By the time I arrived in Washington D.C. for the World Culture Festival of 2023, I was no longer entirely myself.
This chapter belongs as an extension of my New York Chapter, because it came from the same unraveling. There was a stretch of several weeks during which my mental health had deteriorated so badly that I can only say I had lost myself. And what a setting for such a state of mind. Washington, during one of the largest cultural gatherings in the world, became the backdrop for one of the strangest and most vivid episodes of my life.
Prelude
In the New York Chapter, I wrote about the breaking point and the descent that followed, shaped by all the forces at work in my life at the time. But several months before that collapse reached its worst, I had attended a conference where I first heard about something called the World Culture Festival.
It was described as a massive event: music, dance, food, and culture from all over the world gathered in one place. The festival had already been hosted in other countries, and the next one was set to take place in Washington D.C.
I kept the idea of it somewhere in the back of my mind throughout the summer, even as life in New York was beginning to come apart. At some point, I made the decision and arranged to go.
Washington D.C.
When the time came, I left New York City early in the morning and arrived at Penn Station just as the sun was rising. The city felt like a breath of fresh air. D.C. always gave me something New York never did: a sense of order, gravity, and familiarity. I had breakfast at an old Irish place not far from the station, then made my way to Capitol Hill, where I would be staying for the trip.
Washington had always felt important to me. There was something about it — the history, the symbolism, the architecture, the seriousness of it all — that gave it an unusual weight. Staying in Capitol Hill only intensified that feeling. In the state I was in, it was easy to begin feeling that if the city was important, then perhaps I was too.
I spent that first day revisiting places I had loved on earlier trips. I remember walking along the Mall, turning over in my mind the reason I had come. It already felt like more than a trip. It felt like a mission.
To understand the intensity of what followed, though, it is necessary to understand where my mind was at the time. This was October of 2023. I had been living alone in New York City for six months and was spiraling in nearly every direction at once. By September, a certain brainchild of mine had moved to the center of my life. I was working on it day and night. It dominated my thinking. So this journey to Washington became several things at once: part business trip, part festival, part homecoming.
D.C. felt much closer to home than New York ever had.
Late in the evening the following day, I attended the opening ceremony of the festival. The scale of it was difficult to take in. The National Mall was flooded with people from around the world. It stretched for miles — crowds, lights, music, movement — all of it unfolding in one of the most symbolically charged places on earth.
For the first hour or so, there were speeches from the organizers and sponsors. One of the speakers was a prominent figure in the business world. Then, almost in passing, it was mentioned that they would be open to hearing pitches from anyone the following day.
Under ordinary circumstances, that might have sounded like a passing opportunity.
In the state I was in, it sounded like destiny.
With this idea already burning in my mind, I took it as a sign. It felt as though the universe itself were aligning in my favor, placing something directly in my path. This was my moment — or so I believed.
And the setting only deepened that conviction. Even now, I struggle to describe it without sounding exaggerated. The night was clear. A full moon hung above the Capitol. The music was intensely beautiful. Hundreds of thousands of people surrounded me, and all the while this idea kept burning in my mind like a private fire. I felt as though I had stepped into some mythic scene arranged specifically for me. It was the kind of moment that, in the state I was in, did not feel real so much as fated.
That night also introduced me to a piece of music that has stayed with me ever since: Mystic Afghan Melodies. It was mesmerizing, the kind of piece that seems to carry an entire world inside it. To me, it felt as though it captured something of the heart and soul of Afghanistan. Its spirit reminded me of Rumi, whose poem The Guest House is something I have long held close. Even now, I cannot think of that night without thinking of that music too.
Tracking this person down became its own kind of treasure hunt.
I asked around at the festival. I sent emails. I followed whatever scraps of information I could get. Eventually, I found out where the meeting was meant to take place: a grand hotel just north of the White House.
I went there the next day.
At the time, it may have been the nicest building I had ever stepped inside. It was polished, immaculate, and unmistakably a place for serious people and serious business. I remember passing through security already feeling exposed, like I had wandered into a world I had not yet earned the right to enter. Everything about the place seemed composed, expensive, self-assured. I was none of those things. Still, I followed the signs, asked questions, and kept moving.
As it turned out, I had just missed them.
What I was given instead was an email address — somewhere I could send my pitch.
So I sat in the hotel lobby for hours, drafting it there.
Nothing came of it.
Looking back, I can see how naive I was. At that stage, I was nowhere near ready to pitch something like that. I had conviction, intensity, and imagination, but conviction is not enough. Ideas need form. They need clarity, structure, proof, and substance. Mine was still far too abstract, too early, too unformed to survive contact with the real world. It was a hard lesson, but a valuable one.
Even so, my mind was not deterred. If anything, the experience became more fuel for everything that was already burning out of control in me. For the next couple of months, it fed the same fire that was consuming so many other parts of my life. As I wrote in the New York Chapter, things did not go well in the months that followed. I continued much further down that road than I have described here. Eventually, though, I had to let up. There was no other choice.
The specifics of that brainchild are too much to fully explain here. But even now, nearly two years later, it still lives somewhere in me, waiting for the right moment. I can say this much: it was, and still is, a reflection of how I see the world.
When I think back on those days now, what stays with me most is their intensity. The festival, Washington D.C., the beauty of the setting, the scale of the event, and the state of mind I was moving through all fused into something I have never quite forgotten.
They remain some of the most vivid days of my life — beautiful, charged, and impossible for me to separate from the mind that was coming undone inside them.