SECTION 1: THE BREAKING POINT

Introduction to Section 1: The Breaking Point

​What is the true cost of greatness? Section 1 plunges the reader directly into the fragile, terrifying space between profound ambition and total psychological collapse. It is the raw, unfiltered account of a mind that reaches too far—demanding absolute genius and catching psychosis instead. Set against the crushing, high-stakes pressure cooker of law school and the bitter collapse of a marriage, this opening section sets the stage for a gritty psychological thriller. It asks the ultimate question: Is there a recipe for grandeur, and what happens when the ingredients are mixed wrong? We meet a protagonist who is entirely exposed, desperately experimenting on his own mind to survive a self-created cage of expectations, only to discover that the pursuit of the limitless comes with a devastating toll.

Chapter 1
Some have delusions of grandeur, and some have hopes of grandeur. Can grandeur be obtained? Is there a recipe for it? Are we truly limitless? Can we approach the limitless one more time under hypnosis? I’m not sure if all of this is worth it. NLP, stimulants, antidepressants—where does this lead?
I’m not a doctor. I’m not a scientist. I am a law student desperately trying to get a grip on the needed intellect to be the lawyer that can finally change things. What am I preparing for? To answer that question honestly and fairly: hopes of grandeur.
It’s 3:00 A.M.
Looking down, I’m confused. Oh shoot, too much antidepressant. Did I actually try those magic mushrooms? Oh shit, just a little bit too much of that. I think this might be the breaking point. Oh God, what do I do? I’m not sure. Did somebody poison me? Oh man, I have to figure this out.
Got to get outside. It’s too hot in here, far too hot. It’s cool outside. Okay, got to get outside. Where did this all go wrong? I wish I could have done this with just what I had. Why did I have to push the limits?
Stepping outside, the cool air hits with an overwhelming sense of—oh God, it’s too hot out here, too. Oh, wait. This feels much better… but ironically, not. Oddly, I feel good, but I’m way underdressed.
Where are the car keys? I can go there. Did my experiment go wrong? Was I poisoned? I’ve got to get out of here and find some answers. Oh fuck, is somebody else getting themselves involved? Am I drawing too much attention to myself? Well, where am I? I mean, I know where I am, but in this process, I was blindly throwing darts at a dart board. I needed help. What was I thinking? Subliminal messages? Maybe somebody is helping me.
Should I send out some messages to my brother Jonathan? He’s always concerned about me. Maybe a few Facebook messages to tell people where I’m going, just in case I have to abandon the car. That way he can find out later.
All right. Let’s go. I’ll drive to Meijer, get a change of clothes. Go fresh.
Chapter 2
The pressure of law school competition is a crushing weight. As I drove, I kept looking forward, desperate to be able to read and digest all that material, to process it faster than anyone else. I just thought, what clandestine organization is out there that could help me? How do I posture myself right to be noticed? I was looking to gain an edge, but I think I might have pushed myself straight over it.
People are starting to worry about me. They see the self-medicating, the exhaustion. But nobody ever knows about the subliminal workshops I’ve been doing in secret. The hypnosis I’ve been tampering with—self-hypnosis, CDs, binaural beats for success, for motivation, for superior intelligence. I’ve even looked into overseas DNA-altering drugs. Anything. Anything to take me from the mundane reality of being average.
Meijer isn’t far away, so I guess a quick stop in there makes sense. Just a quick stop.
The automatic doors slide open, and the fluorescent lights hit me. Oh my goodness gracious.
I start hearing the voices. Except, it’s not really voices. It’s a feeling—a heavy, suffocating certainty that somebody is watching me. I almost know exactly who I think it is, but when I spin around, I don’t see anybody there. Somebody’s got to be watching me, though. I look down the long, empty aisles, the paranoia spiking, and I’m afraid I’m going to start making a scene.
I grab things off the rack here at Meijer. Shoes. I need to switch my shoes. I’m going to buy these new ones and just leave my other ones hidden in the store somewhere. A trade. Shedding my tracks. Hopefully, I’ve got enough money. I’ve been using the debit card like crazy lately.
Where do we go from here? Did I leave that roadmap?
Oh shoot, I never did Facebook. Wait, those couple of messages I thought about leaving—did I actually send them, or did I just think about sending them?
My mind is racing too fast. The car is a liability now. Maybe I should leave the car at Meijer and just take the bus downtown. I check the time. It’s getting to be about 5:00 in the morning. The buses are running.
Chapter 3
Looking back now, with the clarity of a stabilized mind, the tragedy of that night wasn’t just the chemical cocktail. It was that the crushing pressure I felt was almost entirely artificial. It was a self-created cage.
