. Stop fucking with your brain, you freak!

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and tried to find my center.

There's a reason you're sitting here, Wisdom whispered. A mental illness wasn't randomly bestowed upon you. 'Random' is an illusion. Algorithms don't make mistakes — they just compute. This event is just an emergent pattern in the mathematical mosaic of the universe. If you're sitting here, then you're exactly where you need to be.

But why? My mind asked. Why does everything always have to crumble into chaos around me? Why does it have to be so excruciatingly painful?

Wisdom whispered poetry in my ear. You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens. The cure for the pain is in the pain.

Ugh, stop being so deep and meaningful and cryptic, my mind replied. Just tell me what the answer is. What's the cure? Where do I find it? How do I fix this?

Oh, come on, she chuckled. You wander from room to room, hunting for the diamond necklace that is already around your neck. You already know the answer.

What is it? My mind begged.

Wisdom smiled. It's love. The answer is, and always has been, love. And Nikki, you don't love yourself nearly as much as you need to if you're going to complete this mission. You're terrified of your own potential. You don't freely accept the gifts you've been given — your renegade mind, your privileged life, your loving family, your freedom, your creativity, your charisma, your independence, your warmth, your magic, your vision, your heart. You feel like it's all too much; it's all unfair. Who are you to have all this when so many have so little? Who are you to shine so bright? You feel like you can't handle it, so you lock it in a box and hide it away from the world, hoping that no one ever sees it and calls you arrogant; immodest; full of yourself; grandiose; a girl who's too big for her boots. After all these years, you still feel so uncomfortable in all your beautiful, creative weirdness. You're still letting the world tell you who you are, instead of unapologetically being who you are.

If you want to stop crumbling into chaos, you have to learn to love yourself unconditionally. You must embrace everything that you believe is shameful and wrong and unworthy about yourself. That is the mountain you have to climb. That is the dragon you have to slay. The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are, and the most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. When you embrace your true self, you will light up the world, and this cave won't be so dark and lonely anymore. You will set yourself free.

Oh God, I so wanted to be free of myself. I wanted that more than anything in the world! I wanted to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who heard or what they thought of me. I wanted to be who I was without any apology; without any muting; without any hiding or holding back. The thought of freedom made my heart soar!

I opened my eyes and looked into the mirror. If this was it — if this was my rock bottom — then I was going to start over. I was going to escape this cave and climb this mountain one step at a time, one day at a time. If I fell over, I would get back up and keep climbing until I embraced every part of myself that I'd been conditioned to loathe. I silently decided, then and there, that this day was the best day of my life.

I looked into the mirror and began reciting a phrase over and over and over again. It was the same phrase I would recite for many months to come.

"Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. Everything is always rigged in my favor. Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. Everything is always rigged in my favor. Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better. Everything is always rigged in my favor."