My Life Story Compressed

We should actively take hold of our narrative self, the story of who we are, and construct a narrative we desire.

“The theory of narrative identity postulates that individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of the self that provides the individual with a sense of unity and purpose in life. This life narrative integrates one’s reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future. Furthermore, this narrative is a story – it has characters, episodes, imagery, a setting, plots, and themes and often follows the traditional model of a story, having a beginning (initiating event), middle (an attempt and a consequence), and an end (denouement).” – Wikipedia

Early Childhood

Ages 0-10:

I was born 1991 three years after my older brother. Our parents met in a halfway house for the mentally ill, so they could reintegrate into society. Both of my parents had severe mental illnesses, diseased brains. My father had paranoid schizophrenia and took medication most of my life. I don’t know if my mother ever had an accurate diagnosis, but my guess is at least schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She stopped taking medication when I was two. During her psychotic breaks she would scream at my father for hours. Her first time stopping medication she banged pots and pans together between each word and syllable she yelled until the police were called. Cops broke down our door, dragged my mom out in front of our apartment, twisted her arm, and pepper-sprayed her.

As our neighbors watched the scene, police took me and my brother to government care. Within months the state sent us back to our parents. A kind neighbor realized we couldn’t live in that city anymore and drove our family from Bakersfield, California to Las Vegas. At the age of 5, while my mother was at work my father had a psychotic break and was so confused about reality he jumped through one of our windows. Using his arms to block, he rammed through the window pane falling into shards of glass on the other side. The police took me and my brother to child haven again. While I have few memories of the first separation I remember the second better. I learned how to tie my shoes from a childcare worker. I had a bad case of the chicken pox virus and was given antibiotics. My parents were court-ordered to take a parenting class and got us back again.

Since then we moved apartments on average every three months to hide from child protective services, save money with move-in specials, and ease my mother’s fears. Part of how my parents would get us back is my mother’s illness varied in cycles. For a few months she would appear happy and at a glance normal. Our lives were dictated by her mood. Something internal or extenal would trigger her into months of mania. She would hardly sleep at all and would sometimes yell incoherent sentences all day and into the night.

Part of why my mom ruled over our lives was how passive my father was. There are few creatures more stoic than a medicated human being. I remember my father most sitting at whatever kitchen table we had, drinking coffee, endlessly smoking. My dad was recognized by the state as 100% disabled. The meager government check meant poverty for one disabled person, but we used the money for a family of four.

My childhood was a horror I would not wish on my greatest enemy. Nothing was safe; nothing was sacred. No child should live in chaos facing mental, physical, and emotional abuse. By age 6 the stress and dysfunction made me obese. Being labeled “fat” and moving as an overweight kid with fluctuating weight based on my feast or famine diet of American fast food was a torture of its own. My main escape was fantasizing. Constantly daydreaming, I thought of imaginary worlds or whatever didn’t involve me. Sometimes I inserted myself as a character where I had greater power and influence. The real world was out of control.

Even at a young age I knew the situation we were in didn’t feel right. I talked to my brother about returning to government care, but he thought child haven was a bad place where kids weren’t doing well. He wanted us to stay and go to school with more normal and healthy kids. Through these bad times I considered my options over and over. If I called for help I would be dooming my brother to be taken with me. They wouldn’t take just one of us if we had unfit parents. I would probably never see my dad again, and the idea hurt. My dad didn’t do much, but he told me he loved me almost everyday before I left for school. When we hugged and I pulled away at the end, he would gently hold me as if to say, a little longer and as long as you want. These small drops of love I survived on meant so much to me. There was a chance me and my brother would be separated into different homes. If the state really saw what we lived through, maybe my parents would go to prison. My choices affected our whole family. I could change the course of our lives, but what if I was wrong? I was the youngest, the least experienced. I couldn’t be sure, and no one agreed with me. Besides…if it was really bad, someone would stop this, wouldn’t they? Everything became a test of endurance. How much would I take to keep our family together?

