I sit in the middle of the mess, in a world far away from what I now understand to be my own. I've finally set it all down, what I’ve been observing and noting and saving and carrying for three life-changing years. The volumes of notes, the thousands of pictures, all the recorded voices speaking to me from places I could never have imagined before experiencing them, worlds I still struggle to hold. The dozens of documents, all containers for content, all being shaped to share. It sinks in, the strong sense of purpose that the lifetime of meaningful work in front of me represents.

The new skin on my right hand is hot and red this morning. The puncture wound mends, the one I accidentally inflicted on myself in a rage at my inability to do anything about the psychosis and obscenity of this ugly new world order. A broken glass candle holder and violent downward force stop—dead—my frustrated intellect’s drive to fix everything, to account for it all, to make any sense of any of it. To redeem itself for having been buried alive and useless when it all went down. In the moment of impact—of glass punching through skin and flesh--the pain and shock of what one part of me has done to another part of me suddenly illuminates, in sharp hard cold white light, a formidable intellect with a lethally overdeveloped sense of responsibility. (It is the last time my intellect will hurt my body.)

(Hey, want to radicalize a human being? Instill at a very early age an overwhelming sense of responsibility, the belief that if he doesn’t do his duty, the world will end as he knows it. Hang a cause around his neck that must be addressed, or his family and friends will perish. Then, isolate and ignore him. Knock him down and tie his hands behind his back. Watch him push himself up, over and over, trying to meet his obligation, only to be punched back down again by those with free hands. Watch his rage rise, righteously. Watch it ignite. Watch it burn.)

I feel my intellect creeping around my emotions this morning, sizing up my newly forming creative process, angling for advantage in its instinctive competitiveness. My intellect's need to categorize, evaluate, judge—its innate push to convince, control—works in the background, making a hard structure it eagerly waits to clamp down on the soft new pink skin of my reforming self. It is my mother's work, this attempted emotional imprisonment, this effort to show creativity who’s really boss, this aim to annihilate the soft and sensitive. 

Over its lifetime, my intellect inflicted wounds--some surface, some deep--on humans it was fundamentally incapable of feeling. My emotions were in hiding; my vulnerability lost in a black hole. Only half of a human being was present. Many of the wounds my half-self inflicted on other humans never healed, and I lost all of those connections. 

Now, surrounded by artifacts from the last three years on the outside of everything, I remember my little sister. I say her name out loud. To make her real in my world, so far from her world. I haven't said her name in years, but a possibility I didn't even know existed brought us together recently to try again. To build something new. To see each other with new eyes. To know each other, again. To love.

The deep burning itch in my right hand pulls me out of my daydreams. My hand's new skin reminds me that even the deepest physical injuries can heal, even stupidly self-inflicted ones (the only kind I've ever caused).

The scar, though, will be permanent. It is also a reminder.