Mobile phones go off as I walk past – a hundred different ringtones burst out all around me. The flurry of sound follows me down the street but I am calm. This might be hard to understand but it is a common experience for High Energy People. I get it a lot. I know that it is one of the signs, one of the signs that attend my progress through the town. I have been recognized as the Messiah. Everything is because of me, because I am the Messiah. I wanted to take hold of one of these phones and answer it and say “Yes, I know, I am the One.” It was a good feeling – the best. The best of feelings. I know I am the One and that is as it should be. I have come into my power.

This wasn’t always the way. All my life – until very recently – I have worn the stamp of the outsider. I knew from the early days of my life that I did not belong. I always felt that I was pretty much nothing and nobody, that nothing I did counted or ever could do. I felt myself to be nothing more than a speck of fly-shit on a microscope slide. I knew myself to be nothing more than a speck of fly-shit on a microscope slide. Such was my lot in life. Such was my destiny. Or lack thereof.

I’ve always been a misfit. The kind of guy no one wanted to talk to. The kind of guy people always get uncomfortable around. When I go to parties I find people tend to edge imperceptibly away from me so that I end up with a space around me. The party is going on everywhere else – everywhere that I am not. Although that’s a lie because I never do go to parties. For that very reason. The last time I went to a party was over thirty years ago now. I don’t remember very much about it, to be honest. I drank a bottle of Thunderbird wine and passed out in the corner – when I woke up I was all alone in the room. Everyone had left – presumably moving on to another party when this one had died.

That’s how my life was back then – in my late twenties. I spent my time necking Tuinals and drinking Thunderbird wine and thinking that I was having a good time. I thought I was having a good time but I can see now of course that I was just trying to blank out the pain of my meaningless empty life. I was chasing oblivion and mistaking it for a good time. Not the only one to do that, I suppose. Oblivion often tends to look like a good time – and then you come to in the early hours feeling like shit warmed up. I was an expert in feeling like shit warmed up. I got to know that feeling really well. It was the defining feeling of my life. Been there done that. Forever trying to run away from the pain of my empty life but succeeding only in adding to it…

I can see now that I had to go through all that darkness. It was a necessary process. It was a necessary process but that the time I did not know that it was. At the time I knew very little. It is necessary that when one goes through such darkness that one does not know that it is necessary – this is how it always works. I see this now. At the time it was just shit – shit that I wasn’t really paying much heed to. It’s hard to pay heed to anything when you’re off your head on Tuinals and Thunderbird wine.

Now, I can see that my life was all just shit. Now I know how shit it really was. Only – even more to the point – I can see that it wasn’t shit at all. Even though at the time I would have said that it was, if I had been able to reflect on it. Which I wasn’t able to do. Now I can see that I was actually in a state of Nirvanic Bliss the whole time. It had all been bliss. All of it bliss. I just didn’t know it….