I have a message to communicate.
Over a two-and-a-half-year period from 2007 to 2010, I learned something. It is a huge thing, an unimaginably complex thing, and it is horrible. In this era of gratuitous exaggeration I hesitate to use a phrase like “it ripped chunks out of my soul”, but at times it felt like that was happening. It snuck up on me slowly, aggregating imperceptibly out of little fragments of information, and then abruptly it was visible. It was not a pleasant thing to learn. Having it in my head now is difficult. Knowing what I know, I have an urge to communicate it. This is the kind of thing that I feel everyone should know. It is awful, but it is fixable, and the first step to fixing it is to tell someone else about it.
I want to tell someone else. I don’t know where to start.
The idea is so complex, I can’t fit it into a sound bite. I can’t casually mention it over dinner. And it’s unpleasant, so it’s not something you can take in all at once. The mind just stops processing. It took me two years to see it, and I was seeing little bits of it every day. When the picture came into focus, it was breathtaking — but that focus rested on two years of accumulated pieces of data. I can’t fit that into a blog post. I can’t fit that into a piece of writing someone will want to read. It’s too big to fit through a pencil, a keyboard. The scream, waiting to get out of my head, is huge.
So I’m having to take the thing apart, piece by piece, and try to reconstruct the original fragments of data which led me to my original epiphany. I’m probably going to do it wrong. Some things I’m not remembering correctly, and some things are too painful to think about, even now. But I want to tell someone. I must tell someone.
When I figure out where to begin, I’ll get on with it.
Animalfeasance 