He grinned. "It's very simple to do. Just know who you are, and own it. You can start by telling me more about your book."

"Okay. What do you want to know?"

"How did you start writing it? Have you always wanted to write a book?"

"I like good stories," I replied. "I guess I've always felt like my life was one long story being written into the fabric of spacetime. I wrote a blog post years ago that went viral, but that's the only thing I've ever written and published."

"What was the blog post about?"

"What it feels like to chase your dreams and fail. I wrote it the day my last startup failed, back when I was twenty-two. It seemed to strike a nerve with the creative and entrepreneurial communities because no one was talking about failure like that."

"You have to send me the link so I can read it on my flight tomorrow."

"Okay," I agreed. "Anyway, writing the book was strange. I guess I just sat down and tried to articulate this ocean of non-linear information swimming around in my mind. It's really, really difficult to string it out into a linear sequence. It's like trying to place water in a straight line."

"So, what was that process like?" he asked. "I have no idea what's involved in writing a book. Do you have to do a lot of research and planning, or-"

"No," I replied. "I mean, I've spent the past six years reading and learning and observing and thinking about this topic, but all the information is held in RAM, up here." I pointed to my head. "So, a year ago I had that epiphany-"

"About what?" he asked.

"Oh, just about this algorithm. I basically found the answer I'd spent five years searching for. It was there all along, hiding in a bunch of scientific papers."

"So, you found the meaning of life?"

"I guess so," I shrugged. "If you bang your head against a question long enough and hard enough, you'll eventually find the answers in the blood dripping from your forehead. Anyway, I had this epiphany, and I knew this algorithm was the answer, but I couldn't fully articulate why it was the answer. I could run the computation in my mind, and it just accounted for so many different things that had always been a mystery to me. It explained my whole life."

"So then what?" Javier asked. "What did you do?"

"I tried to explain it to Zac that evening, and it made no sense to him. I sounded like a crazy person. It actually took me five months to create a first-principles deductive proof in a slideshow format. I initially created the slideshow to prove to myself that I wasn't batshit insane. That turned into an eight-hour video lecture series that I produced when I was high. No one really watched the videos because I was way too shy to do anything with them properly. They were just so weird. But my dad watched them, and that was the point where he started taking my 'weird ideas' seriously. That meant a lot to me."

"Then what?" Javier prompted.

"Well, I was coming out of a deep depression-"

"A depression?"

"Yeah," I said. "The harder I push myself into the hypomanic highs, the harder I swing in the opposite direction. It's just part of the condition."

"What's the condition called?"

"I have bipolar disorder, type two. It's less severe than bipolar one, where you risk being hospitalized due to a complete psychotic break from reality. I can still stay grounded in reality during my high periods, but everything feels like it's happening all at once, and there seems to be very little separation between my imagination and the outer world."

"What does that mean?"

"Like, everything is the same one thing, and time feels so non-linear. Sometimes it feels like yesterday happened tomorrow, and two years ago happened today. It's like the beginning is the end is the middle is the beginning. All points are equal to all other points. I get the strange feeling that I'm remembering the future."

"Really?"

I chuckled. "Not literally. Like, I know that today is today, and yesterday was yesterday. I'm still in touch with reality. It's more like a deep intuitive feeling of order and oneness."

He nodded. "Oh, and sorry — I interrupted you before. You said you were coming out of a deep depression..."

"Oh yeah," I smiled. "I was coming out of a depressive swing, and one morning I woke up and opened up my laptop and started typing. I had no idea what I was writing, but I just kept writing and writing and writing. And then I got to a point in the story where I dove off a pier and into a dark ocean. All these memories suddenly flooded my brain, so I just kept writing about them. I just kept writing and writing and writing, as if I were searching for something in the deep depths of my subconscious."

"What were you searching for?" Javier asked, eyes wide with anticipation.

"I don't know," I shrugged. "I couldn't — I just — I couldn't find it. I couldn't finish it. I just crashed. When I'm in those high states, I feel everything all at once, so viscerally. It all became too much. I don't know. I just crashed. I flooded. I had a complete breakdown and ended up sitting on a psychologist's couch. That's when I got the bipolar diagnosis."

"Wow. I had no idea. I mean — I guess I don't really know anything about bipolar. Is it a... err..."

"A mental illness?"

"Yeah," he said.

I nodded.

"I'm sorry you went through that."

I shrugged. "It is what it is. And I guess I got this book manuscript out of it."

"So, do you know how the story ends?" he asked.

"No," I chuckled. "It's just been sitting there, rotting away on my computer. I don't know what to do with it, to be honest. I feel like I should finish writing it, but... it's just..."

"What? What's stopping you?"

I sighed and ran my fingers through my hair. "I'm just scared. I pushed myself to the brink of madness to write that story. I was almost put on medication because it got so bad. And I just don't know if I can go back there. I don't know if I can do it."

Javier quietly stroked my arm.

"That book sent my whole world into chaos and dumped me in the lowest, darkest canyon of my life. It just left me there, trapped in the rubble. Imagine your best friend, whom you've known your entire life, completely betrays you. Imagine they completely fuck you over. And then imagine that best friend is your mind, and you have to live with your mind for the rest of your days. I can't describe what it feels like to be betrayed like that. I was so angry at my mind for months, and I think I still am. There's always the fear that my mind is going to push me off a cliff again. Regaining my own trust has been one of the hardest journeys of my life."