I Changed My Timeline

How psychosis, creativity, relentless learning and three unexpected ideas about perception, time and identity helped me rebuild a life I once believed was already over

There was a period in my life when I wanted the world to burn.

Anger had become easier than hope. Depression colored almost everything I saw, and resentment gave me a way to explain why my life had gone so far from where I thought it should be. I remembered every betrayal, every humiliation, every failed relationship and every mistake with astonishing precision, then carried those memories into the next day as though suffering were proof that they had mattered.

I drank heavily. I moved through toxic relationships. I experienced homelessness for a time. Legal problems seemed impossible to escape. My connection with family deteriorated. Faith, once important to me, had largely collapsed.

There were long stretches when I was not building a life so much as enduring one.

Suicide existed in my mind not simply as an occasional thought, but as an ending I assumed would eventually arrive. On many days, I wondered whether I would make it to nightfall. The future became difficult to imagine because I kept using the evidence of the present to predict everything that would come afterward.

If today was unbearable, tomorrow would be unbearable too.

If I had failed before, I would fail again.

If people had hurt me, people would continue hurting me.

If my life had become chaotic, then perhaps chaos was simply what my life was.

Looking back, I can see the flaw in that reasoning. I was trying to forecast an entire life from one terrible section of it.

At the time, however, I did not know how much information I was missing.

I had no idea what I would eventually study, whom I would meet, what I would create, or what questions would begin reorganizing the way I understood myself. I did not know I would learn to draw after spending much of my life believing I could not. I did not know I would study psychology, philosophy, science, spirituality, consciousness, music, peer support and project management with an intensity that bordered on obsession.

Most importantly, I did not know that the scattered thoughts I was recording in journals during some of the most unstable years of my life would eventually become a framework for understanding perception, time and personal change.

I call that framework the Multiverse of Self.

It did not begin as a theory.

It began as an attempt to survive.

When Reality Became Unstable

Psychosis altered my relationship with almost everything I had taken for granted: perception, time, meaning, spirituality, identity and the reliability of my own conclusions.

During psychosis, connections can feel unusually intense. Coincidences may seem loaded with significance. Internal experiences can feel external. Symbols, memories, fears and ordinary events can become woven together into explanations that feel extraordinarily convincing from the inside.

I have learned to be careful when describing those experiences.

Meaning is not the same thing as fact.

The fact that an experience felt profound does not prove that every interpretation I attached to it was objectively true. At the same time, I do not believe the only responsible response to psychosis is to declare the entire experience meaningless.

There is a middle position that has become central to my work: a person can examine what an experience meant psychologically or existentially without claiming that every perception reflected external reality.

For me, one insight survived that examination.

Things had happened to me, but I did not have to keep making them happen to me again.

For years, I had treated memory almost like an obligation. If someone hurt me, continuing to be angry seemed like evidence that the injury mattered. If I forgave, perhaps that meant I had excused what happened. If I stopped suffering, perhaps I was somehow betraying the person I had been when the wound was fresh.

So I replayed old events.

Arguments that had ended years earlier continued in my head. Relationships that were over remained psychologically present. Past failures occupied new mornings.

Eventually I noticed something simple.

My mind could go backward.

My body could not.

I could remember yesterday, imagine tomorrow and mentally revisit events from decades earlier, but every experience of living still occurred in one place: the present moment.

That observation became one of the foundations of my framework.

Three Thoughts That Eventually Became One

The Multiverse of Self began with three ideas that arrived separately.

The first was almost a passing thought: the self is a kind of multiverse created through perception and choice.

I began thinking about how dramatically a life can change because of a single decision.

Stay or leave.

Drink or remain sober.

Call someone or isolate.

Study or give up.

Forgive or continue rehearsing the injury.

Take the job or reject it.

Tell the truth or avoid it.

None of these choices operates in isolation. A decision changes what happens next. The new circumstances create another set of choices, which produce further consequences. Over time, an entire life begins to look like a branching structure.

My thinking then expanded beyond my own biography.

Humanity itself seemed to represent an enormous landscape of possible lives.

