THURSDAY, 7 MARCH 2024
At the end of the film, Fight Club, the main character says to his girlfriend: “You met me at a very strange time in my life.”
My wife met me, not so much at a strange time in my life, but just before I began a years-long stumble to a low point that still gives me nightmares sometimes.
Between March and July 2003, I worked feverishly on a set of writings that I later called, “The Personal Agenda of Brand Smit.” And because I didn’t stop writing that type of material, I later added that it was Book One. The later months of 2003 and the first two months of 2004 were also quite feverish, with the fever breaking with “The February Plan” and “[The Big Untitled]”. The dust then settled for a few weeks, and by May I was again hard at work thinking and writing about new insights that were supposed to make sense of my life – and even life in general. By July 2004 I had definitely broken new ground in terms of clarity and confidence in who and what I was.
However, by the fall of 2004 (October in Taiwan), I was rolling on fumes: my tank was empty.
And it was exactly at that moment that I met a certain young lady who had just arrived in Taiwan.
The excitement of new love – if I have to look back now – gave me a new zest for life. But serious love is a different world from the one of the Lone Ranger. And if you no longer walk alone, you are not the same person you were a few months before. You constantly appear to someone you want to impress, and you appear differently to yourself.
With spiritual dedication and abandon I worked in 2003 and 2004 on pieces of text that were supposed to reveal the truth to myself, and if it was legible, to anyone into whose hands the pieces of paper might fall.
And I was still making notes in 2005.
But I wanted to do better. I wanted to make money. I wanted to create a better life not only for myself, but for the person who had so beautifully messed up my life as Someone Who Walked Alone.
Little did I know I had already reached my peak. The abyss was near. And I crossed it without noticing.
It would take me years to reach even ground again.
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