August 14th, 2024

I feel like I'm everything. I am an artist and a scientist. My parents are dance and music. My father was a music producer and my mother is a professional ballet teacher and dancer. She's spent 50 years of her life with ballet and it's safe to say artists as dedicated as her are rare. I could've been born with a different nature, but I was born an artist too.

I'm a scientist by education. One of the biggest forms of privilege I have is my education. I attended public school on the Upper West Side, one of NYC's specialized high schools, and an Ivy League University. This has allowed me to understand the world in comprehensive and diverse ways so I have great empathy for people who don't know what I know, because I know I only know it for fucked-up reasons. There's no reason for them to not know what I know, no reason for this gatekeeping other than elitism and white supremacy and greed and evil. 

Weirdly, I lived two very different lives. Winning the housing lottery changed our lives and I went from Spanish Harlem with dead rats in our shoes to laundry in the building and a lovely bedroom. I have been very privileged even though my background is bit tragic... and so I feel like I've seen a lot at a young age and I feel old. 

Along with feeling like everything is mental illness, because bipolar disorder is an extreme experience. We get higher highs and lower lows than other human beings and for me before medication, every emotion was turned up to 11. They would possess me and I'd become them, and I went through an in-depth exposure to the range of emotions like godly superiority and suicidal, low self-esteem despair. I am who I am because of this terrible experience that took me to unknown depths... that make me feel like I've gone deeper than others. Definitely not everybody but seems like other people might not have gone at all.

My overexposure to emotion has made me highly empathetic and sometimes I wonder if I'm more human than most of society. I'm a minority in a million ways and based on what I observe in society, I might be a minority in this way too. Am I suffering an acute case of the human condition? Or is this how all of humanity feels, not just me?