I was performing for a divided audience. I had people hoping I would do well, and I had people quietly hoping I would do poorly—hoping I would suffer, perhaps, just to justify the fact that a particular relationship hadn’t worked out. I was at the eleventh hour of a divorce, and simultaneously nearing the eleventh hour of law school. I was roughly seventy-five percent of the way through, standing right on the precipice of the end, with the finish line in sight.
But the hardest part of that grueling stretch wasn’t the academic rigor. It was the isolating reality of needing a friend. I was starving for honesty. In my frantic state, I had convinced myself that I needed some clandestine organization to swoop in and thrust me to the pinnacle of the intellectual elite. Yet, what I truly needed was just a calm, understanding voice to slow things down.
Instead, I found a different kind of intervention.
What happens when an overzealous lawyer tampers with a vulnerable law student? It is a subtle, devastating kind of ruin. The listening ear you find somewhere along the road is incited to become a tampering soul. You reach out in the dark, desperate for stability, only to find that the hand you need to hold has become a weapon.
And in that moment, stripped of your defenses, you realize you are nothing but exposed skin.
Chapter 4
But back in the grip of that 5:00 A.M. madness, I couldn’t see any of that. Where is God now? I felt like I could just march my way right up to heaven. I was on a mission. A mission from God. Maybe I’ll walk right into her attorney’s office and tell them to stop all this madness. End it. Just stop it all. I don’t know.
I need to see an attorney. Wait. I have a whole law school full of them over at Thomas Cooley. Students, law students, professors. All of my teachers. All the people working there are attorneys. I should go. I need to tell them more about what’s happening.
Screw the bus. I’m huffing it.
Walking will give me time to think about this city. I need to look at Grand Rapids in the early morning light and figure out what’s going on. Really see it. I’m struggling, but I still haven’t really figured out where this struggle is fully coming from. I’m constantly analyzing the stress. I’ve got to get somewhere, and I need to get there fast. I can feel myself falling apart, but I’ve got to keep moving.
I get to the school. I walk in, and I give them my alter ego’s name at the front desk. I had just emailed the school about this alter ego that I created, and I was trying to explain why I created it. Shoot. I’m not sure if I ever really knew why, or if the persona was even fully created yet. I claimed it was for my own protection.
Then I see him. The Duke. That’s what we called him. I follow him right up to his room to discuss this, because I noticed he was attached to that email I had just sent to the Dean.
But when I get in there, the atmosphere shifts. I turn around, and security has followed me up. They are standing there, watching me.
“Apparently, you guys don’t trust me,” I say.
And so I leave. I just run out of there, completely not knowing the sheer amount of trouble I just caused for myself. They aren’t just worried about me now.
I am a law student fugitive.
Chapter 5
Alcoholics have a saying: they are allergic to alcohol. They break out in handcuffs. Yeah, my mania is kind of like that, too. I’m allergic to mania. I break out in handcuffs.
It didn’t take long for the handcuffs to find me as I was fleeing the scene of the law school breakdown. I was given an option—two options, really. Go somewhere else, or go to the hospital. Something told me to just say the hospital. I thought to myself, you’ve got to experience this. I’m not sure why. I’m not sure why, but that’s where it led me.
I went there somewhat willingly, but I was forced to stay. And by forced, I mean straitjacket forced.
I didn’t wish this pain on myself. I didn’t wish this pain on anyone. I didn’t even know this kind of pain was possible until I got to the hospital.
Both Megan and Beth showed up. Naturally, my family let the soon-to-be ex-wife come in and administer things, if you will. Whatever happened to Beth? I don’t know. I guess my brother insulted her and that was that. So much for a summer love. It was February, anyway.
So, what do you do now? It’s a waiting game. Kicking and screaming doesn’t get you anywhere at these places, especially with the way security was at Trinity. Or whatever it was called back then—Mercy Health. Mercy, in fact. It’s not called Mercy anymore, probably because it certainly wasn’t mercy to me.
And so began my tour of the institutions.
Chapter 6
Thud, thud. Why did I just have this memory? Well, it wasn’t mine. It was the memory of my ex-wife, but she had shared that with me and somehow I retained it. She ran over the family dog. I don’t know, what a travesty. A terrible travesty.
She never really seemed to have much remorse over it, either. That dog was a fucking Sheltie, too. Little Shelties do not shut up, and so maybe she ran over the dog on purpose.
As for this dog—yeah, she tried to run me over, too. When she came in at the eleventh hour, she made sure I went somewhere where I would be treated like a criminal, despite the fact that I was in a severe mental health crisis.
I was looking around at the bars on the windows and these strange places. The Battle Creek mental institute. I guess she told them if I was in Grand Rapids, I’d break out and I would be too near her, so she decided she was going to have me shipped out. Make it so I wouldn’t know where I was.
Well, I think I still could have gotten back from Battle Creek, but it would have taken me longer. And they would have caught me, like they did eventually when I did break out.