If I wanted to imagine how differently my life might have unfolded, I did not need access to a literal parallel universe. I could simply look at other people.

Someone studied during the years I was drinking.

Someone walked away from a relationship I would have stayed in.

Someone forgave an injury I might have carried for years.

Someone sought help when I isolated.

Someone created when I wanted to destroy.

Of course, other people are not alternate versions of me in a scientific sense. Human beings differ in biology, opportunity, culture, history, resources, health, chance and countless other variables. The idea was philosophical rather than physical.

What other lives showed me was possibility.

There was more than one conceivable way for a human story to unfold.

That realization changed the question I was asking.

For years I had asked, “Why did my life become this?”

A more useful question slowly emerged:

“What kind of life could my next choices begin creating?”

The second idea concerned time.

I called it the Perpetual Present.

Human beings can psychologically inhabit yesterday and tomorrow, but action takes place now. Memory can inform us, and imagination can orient us toward the future, yet the only point at which we can actually intervene in our lives is the present.

That realization became deeply practical.

I could spend three hours thinking about the person I wanted to become five years from now, but the only meaningful question was what that future required from me today.

The third idea came partly from something I encountered while reading a comic book.

I began thinking about what I later called the Inevitable Self: the person produced through the accumulation of choices, habits, circumstances, experiences and interpretations over time.

“Inevitable” does not mean predetermined.

It means that, if we continue living, we continue becoming.

Every repeated action contributes something.

Every habit strengthens a direction.

Every response to adversity becomes part of a pattern.

We cannot choose every circumstance that shapes us, but we are continually participating in the construction of a future self.

For a while, the three ideas remained separate.

Then I realized they were describing the same process from different angles.

The Multiverse of Self represented possibility.

The Perpetual Present represented the place where change could occur.

The Inevitable Self represented the person emerging from those accumulated choices.

That was when something else became clear.

I had been building the framework for years without realizing it.

Journal entries from periods of psychosis, depression, recovery and intense self-questioning contained fragments of the theory long before I gave it a name. Notes about time sat beside questions about consciousness. Observations about identity appeared alongside thoughts about choice, spirituality, psychology and perception.

The framework had not arrived fully formed.

It had accumulated.

So had I.

Choosing Another Timeline

By then, I was exhausted with the version of my life I was living.

I felt as though I were wasting whatever time I had left. More precisely, I felt trapped in what I came to think of as the wrong timeline.

The phrase can sound like science fiction, but what I mean by it is much more grounded.

I did not believe I could physically jump into another universe. I began asking whether I could change the trajectory of my life by changing the decisions that were producing it.

If I knew the kind of person I wanted to become, what would that person do in the present?

That became the practical test of the Multiverse of Self.

I imagined a future version of myself who was more educated, more stable, more compassionate, more creative, more accountable and more useful to other people. Then I tried to make decisions that seemed consistent with that version of me.

The process was not mystical.

It was behavioral.

I changed what I studied.

I changed what I gave my attention to.

I changed how I used my time.

I changed the way I related to old injuries.

I began questioning beliefs I had treated as permanent facts.

Instead of asking whether I already felt like a different person, I began asking whether my next action belonged to the person I wanted to become.

That distinction mattered.

For much of my life, I had assumed transformation would begin with a feeling: motivation would arrive, confidence would appear, and then I would act.

Experience taught me that the sequence often works in reverse.

Sometimes you act before you feel transformed.

Then action produces experience.

Experience changes what you believe is possible.

Those beliefs affect the next decision.

Repeated decisions become patterns.

Patterns become habits.

Habits begin influencing identity.

Seen this way, becoming is less like a dramatic conversion and more like a feedback loop:

Perception influences interpretation. Interpretation influences choice. Choice influences action. Action creates consequences. Consequences create new conditions. Those conditions alter perception.

Then the cycle begins again.

The point is not that people possess absolute control over this process. We do not.

Poverty matters. Trauma matters. Mental illness matters. Disability, discrimination, opportunity, biology, social systems, luck and other people’s choices all influence what is available to us.

Any philosophy that pretends otherwise is incomplete.

Choice is powerful, but choice is not omnipotent.

