If, like me, you have a void within you that will not be calmed; if you have had to create your own world just so you had somewhere to exist; if you experience every relationship under an impenetrable fog of difference; and especially if you have accepted the lie that all of this makes you sick, bad, and wrong; read this book.
I can't say that it captured the truth of my experience with impeccable precision, but it has come closer than any prose I have ever read. Poets have touched it, but therapists, scholars, and novelists never have. Perhaps it is because a certain type of individual--intense, porous, and gifted--would have nothing but poetry or music to express it.
As clearly as it reflects my reality, however, the only help it can offer is the acknowledgement that it is not a disease or a disorder, but a heightened way of being to which few can relate. This is some comfort, of course, but one could hope that it offered a pathway forward other than rather general therapeutic exercises that I have tried already. For now, it will be enough fuel for my engine that I am that I am that I am: the rage, the cruelty, and the emptiness as much as the beauty, the kindness, and the perceptiveness. It is all a part of one imperfect but stunning work of art.
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