My mom got me and my brother two dogs over the years but neither lived more than a few months. The first we adopted ate too much chocolate we left on the floor, causing him to be sick for days. One day he was there in the morning and gone in the afternoon. I came home to my dad telling me the original owners wanted him back. The second dog, Lobo, was given to us by one of my mom’s coworkers. Lobo was a beautiful Dachshund with a bark 4 times his small size. Lobo had a long, lean, muscular body and aggressive temperament that hinted at his pedigree of a hunting dog. I was so excited to have a dog again I walked on my hands and knees for the first few days to welcome Lobo. I wanted Lobo to think I was a dog like him. Full of hope, I believed we would have to be more stable to take care of a dog. Life had to get better.

My mom lost her job, and her psychotic break almost always caused or followed her firing. Lobo couldn’t get used to my mother’s manic screaming and would bark back at her. I didn’t know dogs are stressed by changing environments. Every time we moved must have been more difficult for Lobo than for us. One apartment we stayed in had huge windows and sliding glass doors. My mother’s voice echoed through the entire complex. I remember hearing her yelling from buildings away as my stomach tightened into a knot of dread. Part of the reason for her outrage was my father having gambled the money we had for the month. We barely scraped by and had days of no food. A few times I ate so much white rice, butter, and salt more than feeling full or hungry my head ached until I no longer wanted to eat. Lobo struggled alongside us. I didn’t realize at the time, but a sign of his hunger was eating a tasteless plastic toy I left out. Once in the shape of a rat, there were only small chewed pieces left stuck under the couch he couldn’t reach.

Around that time in 4th grade at the age of 9, I had my first thoughts of suicide. The idea came to me while I walked home under the beating desert sun. How do I stop this pain? A feeling answered, fall in front of that car. I saw in my mind’s eye my ankle giving out on the next step and my head being crushed under the tire of the upcoming car. I understood that all my pain would be over, but I grew immediately terrified of my end so close. The car sped away and my ankle didn’t falter. Simply walking down the street I had to come to grips with this feeling, but I pushed it away.

We moved again. As usual, things got better for a while, then worse. My mom was deep into mania for weeks. When Lobo’s barking finally got through to her, she picked up Lobo and walked in front of me and my brother while we watched TV. She held Lobo by the throat against the living room wall. My body froze as my mind shut down. I couldn’t do anything as Lobo desperately yelped in submission, for help, for air. She didn’t strangle him to death. Soon after she called animal control. That night I sat outside petting Lobo for the last time until the truck arrived with stacked metal cages. Lobo was trapped in the dark, surrounded by strange smells and sounds, uncertain of where he’s going. I consoled myself by imagining a purebred Dachshund like Lobo would be adopted quickly. Now I’m old enough to know both of my dogs died cruelly.

Teenage Implosion

Ages 11-15:

My brother and I made friends who became our family. We latched onto normalcy. We spent nearly every weekend and most weekdays at the homes of friends. I spent most of my childhood drawing, reading, and watching several hours of TV per day. I went to school as often as I could which was difficult with constant moving. I wanted stability but had no firm base. By age 11 our family dealt with evictions, broken leases, homelessness, homeless shelters, and even stayed in the projects. We were running out of places we could move to. For a month we lived in a U-Haul truck with all of our stuff. Despite growing with Christianity and wanting to believe, I couldn’t make sense of how a good god would allow such evil in the world. Is god good and has a plan for us all? I needed to know to endure this life.

During a bout of homelessness and living on the actual street, I couldn’t take it anymore and left my parents to stay with my brother at a friend’s home. A sickness caught up with me. As the fever built I laid on the couch alone. I woke to a feeling of alarm, weakness, and mortal fear I never remembered experiencing. I needed help. I tried to get up, call out to someone, but with all the strength in my body I raised my right arm before losing consciousness. Sometime later I woke up feeling better, but the idea that I could have died without any help stuck in my mind. If my life ended there, what was the meaning of anything I experienced? I searched for the depths of evil god would allow and abandoned organized religion. In place of religion I investigated spiritual truth and the occult, refining my beliefs.