What mattered to me was discovering that the existence of forces outside my control did not mean I had no agency at all.

I did not need control over the entire future.

I needed somewhere to intervene.

The present gave me that place.

Learning Became a Reason to Stay

Curiosity had always been one of the most persistent parts of my personality.

Even when my life was falling apart, I wanted to know things.

Eventually, that curiosity became deliberate.

If I was going to remain alive, I decided, I would learn everything I could that might help me understand why I was suffering and how a person might change.

So I began studying widely.

Psychology gave me a language for cognition, behavior, emotion, perception and trauma.

Philosophy introduced me to questions human beings have been asking for thousands of years: What is the self? What makes a life meaningful? How much freedom do we actually possess? What do we owe one another? What should we do with suffering?

Science gave me an essential discipline: an idea can be fascinating, beautiful and personally meaningful and still be wrong.

That lesson became especially important after psychosis.

I wanted to preserve my capacity for wonder without abandoning the requirement for evidence.

Spirituality gave me another vocabulary for meaning, ritual, awe, connection and transcendence.

Consciousness studies forced me to confront how much remains unresolved about subjective experience.

Physics—particularly the stranger questions raised by modern physics—expanded my sense of intellectual possibility while reminding me that technical concepts should not be turned casually into metaphors for whatever we want to believe.

Peer support showed me how lived experience can become useful when it is accompanied by ethics, humility and service.

Project management taught me something less romantic but equally valuable: ideas need structure if they are ever going to become real.

I studied art and music because emotional survival required more than intellectual understanding.

Over time, my interests became deeply interdisciplinary. Some people might describe that as polymathic. I did not originally think of it that way.

I was trying to stay alive.

That is not an exaggeration.

Suicidal ideation had become familiar enough that learning functioned as a daily counterargument.

There was always another question.

Another book.

Another subject I did not understand.

Another theory to examine.

Another skill to learn.

The thought might come: There is nothing left for you.

Curiosity answered: You still don’t know this.

Sometimes that was enough.

I wanted to understand the mind before giving up on mine.

When Drawing Became Evidence

Creative expression gave me something intellectual study could not.

It gave emotion somewhere to go.

For years, I had assumed I could not draw. It was simply part of the identity I had assigned myself: I was not an artist.

Then I learned.

At first, the significance had little to do with artistic quality. What mattered was that every hour spent drawing contradicted a sentence I had repeated for years.

“I can’t draw” slowly became “I am learning to draw.”

The difference between those statements is larger than it appears.

One is a verdict.

The other is a process.

There were days when I could spend hours drawing, not because I expected the work to hang in a gallery but because concentrating on a line, a face, a shape or a shadow required my mind to inhabit something other than despair.

Journaling served a different purpose. Pages absorbed thoughts I could not organize internally. Some of the ideas that later became the Multiverse of Self began there, mixed among entries about pain, confusion, spirituality, identity and recovery.

Music gave me another language.

I played instruments. I sang at the top of my lungs. I danced daily.

Podcasting turned internal questions into conversations.

Each medium seemed to handle a different part of me.

Anger could become movement.

Grief could become sound.

Confusion could become language.

Restlessness could become rhythm.

An idea could become a sketch.

Pain could become a journal entry instead of an act of self-destruction.

None of those practices cured mental illness, and I would never present them as substitutes for appropriate mental-health care.

What they gave me was expression.

I had spent years carrying emotions that desperately needed somewhere to go. Creativity provided destinations.

Eventually, creation became more familiar than destruction.

That may be one of the quietest but most consequential changes in my life.

Getting Tired of Dying Every Day

There was no single movie-like moment when everything changed.

Transformation was less elegant than that.

I simply became tired of believing every day was going to be my last.

Living in constant expectation of death had become its own kind of exhaustion.

Eventually I chose something different.

That phrase—I chose something different—may be the simplest description of my recovery.

Not once.

Repeatedly.

There were still difficult days. There were choices I regretted. There were moments when old patterns remained easier than new ones.

But I began to understand that a different life did not require me to become a completely different person overnight.

It required enough different choices to establish another direction.

The question became:

Which version of me am I feeding?

