Personal Development

If you like, listen while reading: Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up in a house where the light rarely reached the floor. His hands were still small, yet they already knew how to tremble. His back was still soft, yet he already knew how to hunch when the footsteps outside the door grew heavy. And worse than the blows that could be seen were the sentences that stayed behind. They did not draw a boundary around what he did — they described what he supposedly was: too loud, too little, wrong. ...

Behind him, the mountain gave way. A deep rumble, a blow, then dust that took his breath away. When it grew quiet again, a wall of rock and clay lay behind the wanderer. The valley he had come from – the familiar, the beautiful, the known – was buried. The way back no longer existed. He stood in the old tunnel. It was cold. Under his boots lay sharp rubble that the collapse had broken from the ceiling. Above him, in the unseen vault, there was rustling and squeaking. Bats, startled from their sleep, shot closely past his face through the darkness. ...

To many people, “bipolar” sounds like a mere swing between good and bad moods. On paper, however, my diagnosis reads Bipolar 1 with psychotic symptoms – and when I am in full-blown mania, it has nothing whatsoever to do with “being in a good mood.” It often starts constructively: I have countless ideas, mostly driven by an honest desire to improve things fundamentally. Yet my head shifts into a speed that hardly anyone on the outside can follow anymore. There is no longer any filter between thinking and speaking – almost every thought has to come out the exact second it arises. At the same time, my short-term memory collapses: what I said days ago, or even just a few moments ago, is erased almost in the same instant. Only this hyper-accelerated Now exists. ...

Sometimes you walk through the world and it gets out of your way. People turn curt before a word has been spoken, some irritable. They sense something about you. And you understand them, because what radiates from you keeps them at a distance. At other times, doors open. People laugh with you, seek your closeness. You are simply there, light and open, and the world answers warmly. For a long time you took the one for luck and the other for misfortune. Then you realize: it is an echo. As you call into the forest, so it comes back. When it is dark inside you, you see differently, you enter the encounter differently, and the encounter answers you differently. The outside carries what lives on the inside. ...

Once there was a man who was good. Blameless and upright, one who shunned evil. He was good the way a stone is still — from birth, without ever having chosen it. Then the dark forces came. They took from him first what was outside: his possessions and the people he loved. Then they reached inward, toward his body and his sleep. They wanted to know whether goodness would hold when the ground was pulled from under it. ...

Once upon a time there was a black sheep. It lived in a village full of sheep and carried a bucket with it. A bucket of filth. Everything it had not allowed itself to be, everything the village had not wanted to see, lay in it. It could not put the bucket down. For a time the sheep thought about tipping the bucket out. Over the others. They should turn black too, it thought, then it would no longer be alone. It imagined nights in which it moved through the village spraying colour. The thought warmed and poisoned at the same time. ...

There is a form of self-destruction that feels like protection. It is called: I am the victim, everyone else is to blame. I know this attitude from the inside. For years I was the poor one. When something did not work, it was down to the circumstances or the people around me. Above all to my parents. They were the address for my blame for years, for much that I should have stood up for myself. ...

Yesterday I helped a family bury their dog. We accompanied him to his last breath. A dear, dear fighter — for those he loved. I read Psalm 23 to the family — so they could see: even this dark valley passes. In the evening I thought: now I will do something good for myself. I went out to celebrate. Into bed at six in the morning, fell straight asleep. Up again at two in the afternoon. The day was depressive. ...

I write this not from theory. I was a victim long enough to know what that feels like from the inside. And I have myself oppressed — made people feel small, relieved myself at their expense, passed on the burden that lay on me. Both belong to me. Neither is to be glossed over. Today I am free. Or more precisely: I am on the way. I am trying to be a warrior of light, in Coelho’s sense — that is, someone who falls, rises again, doubts, keeps going. Not a hero. A practitioner. ...

The ancients built upward: roads, houses, knowledge, peace. We inherited it. That deserves respect. Today we have everything. Information. Choice. Comfort. Stimulation without end. And we lose: depth. Quiet. Space in the mind. Whoever has everything must learn to have nothing. Jesus went into the desert. Mohammed into the cave. Both had nothing for a while. Only then came what we know them for. In the emptiness the gaze becomes clear. Without noise one hears what is one’s own. Without possessions the hands are free. ...