There was a hole where reason should be. I didn’t even know I was missing an answer to the fundamental question of why. Why did my parents act the way they did? Why did anyone? Why do people suffer? I interpreted neglect as freedom. I could do or think anything. At times my daydreaming intensified where I would spend an hour in the afternoon lying in bed with my arm over my eyes listening to music, fully immersing myself in an imaginary environment as an observer or character. If I wasn’t daydreaming, I thought of truth and certainty. When most parents yell at each other they are arguing, to express themselves, to show a different side, to persuade. What were my parents arguing for? With certainty we could have clarity, direction, and be rid of the constant confusion. Is truth independent of what anyone believes or says? If I can find truth I can objectively cut through all the mixed messages my parents expressed. Maybe the yelling would finally stop. Living through madness fused my will to live with craving for meaning.

By age 12, my brother (15) could hardly stay home anymore and lived with friends. At 14 I couldn’t take staying with my parents through their chaotic lives any more, especially without my brother. When my parents told me we were going to be homeless again, I left to live with friends. After several months I made it through 9th grade and into my freshman summer. On what felt like another weekend my brother bluntly told me our father died. He had been missing for a few days, and like every other time I was waiting to hear he was found and safe. My dad had psychotic breaks lasting from a few hours to weeks and probably looked a lot like the mentally ill homeless men you might see on the street. He collapsed at a bus stop. People nearby called an ambulance, but how would you treat a homeless old man lying on the curb? I couldn’t fully imagine the final moments of my father in pain, confused, surrounded by strangers.

A month later my mom rented a car to attend my father’s Marine funeral in Boulder City. My brother didn’t go and only my dad’s two sisters attended aside from me and my mom. My mother made a scene before the service began. She talks in a way that never ends. At first people try to understand, but their frustration grows until they stop trying and label her crazy. I watched as the funeral director slowly lost his temper before he yelled at her to leave in the parking lot. With my mother screaming in the car I told her to pull over. Stopping in the middle of the road, I got out and ran. In that moment I decided I would never live with my mother again. With my father gone I had no reason to stay and long ago I lost any attachment. While I used the last coins in my pocket on a payphone to call my friend and a brother to pick me up, my mom called the police. I was labeled a runaway in the system. After getting back to Las Vegas and going to class, the high school cops got a statement, cuffed me, and took me to a temporary holding facility. Within a few days they released me to my mother. We took the bus home to the apartment where my mom and dad were staying. I called the police to take me away, back to the facility.

For the longest six weeks of my life I was housed with runaways, drug addicts, human trafficking victims, battered women, and more. My daydreaming became a powerful coping mechanism again. Government care was a huge shock. The workers constantly monitored and tracked me which was in stark contrast to the independence and freedom I had. I passed through several homes; none worse than what I’d been through. I kept trying to get back to my friends, the people who proved they cared for me. There was no point being in the system if I couldn’t see my friends. Within six months of entering the childcare system, I found a way to live independently under the state and stayed with friends on couches. After major turbulence I was so grateful to have a reliable place to simply live among friends and pursue my education. Before the government check to care for me went to others, and finally the money was under my control.

High School, College, and University

Ages 16-20:

I was determined to take more action and do what I thought best to the fullest. I had already nearly died a couple of times and everything I knew was taken away from me. I applied for a dual high school/college program and began college at 16. I took three high school classes with other students in the program and a full load of college courses all on campus. Finally gaining more stability, I wanted constant stimulation, friendship, videos, and learning. Looking over the majors at my college I saw new possible paths. I narrowed down to three choices: art, psychology, and philosophy. Since childhood I pursued the aesthetics and mastery of art. In psychology, I would find understanding of my parents’ affliction and work towards a treatment of the disease. However, the fundamental questions I searched for in psychology were actually philosophical. If sanity is connecting to reality, then what is reality? What is medication balancing neurotransmitters to and who decides the balance is acceptable? Is medication mind control and should we do that to a person? Philosophy won as the prime major to attempt to answer these questions and train my mind to be clear, resilient, and antifragile. If I devoted my life to the treatment of mental disorders, then I would still feel controlled by my history. I wanted to be free, but what is a free, good, meaningful life? To even begin to answer is philosophy.

