In the Before Time, one of the first texts assigned to me during undergrad was Milton’s Paradise Lost, a retelling of the Fall of man. I’d already heard the original version of this story a thousand times as a child raised in a Southern Baptist church and consequently, had a very poor opinion of “the Devil”. As I read, though, the character resonated with me: the anguish and rage of failure, hopes and dreams of glory dashed on the jagged rocks of the abyss, and even the warm, bitter, defiant resolve when he says “The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” I understood. I still laugh remembering trying to describe this to my devout grandmother (who was obviously quite scandalized at my sympathy toward the Devil).

It’s become a recurring theme in my life, this notion of the mind being a source of creation. I busted my ass finishing undergrad, barely balancing a full-time job and an equally demanding courseload, and the personal, private tribulations of young adulthood. “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Hamlet. “I picture the human mind as a movie screen… we are the absolute bosses of that whole theatre and show in our minds…” Pimp. It was (and still is) difficult to accept that power. Busying myself helped me not to. Things were happening to me, not as a result of my own choices but a greater arbiter of fate moving things, moving me, around a universal sandbox. I would whine and complain to my loved ones about what I thought were problems.

“It’s all in yo mind.” Easy for them to say. Wasn’t everything?

Then the pandemic began and everything ground to a horrific halt. I was working in the city when that infected cruise ship docked in the pier, an ominous, floating white speck miles down and away from the window of the high-rise office building where I often stood caffeinating myself. I was laid off shortly thereafter; it was a temp job taken in desperation anyway.

And then there was the “lockdown”. Now there was no escape from the mental prison I had created for myself. No mind-numbing commute, no papers to write, no assignments to read, nobody wanting anything, nobody needing anything, no fake urgency fueling the near-constant state of stress and adrenaline that I had become accustomed to. There was nothing but time. I wished I could open my head on its hinges and take my brain out to put in a glass of water on the nightstand- still do sometimes, actually. Anything for relief. I had the morbid realization that I was stuck with my own thoughts until I died, or opted for a lobotomy. All my ideas, half-baked plans for the future, all the scary existential questions I had about the past and the present and the future would simply have to be dealt with.

I could write them down, expel them from my headspace in a symbolic act of thought-letting, like the rituals of the Mayans I read about in encyclopedias growing up. They believed such bloody, painful rituals restored balance and harmony between man and god.

Or.

I could even actually execute some of them.

No, not that. That prospect was even more horrifying than just living with them, driving my own self crazy.

So- I changed my mind a little. I wasn’t cursed or doomed to live like this forever. There are much worse things than an overactive mind.

Right.

Then the world outside my mind changed a little. And then a lot. It still works like that, despite how easy it is to fall back into catastrophizing.

I want to be a storyteller. Guess that starts with the stories I tell myself.