There was a version of me who could remain angry indefinitely.

What kept him alive?

A version who remained intoxicated.

What strengthened him?

A version who replayed every injury until the past colonized the present.

What did he require from me each day?

Then I considered another possibility.

What strengthened the version of me who studied?

Who created?

Who forgave without becoming naive?

Who accepted responsibility without converting accountability into shame?

Who could acknowledge trauma without making trauma the entirety of his identity?

Who could have a psychiatric diagnosis without treating that diagnosis as the complete definition of a life?

The Multiverse of Self became useful because it transformed identity from a verdict into a question.

I no longer had to ask only, “Who am I?”

I could ask, “Who am I practicing becoming?”

The Past Is an Archive, Not a Residence

The greatest change may not be visible from the outside.

My circumstances changed, certainly, but my relationship with suffering changed more profoundly.

A bad day no longer automatically predicts a bad life.

Pain is no longer synonymous with permanence.

An ending is not automatically destruction.

A diagnosis is not destiny.

Most importantly, a memory does not have to become a home.

For years, my mind had functioned like an archive that I mistook for a residence.

The Perpetual Present gave me another way of understanding memory.

The past deserves examination, but not necessarily habitation.

I can acknowledge what happened without reenacting it every morning.

Forgiveness does not require pretending that harm was acceptable.

Moving forward does not require forgetting.

Growth does not erase accountability.

The person I used to be still belongs to my history. He simply does not get exclusive control over my future.

That distinction is at the center of what I now mean by becoming.

The self, as I understand it, is not a finished object.

It is an ongoing process.

From Survival to Service

Once survival stopped consuming every part of my attention, another question emerged.

If I was going to stay alive, what was I going to do with the fact that I stayed?

That question eventually contributed to the creation of The Nomothete, the work through which I try to integrate psychology, philosophy, science, spirituality, creative expression and lived experience into approaches that help people build greater clarity and stability.

The name comes from the idea of a lawgiver, and over time I became fascinated by the invisible laws people impose on themselves.

Not statutes.

Personal laws.

I always fail.

No one can be trusted.

I will never change.

My diagnosis determines what my life can be.

What happened to me is who I am.

It is too late.

I cannot create.

I cannot learn.

These statements can become private constitutions.

People begin organizing their lives around them without remembering when, why or by whom the rules were written.

My interest is not in replacing those beliefs with empty positivity.

It is in examining them.

What evidence supports the rule?

What evidence contradicts it?

Who taught it to you?

Did it once protect you?

Is it still useful?

What happens if you stop treating it as permanent?

That is part of what I mean when I say:

Always remember to question your reality.

I am not suggesting that people abandon reality testing.

I mean something more disciplined.

Question the interpretation you have mistaken for reality.

Question the belief that says one terrible period predicts the rest of your life.

Question the assumption that failure is an identity.

Question fear.

Question resentment.

Question certainty.

Question spirituality.

Question philosophy.

Question science appropriately by understanding how evidence actually works.

Question teachers.

Question me.

Question yourself.

The goal is not endless skepticism.

It is conscious participation in one’s own life.

Finding Stability in a Chaotic World

That challenge feels increasingly urgent.

We live amid extraordinary access to information and an equally extraordinary shortage of clarity.

Algorithms compete for attention. Outrage is monetized. Social comparison is available at every hour of the day. Political instability, economic uncertainty, war, technological disruption, loneliness, mental-health struggles and artificial intelligence have all intensified the sense that the world is moving faster than many people can psychologically process.

In such an environment, stability can feel almost radical.

Clarity becomes a form of protection.

Self-knowledge becomes orientation.

The ability to distinguish what we can influence from what we cannot becomes essential.

The Multiverse of Self does not ask, How do I control reality?

It asks, How do I participate in my life more deliberately?

Its three central ideas can be expressed simply.

The Multiverse of Self asks: Who could I become?

The Perpetual Present asks: What can I do now?

The Inevitable Self asks: Who are my repeated choices teaching me to become?

Together, they form what I think of as a philosophy of directed becoming.

Not guaranteed becoming.

Directed becoming.