Based on my story so far I don’t know how you would expect me to act! I am probably far more normal in person than you think. I was friendly and loved talking to people. Being in the flow of conversation and focusing on others let me forget about myself. College was great for meeting people. I could ask almost anyone what their major is, then I could ask why. I already had years of experience steering conversation away from me and any sensitive topics. Dodging questions, redirection, following an interesting tangent, allowed me to relate. When you give people space they fill it with their expectations. No one’s expectation of me matched my reality, but I focused more on similarity than difference.

At home, I could relax some, but I was constantly on guard about annoying anyone. If I was too much of a burden, I would have to find a new place to live. I lived with an extremely dysfunctional family who let me sleep on their upstairs couch. At school I could give all of my social energy to who I met. With the consequences of failing socially so low compared to living with another family or dealing with the legal system, I took opportunities to be authentic. I was carefree and spoke honestly. I was voted prom king, and I felt so validated in my ability to socialize. Outside I took up space but at home I tried to take up as little space as possible. I began to play an addictive online game where I could explore a virtual world. There I could go anywhere and be powerful. Computers are like TV but with even more interaction and control. Gaming continued to be my escape and took over every hobby. I graduated high school and transferred directly to my local university with 4 terms of college experience. My status as a former ward of the state granted a full ride scholarship.

I went to school for food, learning, and normalcy, and the more I focused on school the more I was rewarded. Academic settings put me in positions where people were willing to invest in young people. The more I learned of the world the more strange I felt. Over many years I’ve pieced together a story of my past. My parents were brutalized minorities suffering in illness at the hands of an ignorant society. My mother took antipsychotic medication while I grew in her womb. So much came to a single point. The government gave us just enough money to barely survive in poverty-ridden parts of the city. The severity of my parents’ mental illness matched their paired dysfunction. My passive father endured and perpetuated abuses as my mom screamed a stream of background noise. The part of her mind which chatters never silenced, so pressured speech built into quiet talking to yelling as loud as possible all day and into the night.

I know I should forgive that terrified child I was whose nature is to trust parents. Mental illness traumatized that child by early separation from his parents twice. I must have had a terrifying and deep fear of losing my parents again. The stress was so great I froze in stasis for years, taking in excessive information, the endless chattering of my mother which I tuned out in favor of anything I could do motionless and silent. I am an outlier, an anomaly. What being before or after has this extreme life?

I searched for answers to the most fundamental questions of reality, knowledge, ethics, and religion. I found few answers and far more questions. I was hurting. I fell into the vices of food and video games to be happy, gaining my heaviest weight in college.

The end is the beginning is the end

Ages 21-25:

I got fit, quit gaming addictively, and prepared to get a job. I finished my philosophy degree feeling I could begin to study the subject adequately. Graduating at 21, I took an entry level corporate job while I figured life out. At 22, I had a deep intuition for the meaning of life. The artificial intelligence Watson’s display of answering questions completely altered my view of what AI was capable of. In a game of trivia, Watson defeated by far the best human champions to ever play. At each answer the system displayed Watson’s top 3 guesses, so you could see what it was “thinking.” I never believed machines could approach human level intelligence, but my mind opened to the idea that all mental capacities could be computed beyond the limits of biological life. An artificial general intelligence, with the potential to be a perfectly rational being, is the next level of life. I quit my job and returned to school to learn computer science to refine and test my ideas.

