Who’s into Philosophy?

What’s up!

My name is Jackson Weber, and I’m eighteen years old.

At just two years old, I had an illness (meningitis) which rendered me deaf and unable to walk (temporarily).

When I was fourteen, was diagnosed with bipolar type II, debilitating depression and severe anxiety.

Age fifteen hit, as well as an autoimmune illness that yet again revoked my ability to walk, but yet again was temporary.

During that time frame when I was fifteen, I had several traumas develop which I am still currently working through.

My autoimmune illness started with an inability to use the restroom and a burning fire in my legs.

One day later, I was catheterized.

Doctor: “his bladder would have burst if you would have waited any longer.”

My parents, the individuals who were meant to care for me, my “guardians,” watched me regress into a coma over the course of two weeks, with a tube sticking out of my midsection. I was bed-ridden. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t talk. I wasn’t even there, yet I was.

Eventually, they called the ambulance.

Apparently I had overdosed on drugs, even though I didn’t use at the time. Apparently I was such a bad person for making them pay for my medical bills— my dad could have bought a jeep instead, but no, he was gracious enough as to pay for my bills.

The doctors said it was an autoimmune illness, but no, my parents insisted that I had overdosed on drugs for a month straight.

They insisted I was buying whipped cream to get high off of the remaining air.

They insisted I was buying fentanyl and snorting it in my room.

They insisted I was buying cocaine and ingesting it.

But none of those substances were in my system..?

Denial.

No, doctor, our son overdosed. We don’t know what he was using, but we know he was using. He was in his room all the time, not socializing— and when he did, it was extremely awkward. He just seemed down all the time, and he’s never around us.

Mom, Dad, that’s called depression.

And what I went through, I’m still healing from.

I now use, not that I did before— I now use marijuana, because you accused me of using the very things that you thought caused my illness— “drugs.”

My illness was both a blessing and a curse.

It really opened my eyes to the people around me.

When I woke up from my coma, I only recognized my little sister. I’ve six people in my family, including me, and I only recognized one.

I was diagnosed with permanent brain damage. Plans were being set to adjust to the new life of a dead son in a living body. A severely incapacitated individual, one who could not even talk.

Then, my brain started changing.

I started becoming more conscious.

I started becoming more aware of my surroundings, as if I was a newborn baby suddenly thrust into a fifteen-year-old body.

One month into my hospital visit, I started talking again.

Two months into my hospital visit, I was walking with support.

One month after discharge, I took it as a personal obligation to completely obliterate my walker.

Four months after discharge, I did my first backflip on ground since before the illness.

Five months after discharge, I started living a “normal” life again.

A year and a half after discharge, I left my home and started living with my girlfriend.

At age eighteen, I’m still here, and proud of myself for being so.

However, several questions remained. I turned to philosophy for answers, but found yet even more questions.

How? How did I come back from this after being diagnosed with permanent brain damage?

What? Is this reality really “real?” I don’t think we understand even a minute fraction of what or who we are— I think we’re severely limiting ourselves and what abilities we have.

Why? Why are we taught to limit our own minds? Studying a brain— is literally a brain studying itself. It will not comprehend— it will place things into containers, it will place things that may not be capable of being understood into separate constructs so that it may be viewed upon with a common reference.

We’re all different, yes, yet the difference is infinite and impossible to measure and lies closer to the same than one would think.

You have an infinity, right? That’s you. Impossible to comprehend. Uncountable. Unfathomable. But yet when you place “infinity” into a finite container such as “dimension,” it becomes comprehensible. Same for us— we are infinities contained within physical beings.

Close your eyes and look— don’t look through your eyelids, but look through your mind. Visualize an object and note the intangibility of it, and only then will you further understand yourself.

You are physical as well as mental. You are “real,” as well as “imagined.” You are “light,” and “dark.” One without the power to do evil is not necessarily good, and one without power to do good is not necessarily evil. But one who has power to do both can be defined as “good” or “evil,” and the same perspective lies within you.

You are not your thoughts, you are merely an observer ties to your thoughts. You can choose to look upon these thoughts as the very sustenance that will become your end, or you can turn that into a beautiful space with vast room to grow.

It’s infinite, and it is full of crap. Or it can be full of life.

With this information in mind, I’m working to find the balance so that I can experience both happiness and sadness with equal feeling, as opposed to being sad and focused on my goal of happiness, or happy with the knowledge that I’ll be down again.

One who is happy will not realize he is happy until he looks at himself, and one who is miserable will work through his misery until he looks upon his own image.

To be conscious is both a blessing and a curse— but to be unconscious, is neither.

To hold your pain is to heal with it, but to run from your pain is to feed the fire with gasoline.