The distinction matters because hope should not require dishonesty.

No philosophy can guarantee that everything will improve.

Illness remains real. Death remains real. Injustice remains real. Chance still exists. Other people have agency. Circumstances can overwhelm even the most disciplined individual.

But realism does not require surrender.

We may not control everything that shapes us.

We are still participants in what comes next.

What I Would Tell the Man Who Wanted the World to Burn

Sometimes I imagine sitting beside the version of myself who believed his story was almost over.

Not the student I later became.

Not the writer.

Not the founder.

Not the Life Strategist.

Not the person who would eventually construct a theory about perception, time and becoming.

Just the man who was angry, intoxicated, heartbroken and exhausted.

I could tell him everything I know now.

I could explain psychology.

I could tell him how much he would eventually learn about trauma, philosophy, creativity, consciousness and recovery.

I could tell him he would write, draw, podcast, study and build something out of the ideas filling his journals.

But I suspect he would not need a lecture.

He would need a sentence capable of surviving despair.

I would tell him:

The end isn’t here yet. You aren’t in your timeline. Things will become better than you can imagine. Just keep going.

I can say “will” to that version of myself because I know what eventually happened to him.

For everyone else, I would phrase it more carefully.

The future may contain possibilities that your present circumstances do not allow you to see.

That is not motivational speculation. It is a statement about incomplete information.

At our lowest points, we tend to forecast the future using variables available in the present.

But no person knows every relationship they will eventually form, skill they will develop, opportunity they will encounter, book they will read, question they will ask or decision they will make.

The current self does not possess complete information about every future self.

There were drawings I had not yet made.

Books I had not yet read.

Ideas I had not conceived.

People I had not met.

Songs I had not sung.

Journal pages I had not written.

Questions I had not learned enough to ask.

Versions of myself I had not given enough time to emerge.

Years ago, uncertainty terrified me because I assumed the unknown contained something worse.

Now I understand that uncertainty has another face.

The unknown also contains possibility.

At Every End, There Is a Beginning

One of the phrases I return to often is:

At every end, there is a beginning.

I do not mean that every ending is secretly good.

Some losses are simply painful.

Some harms should never have occurred.

Some endings leave consequences that cannot be romanticized away.

What I mean is that an ending alters the structure of possibility.

When one version of life closes, possibilities that could not exist under the previous conditions may become available.

The angry version of me reached an ending.

So did the hopeless one.

The intoxicated one.

The man who believed he could not draw.

The man who thought his past had already written his future.

None of them disappeared completely. They became part of a larger history.

But they stopped being the only possible authors of what came next.

The survivor became a student.

The student became a philosopher.

The philosopher became a creator.

The creator became the Nomothete.

None of those transitions happened in a single moment.

They accumulated.

Choice by choice.

Day by day.

Present moment by present moment.

That is why another phrase has become important to me:

Thank you for today. Thank you for yesterday. Thank you for tomorrow.

Yesterday deserves gratitude because it can become information rather than imprisonment.

Today deserves gratitude because it is where action remains possible.

Tomorrow deserves gratitude because it contains possibilities I cannot yet see.

After spending so many years wondering whether I would survive until tomorrow, being curious about tomorrow feels like one of the clearest measures of how much my life has changed.

I once woke up wondering whether I would make it through the day.

Now I wake up wondering what I might become through it.

I did not erase my history.

I changed my relationship with it.

I did not escape reality.

I learned to participate in it differently.

I did not discover a literal alternate universe.

I changed the universe of choices I was living inside.

The process is unfinished.

It should be.

I am still learning, still creating, still questioning and still becoming.

The Multiverse of Self did not give me a final answer to the question of who I am.

It gave me a better question:

Given everything that has happened to me, everything that exists right now and everything that may still be possible, who am I choosing to become?

That is also the question I would leave with anyone reading this.

Look at the life you are living without denying its difficulties. Look honestly at the decisions, habits, stories and circumstances shaping it. Separate what is outside your control from the places where some agency remains.

Then choose one thing.

Not an entire new life.

One present decision that belongs to the person you want to become.

Make it.

See what becomes possible next.

The end isn’t here yet.