Yeah, I broke out. I didn’t get too far, but I broke out and that was that. You know, it wasn’t the place I wanted to be. And I completely misunderstood the system. I didn’t realize that if I just behaved, I would only have to stay there a few days. Nobody explained that to me.
So I misbehaved. And it was torture after that. Just torture.
Chapter 7
Jahndeer Sefalahi. Or, as I came to know him: the evil torture psychiatrist. Terrible. Awful. He held me there for as long as I could suffer it and he could stand it, which ended up being almost three months.
He moved me from Battle Creek to Grand Rapids. He pumped me full of drugs that filled my head with nonsense and sleepwalking. And he wasn’t just cutthroat; he was cruel. I would sit outside his door and wait for him to talk to me, and he would literally step right over me, leaving me sitting there on the floor like I was a dog. Jahndeer Sefalahi. A name I will never forget. Such a pompous asshole.
Oh, man. And to think, I actually got worse during the time I was under his care. I didn’t get a single bit better. Not to mention the fact that the hospital workers were largely incompetent. But what can you expect from a crazy doctor like Jahndeer?
What the fuck was this? I don’t know if it was my paranoia or the illness, constantly thinking this was all set up for me to fail. Or even worse, that they were actively instigating my insanity, pushing it further. It was an absolute miracle I made it out of there without having to be transferred to the state hospital, which is exactly what my ex-wife was trying to have done.
Banging on the glass. Looking out the windows. That was me. Fucked up beyond belief.
Chapter 8
I guess I had gotten too used to an independent lifestyle, dipping into this artificial serenity. I thought maybe I was hungry for a mission from God, but I didn’t even really believe in God. I believed in… something. I believed in the hope that this grandeur could still take place.
I believed in every science I came across, and all the pseudosciences, too. I believed in everything except fact-checking when it came to supplements. I know I might be repeating myself, but it’s important to get this out right: I was in a hell of my own creation, being tortured by the demons of the psychiatric system. That is not an understatement.
Honesty wasn’t exactly my priority in there, but how was I supposed to tell them something I wasn’t even aware of at the time? Describing the illusion of the delusion is quite difficult. How do they treat that? Well, with pain and suffering. At least, that’s what they thought.
I lied my way out of that hospital.
Three months later, my dog was gone. Beth was nowhere to be seen, and I was back at my mom’s house, staring at the ceiling. Wondering what I had become. Wondering if I could ever go back to school, and how on earth I was going to change the world at this point. Lawyer or not a lawyer, I had created quite a mess for myself.
I was out, but the mental agony hadn’t stopped. It was just a continuation of the torture I experienced in psychiatric hell, as I call it. Also known as Fieldstone, Forest View, and Pine Rest.
Yeah. And to think, this was only the beginning.
Chapter 9
“Rusting my sparkling summer” was the goal. I heard that in a song one time. Yeah, I’d done that for myself. Rusted right through. Later on, wishing things were different. Wondering what it would be like if things were different. Hoping things were different. Whoa.
Wishing I could go back to school. Missing that good, good loan debt that I could rack up. Looking for something to do. Anything to do.
What in the fuck was I thinking, just laying there staring at the ceiling? Sleeping for days. Literally days. The only thing I remember from that summer was a basketball game where LeBron James and his special team lost to the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA Finals. What a conundrum. Like Bobby Brown lost in the drums, the rhythm of reality had completely passed me by.
I wasn’t exactly preparing for going back to school. It was a situation where I hated my bed, but could only lay in it. I was laying in hatred. Oh Lord, if I thought I was in hell then, I found myself in a deeper hell preparing to go back to school.
No, I wasn’t preparing for school. I was preparing to find out how deep this goes. And it goes deep. Really deep.
Chapter 10
Finally, I was back in school. The mania had subsided somewhat, but I was barely existing. Just Adderall and no sleep. I was lucky to get an hour of sleep a week. Seriously, I would try and try and try, laying there with my mind racing and my sleep stuck in purgatory. Hell, looking around the room, wondering if anyone could tell how much pain I was in and all the secrets I kept hidden within.
I didn’t know what to do. Was there help? Is there help? Was I just a freak show? I felt like a freak show. I’d hide in the back of the class, hoping I could just stay anonymous. And then, boom—they’d call on me, and I’d have to mutter whatever legal answer they wanted.
“What is an adjusted basis?” Well, tax lady, an adjusted basis is when I puke on your shoes and you have to take them off ’cause they’re worthless. That’s an adjusted basis.
What a sick way of describing the law.
And then there was Business Organizations. I actually finished that class with an A that semester, somehow. Well, an A-minus, but still. If you can get an A-minus in a difficult class like that while you’re literally dying, that says a lot for your fortitude. Serenity under pressure. But most people don’t look at it that way.
I started off with three classes. I finished one. That would be the last class I’d ever finish in law school… though I’d try again.