@sneak
@officialfuzzy
@ned
@dan
@stan
@ausbitbank
@pharesim
@instructor2121
@abit
@alexpmorris
@baabeetaa
@fabien
@frystikken
@furion
@forrestwillie
@intelliguy
....and many other people, who I didn't dig through my old followers to find.
Seems I owe some folks around here a sincere apology.
Last year, I more or less lost my mind. There's a great many details around this, but suffice it to say that I became highly delusional. I was living in a world inside my mind with little attachment to reality. One of my delusions was that steemit was populated and built by a bunch of noxious hackers. Heck, I hung onto that particular delusion for a very long time.
But I realized: If I was wrong about everything else, I'm probably wrong about that, as well. And after a good think on the matter, I realize I was quite wrong indeed.
- Sneak's not an asshole. I was. Sorry, @sneak.
- Steemit's not good or evil. It's just one of the coolest tools for publishing and managing content online. And then some.
- In all likelihood, no one hacked me. My brain simply failed on me.
- I acted the fool to a whole lot of very welcoming people.
So, to get real specific on what happened?
Well, I found out that I'm bipolar. I've likely always been bipolar, and probably began experiencing symptoms in elementary school. Let's just say that I had a very tough time dealing with my classmates, teachers, and everyone else. But I didn't know I was bipolar. I had no clue that I might be mentally ill, and even when I had clues, I certainly didn't think that it might be treatable.
Here's a post on Steemit from a bipolar writer describing his illness:
https://steemit.com/life/@smithgift/writing-bipolar-from-bipolar-writer
It's a lot like that. Except that I've got a different form of bipolar disorder-- "Type I with Psychotic Features". The basic gist of that is that if I become manic, I am prone to breaking out of reality altogether.
But now I take only safe, legal lithium from a pharmacy, perscribed by a doctor.
But what about the truck ?
Note first: I'd been sober for more than a month when the truck incident occurred.
Well, that's what happens with delusions. In a ridiculous chain of events, I became convinced that I was living in a movie, and that I needed to steal transportation in order to meet up with Anonymous at the intersection of highways 5 and 6 in Phnom Penh. If I did not steal the transportation, no one would recognize me.
Well, it worked about as well as you might imagine. I ended up in immigration jail, saying only "pram bongkno" to the jailers-- it happens to mean "five cock and balls" in khmer.
Long before this happened I had already gotten paranoid and destroyed all the electronic data in my possession including my google account and crypto keys and mobile phone. I'd destroyed all of it-- my relationships, my google search result (try searching Jacob Gadikian) and my money in about a four month period.
I'm just grateful that my fiancee, kept insisting that my head was broken to anyone who would listen. I eventually got to a mental hospital in Buffalo, NY, where I was given lithium. I ever so slowly began to realize the horrid nature of what I'd done.
But it's taken me even longer to see that anything that happened between me and anyone else during that time span, was almost certainly my fault. So I'm taking the blame for all of it:
- my disgrace on steemit
- my quarrels with anyone
- my failure of a startup
- my failed relationships
At this point I'm just taking all of it. And I mean, there's a LOT. It's not just work-- it's my personal life as well. How my fiancee and I made it through all this I will never know. I just know she's a saint and that I'll stay by her side forever.
So, I'm not going to stop. I'm going to keep on doing what I do, but hopefully treating people much, much better. The psych treatment helps, but I'm sure it's not a perfect cure. I'll do all I can, all the time that I am able.