The Fourth Letter: My Favourite Twitter Account

The Rebellion of a Mind Half at War with Itself

This image has been used for the purpose of illustration only

My favourite account to read on Twitter belongs to a woman who is very possibly insane. She posts in milliseconds. Time after time. Raw, fragmented thoughts from the edges of her consciousness.

There are days when she writes as though heaven is inside her chest and God Himself is shouting commands into her brain. Other times, it’s like you’re reading the solemn prayer of a person afflicted with a high fever. I sit around and watch as she documents her entire life like this in a very luminous way.

When I say luminous, I do not mean that they are always clear, no. But I’m saying that despite how broken they are, there are still some shards of clarity and traces of beauty in them at least.

And oh, how angry she is at the world.

Now, I do not know what particularly afflicts her. Schizophrenia, perhaps. A creative kind of torment. True, there is nothing exciting or beautiful about mental illnesses, but this particular individual calls to me.

I am currently blocked from assessing her thoughts - one of the many casualties of her impulsive rage, I suspect - but thanks to the very insufferable Elon Musk, sometimes I still manage to read her thoughts, and listen, let me tell you, there are tragedies in the world that our eyes have never seen, but thankfully, what we have to make most use of are our excitement.

There was one time on my Twitter when I shared a story about Soba, a girl with a mental illness who lived in the neighbourhood where I grew up, and on this particular day, she read that story and texted me. This woman. Our conversation was very simple and easy. But in her words, there was something unfiltered, something most of us never get to say.

Something I hope I never get to say.

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I was writing this letter for you last night, and by some unusual timing, just as I was about rounding up, the power went out. My desktop screen went black mid-thought. There was no warning. I sat still in the darkness, hands paused over the keyboard, like someone trying to remember a constantly evading dream. And then the world as I know it vanished. The noise that confronts me with reality went out with the light.

At that moment, there was nothing but myself and my thoughts. The pressure to attend to undone tasks, the need to be accountable, to exist, everything vanished.

All that was left was a man. Strange, half-naked and bare.

I lit a candle and walked barefoot through the house like a ghost unsure of when he died. The books on my shelf in the half-glow of the light looked very much older. I fixed my eyes on them, furiously thinking. My phone buzzed at regular intervals but I ignored it. I didn't even check who was calling. For the first time in weeks, I was no one’s answer. I was nobody's lifeline. I just existed.

And in this state, I thought about her again, this psychotic, poetic woman on the internet, who lives in a world governed by her sensations. This woman who can break down in public and rebuild however she deems fit. What would it mean to live like that? To be irreverent to life. To have your mind bend the world until it no longer resembles anything familiar, but at least, it still belongs to you. To spit in the face of coherence, and answer to no one but the tremors in your own blood.

My hours, perhaps much like yours, are marked by clocks, tedious appointments, random notifications. Hers seem more measured by frustrations and dangerous firestorms. Outrageous impulses that battles her mind. You don’t know the torment of a mind in this sort of state. She offers me an opportunity to see life lived in rebellion against the relentless tick of accountability to sensibleness.

It makes you wonder, really, about the cost of our carefully constructed lives. Sometimes, she brings me back to the brink of reality. The place where thoughts are measured by their coherence and life gives distance to emotional struggles. There’s something hauntingly liberating about her defiance, still you don’t know what sort of life this is.

You can’t even imagine it.