The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

– Jack Kerouac

I am a rebel and my enemy is mediocrity. I am a mental child of the 60s, speeding down the road in an old school bus, going further, never compromising your freedom, living for change – stagnation is the first step of dying.

I live for acceleration, because in the moment when the world speeds up and I can hardly keep up, I find myself, at last, standing still, surrounded by the rush of everything. I am at my most alive when I press my foot down on the gas, start running; the sense of freedom you get once your throat closes up and the sound of your heartbeat, that old brag of my heart, rings in your ears: „I am, I am, I am.“

But I am also scared. I am scared of being bored, of being tied down, scared of wasting opportunities, not living up to my full potential, of missing out. But my biggest fear is at one point looking back at my life and seeing that I didn’t live fully. I want so much from life I’m afraid it will never be able to give it to me. Because to me, the point of living isn’t to find happiness, to make money or to raise a family, to achieve content in a little house in the suburbs: the point of living is to experience. To be surprised, each and every day, to live all those moments where you feel so fucking alive you want to scream. The moments where the present is too much for the senses, too crowding, too confusing – too present to imagine.

This is a column for the wild at heart, kept in cages. Because life is too long to be just one person, to be bored or to be satisfied with being content and I don’t ever want to feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.

I am the Undersecretary of the Insane.