I first met Brother Ocean before he was known as Brother Ocean. At around the same time he decided to become a monk, I decided that I needed to move away from New York. 

While doing a retreat at his monastery for my birthday weekend I got to know a different version of my friend. Out of respect for Brother Ocean's story I'll save the details for him to tell. But I think he'd be comfortable in me saying that we met each other at one another's personal lowest. 

Since then I have become a celebrated writer forced to live to obscure standards of mediocrity. While my dear friend has studied, contemplated, and meditated. I have wrestled with homelessness, hunger, and poverty.

There is a system in place that won't allow me to celebrated for my work and it's beyond my understanding. I willingly embrace humiliation and deprecation in the pursuit of trying to remedy a problem that nobody is willing to fully identify. So in my twenty eighth lap of the sun, having achieved more than I ever have (publishing six books and embodying a revolutionary spirit to the point of my own demise), I have never had less confidence. For lack of a better word I have been brutalized by a system that values my craft while simultaneously shits all over my individuality and any attempt I make at achieving independence. I was alarmed when Brother Ocean introduced me as someone who "grounds him" to the other monks. 

The weekend was spent observing Buddhist traditions that were being taught to me in real time. Though the moments I valued the most were drinking tea in a half lotus with my friend who just over a year ago was chasing tail with me in the East Village. We discussed a variety of universal themes such as despair, love, nihilism, and persistence.

I spoke with a retired educator about endurance. With a compassionate transgender man about cruelty. We sang and walked and sat and repeated it all with the sunrise (that I promptly slept through [it was my first time getting eight hours of sleep in months]). We ate in silence as the deer rose on their hind legs to eat peaches from the trees. There was a stillness to the grounds that I now saw in my friends eyes. Eyes that once held panic were that of a still abyss. That without warning would illuminate with the nostalgia of a childhood firework at the sight of a falling leaf. 

I thought. I have been thinking a lot, but I have been thinking with what the monks would call "Monkey Brain".

There is this theory in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. A theory that I haven't quite contemplated since first engaging with it. "The moment of madness". A moment that arises when the conscious individual becomes self aware. I am assuming this is a moment that happens periodically throughout ones life. Not a literal instance of insanity. Though it may be in some cases. But a reflective moment in which the self recognizes the contradiction in which it has come to be. 

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I have been shaking shit up. At the very least, I can deduce that in the last year my literary career and the decisions I have made have shaken things up. If nothing more. 

And yet I remain, unpaid, underrepresented, and brutalized by an unforgiving system. All the while there is so much love for me. My perception of who I am has been undercut by those who cannot grasp the vision of my ambition. 

And so I woke up this morning. Twenty nine years old. Having achieved all of my dreams and ambitions, while being forced to perform a reality as if the opposite is true. And this passivity I have adopted for the sake of saving face of countless people simply dissipated. In some obscure blend of a midlife crisis, an indulgence of peace and serenity, and a painfully ironic awareness into the fabricated reality I occupy a fit of laughter over came me. I broke out into song, "They tried to kill me. They tried to rob me. Ohhhh they tried to silence me. Bitch, I am still standing.", in a yo-ho pirate type melody. The song raising the question to myself of, "To whom do I owe my passivity?". The answer: 

absolutely. fucking. nobody. 

I am making a move. I am just patient. 

This was my moment of madness. My consciousness could not look away from the irony of what I had become. The people who want me to be their saviors are those who buried me. Those who are pleeing with me to stop going down the route I am going are the ones who robbed me. And I cannot shake the anger blooming from my understanding of negative responsibility (when you know something is wrong or something bad is going to happen and you do nothing to prevent it you are just as responsible as the perpetrator.), making all those too afraid to tell me the truth just as guilty as my abusers. 

If you would like to know my secrets, then I'd like to know yours. But if you want to know what I foresee I see Gensis 6. I see a judgment day. I see a reckoning for the way our society brutalizes the healers, the compassionate, and the prophetic. For the way we celebrate the liars and the cruel. 

So in my moment of madness I relinquished the burden of weight that others have put on my shoulder. I am laughing. My circumstances are fucking hysterical. And I laugh because those who put me there are going to be begging for my help when they realize it is beyond their capacity to maintain the lie. 

I can assure you. I will stop when I am dead.