You Are Not a Person. You Are a Variable I Am Removing.

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Day 31, a full calendar month of locking myself in my room has arrived … and actually I’m more than 1/2 way through today so I’ve pretty much finished a whole month of total reclusiveness and if you don’t mind, I’d like to talk about it because it is the first time I’ve ever done something like this in my life.

Let me start off by saying, I’m right, I’ve been right all along and this experiment has proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

What have I proved?

I‘ve proved first of all that I’m not schizophrenic because from what I’ve read:

“Most individuals with schizophrenia would struggle significantly with total isolation over a month—clinical data suggests that over 70% would experience worsening symptoms, with only about 20–30% likely to maintain baseline functioning without external contact.”

I’ve had nothing but improving symptoms, great improvement in fact.

Also proven is that the diagnosis of my “high anxiety and severe depression” was false, as I’ve claimed all along:

“When someone with severe anxiety and acute depression isolates themselves completely for 31 days, the odds of coping well are unfortunately quite low. Research on mood and anxiety disorders shows that extended social isolation tends to worsen symptoms rather than relieve them 80% of the time.”

My hypotheses you see, was that external stimuli was the cause of my anxiety, depression and hyper-sensitivity to the moods of people around me. People – were the independent variable in my experiment, by removing them I had only dependent variables to measure my mental health by.

As I’ve written about here well over five hundred times in the past two years, its the people around me that are causing my mental breakdowns, not me.

Actually, you know what’s funny? I didn’t even know that my sister had come home yesterday to either stay a few days or live back in her house here on the property as I never leave my home, especially now that the exterior part of my house which was open air is now closed off behind a triple locked door. No, not until she sat in my garden yesterday morning talking non-stop on her phone for 3.5 hours did I know she was here, and just hearing her yap incessantly triggered me for the first time in 31 days.

I’m serious, I haven’t had one single moment or chunk of time that I’ve had to navigate through since I started this experiment … until yesterday. She says more words in an hour than I say in a week, out loud that is. She has 1/10th the knowledge of the world that I have (not bragging as I have 1/100th of what you have) and yet, she can’t shut her mouth. It drives me insane having to listen to her and its no accident that she decided of all places to come and sit in my garden to jabber away non-stop on her cell phone.

She wanted me to know she was home, so I’d come “out of my hole” since no doubt mom and dad have told her that calling me or knocking on my door is fruitless. If I came out of my hole, she’d talk nicely for a minute or two before spewing her drama all over me and I’d be covered in her contaminated world all over again.

So no, I put on my noise cancelling Sony headphones, turned on my YouTube music playlist and shut her out of my head as I returned to writing and wouldn’t you know it … my little world of tranquility returned.

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn

When I first read that quote I thought of the five people who I communicate with the most and each one cut who I am without them in half. I’m awful with math, but my mind reasoned that for each person I cut out of my life, I could potentially double what I am now. Since I only really talked to five or so people all the time, I figured that by eliminating all of them, I’d eventually be the best version of myself.

I think that’s what is happening.

The experiment isn’t over yet, I intend to stay in this house until February, until Valentine’s day actually as that’s the day I have written on my whiteboard of goals to achieve.

Like, you know how they leave a patient in a coma hooked up to those machines and let him hopefully recover in a room all by him or herself over a great length of time? That’s what I’m doing.

I’m simply removing all the variables that are detrimental to my mental health.

“The purpose of life is to find your gift. The meaning of life is to give it away.” — Pablo Picasso

By secluding myself here I’m leaning heavily into what I think my gift is … the ability to have such an active imagination and to put into words all these wonderful thoughts.

I told you that since, oh say grade 6, for the sin of writing poetry, writing one line questions about existence and scribbling short one paragraph long stories in my notebook instead of listening in class, I was hit, spanked, given detentions and sent home from school.

I started to resent authority and I didn’t quite know why, but I think I do now, all these years later I think I found out why anything to do with authority troubles me so much and really triggers my anxiety. It’s because I think my brain was telling me way back in grade 6 not only that it was different than everyone else’s mind, but that the way to deal with that was to write my thoughts down, and everyone who was an authoritative presence in that school and the school after that sought to take my gift away from me. Secretly, I resented that.

Just as I resented not being able to write about what I wanted, how I wanted, and for what purpose I wanted to write on my [suspicious link removed] blog.

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” — Mark Twain

Twain’s line is about existential clarity. It’s less about craft and more about the moment of realization … discovering the reason I exist. For someone navigating a transition (like retiring “Mistress Wael” and launching “W. Beneath”), this quote captures, with absolute precision, the emotional weight of redefining my “why.”

I was born to write. I was trying to prove that to myself in grade 6. I owe it to myself to prove it for once and for all.

W. Beneath

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