My whole life I studied rationality to defend myself against insanity. I knew I was high risk. When I found purpose, meaning, and direction, complex PTSD nearly destroyed my mind. I stood at the edge of sanity to see as far as I could see. Balancing, I fell over the edge into the abyss. I continue to climb back up. What can a diurnal creature do but crawl towards light? No one knew what I was going through. My memories constantly tricked and confused me. Years of controlling my thoughts had come to haunt me.

I remember the night the problems hit me the hardest. In so many ways I feel Elliott Collin Ploutz died then. I laid down to sleep but stayed awake in the grips of a vivid memory. The most painful scene looped in my mind for hours until I slept in the early morning, waking up a few hours later where the same scene looped in my mind for weeks. The more attention I gave the memory the more it shifted and altered. After years of experiencing this anguish, I think I can communicate the feeling: a waking nightmare. I felt like I was having a constant nightmare in my mind. Sometimes I can tune out the dream and focus on the current moment, but the nightmare pulls me. The horrifying dreams filled every gap in my memory where I was vulnerable. For the future I can prepare. In the present I can act. But I can’t make me, the child of my past, grow. There I’m frozen in weakness, and the monsters attacked me.

If you want to understand think of the last nightmare you had. Could you think clearly or were you terrified? I’m ashamed to admit that for all my learning and preparation I didn’t recognize my experience as mental illness. Before I left my job and lost insurance I visited a psychiatric center for a mental health evaluation. The nurse practitioner told me I should only come back if I had symptoms, and I was fine. When it started I was caught up just like a nightmare where I wasn’t quite sure what’s real. Well, my childhood did prepare me to function through crisis at school and with people no matter how I felt on the inside. With how terrible I felt I thought someone would notice a change in me; that I was different from before. Neither side knew what to ask. I didn’t know how anyone could help me. I could barely describe my experience. Old friends seem annoyed with my lack of focus. Their misunderstanding made me distant, and I could barely think of what they were going through with little space in my mind. A few times I reached out for medical care I could afford, but the mental health system in our country is horrible. I still battle my mind every day while following my chosen path.

The Path

Ages 25+:

I work towards the purpose I found no matter how small my contribution. Finishing my bachelors degree in computer science in three years while enduring the pain of my trauma, supporting myself, and preparing for graduate school drained me. I studied for and took the GRE prior to my last term which was a rough goodbye from undergraduate studies. I spent the early summer relaxing and rewarding my effort.

In that summer, my mother was murdered. I want to say it didn’t affect me, but I can see now it did. I hated my mother. I hardly said more than a few sentences to her in over ten years. Hearing of her death felt like hearing of a stranger’s tragedy. A person I didn’t know was killed. The case was never solved. Does anyone care when a poor, mentally ill, old woman is killed? I grew even more distant from my old friends because they knew what happened, and I didn’t want to care or pretend to. I always thought when I got into a safe and secure place I could reconnect with my mom on my terms. Slowly I had to accept that would never happen. Any hope of closure was taken from me.

I began to struggle with self-medication. The opportunities in graduate school kept me moving forward. While my views of artificial intelligence evolved over my education, the value of my belief system pushed me forward. I felt and feel my perspective is important to share. Completing my masters in computer science, I exited academia knowing the purely academic life was not me.

I took a few months to recharge and refocus. Like many people I hoped that climate change would be solved through the economy and technology, but the dire warnings of climate scientists were only getting more bleak. I looked into climate change gravely, and as I read my hope and optimism grinded down to nothing. We won’t reach AGI if our planet’s resources are misused. In the years since 2018 I continued to learn, write, and create videos. For four years I wrote my autobiography and consolidated my thoughts on the objective meaning of life

I never gave up on changing the world. The flaws of our current society pushed me to re-imagine what humans can do. We can flourish as a species and help the biosphere thrive through connection, consciousness, and wisdom! I hope to live up to my personal meaning of life: I support the search for wisdom.