“Notes on Conviction” by Tania Pabón Acosta
1
When I was fourteen, I became convinced that I was a witch. My magical powers included bringing imagined things to life, seeing the future, and an ability to make inanimate objects move. The walls in our school breathed as I walked down the hall. The posters of notable literary women in the English classroom winked at me. Having been brought up Catholic, my instinct was to try to understand why God wanted me to have these powers. But soon, searching for an answer in religion didn’t feel genuine. In truth, I was to God as waves are to shore—ebbing close then far, depending on the moon. In truth, I just needed someone to blame.
I attended an American Methodist school from second to twelfth grade. We were not a Methodist family, but the institution came recommended and was walking distance from our apartment. In school, we attended chapel every other Wednesday, we hosted religious speakers and, when permitted, we danced with no fewer than five inches between our eager bodies. We were required to take a religion class; the hem of my skirt was required to touch my knee.
One night, while standing in our San Juan apartment hallway, I saw a woman appear on the other end. Her right side was consumed by the wall, and her left was translucent and silver. The air got caught in my throat and I stood, stoic and wide-eyed, mouth agape and silent. Her hair, long and waved, billowed even though there was no wind in our concrete hallway. I took one step forward, my teenage body unsteady. She glided toward me and then disintegrated before reaching me. I pressed my eyelids to my cheeks and then looked again, but she was gone. I ran to my bedroom and shut the door behind me. On my bed, thighs hugged tight to my developing chest, I waited for her to come for me, to claim my soul. She never did.
The next day, in homeroom, I told my friend Lisa about the silver woman and her wispy hair. “You need to pray for that spirit,” Lisa said, miming the cross with her hand and kissing her fingertips. “And you need to pray for you, too.”
Instead, I told the school psychiatrist that I had seen a ghost. The doctor assured me that the ghost was likely a woman I had seen at the grocery store or on the sidewalk, her image suddenly surfacing. “Sometimes the subconscious manifests in confusing ways. If you feel you need guidance, why not speak to Reverend Maldonado?”
I pressed my eyelids to my cheeks and then looked again, but she was gone.
I rarely engaged with the religious parts of my schooling. Jesus was tacked above the door to the reverend’s classroom. Inside, our chapel songs were strewn in sheets on his desk. Leaning back on his swivel chair, the reverend prompted, “Describe the figure.”
I delved into the moment with detail and concluded, “I don’t know what to think, she was almost beautiful.”
He pursed his lips. “What did you feel when she came toward you?” he asked.
“I was stuck. I couldn’t believe it.” My heart had stopped, my breath had shortened, my feet had hardened. I’d been awestruck, but I hadn’t been afraid.
“She could have been an angel,” said the reverend. “You are unharmed and present, you haven’t gone mad, you’re not upset. This couldn’t have been a negative energy. You’re very lucky.” His answer was unexpected, although I didn’t know whether I would have preferred a different explanation. If I was not cursed, then what was I?
When I moved to New York to begin my freshman year, my powers hit a growth spurt. I began astral projecting regularly, my soul escaping my body and hovering above it, watching its limbs carry the rest to class, to the grocery store. When my soul would rejoin my body, it would startle in the mirror, taking time to find something familiar in the person staring back. Oftentimes, I would not see myself at all. By my sophomore year, the ghost voices became defined into those of two men, and their running commentary often teetered between insulting and demanding.
The taunting was such that I sometimes had no choice but to fulfill the voices’ demands. I still knew better than to drink my laundry detergent (something they asked), but other orders prompted me to leave my dorm room in the middle of the night barefoot to catch snowflakes on my tongue. Or, press my body against strangers in the darkened corners of bars, to give myself up before the voices listed all the ways in which I could lose control. I spotted orbs of white-yellow light with the corners of my eyes, hopeful that goodness had come to protect me. Sometimes, I remained under my covers all day, afraid of having to interact with others, aware that I couldn’t form a single sentence. My thoughts raced and jumbled together, meeting each other in their middles and sprouting wings from there. Is there milk left for the essays on Emerson were due by the time you get yourself out is someone home close your eyes before you forgot to hand in there is no one here with you the time mom took you am I hungry the night is coming you will die. I couldn’t grab at a single one, couldn’t explain what was taking place in my head, let alone talk around it. So I kept my lips tight, kept my head on my pillow when the weight of my consciousness became too heavy.
My senior year of college, at 21, I found myself at the Lenox Hill Hospital ER accompanied by an NYU psychiatrist. During my scheduled appointment earlier that day, after I broke down and confessed what had been plaguing me, my doctor suggested an in-patient stay to tackle my substance use and hallucinations. Desperate, I agreed. I sat in a bare and dry exam room, black sweater pulled tight across my chest, a barrier between me and the manufactured cold. Scorpions did not crawl across the floor, gnats did not buzz around the clinical lighting. I repeated this to myself each time an imagined bug threatened to get close.
Why are we here? This is a mistake.
Sometimes, I remained under my covers all day.
Two doctors sat across from me expectantly. “Tania?” One of them scrunched her nose, pressed her lips together.
“We asked when your last drink was.” A gentle push from the second lab coat.
“Last night.”
“Before or after midnight?” My eyes wandered over to the sparkling ocean behind them, held together by a rusted golden frame. I could not recognize the beach—there were no palm trees.
“We sense that you’re distracted.”
Lie. Don’t you dare tell the truth. They leaned in so close, I could feel the words leave their lips and sit on my ear.
What are you waiting for?!
Lie. “I just can’t hear anything other than these men.” I let it escape me through tired breath.
“Men?” asked the second doctor.
You dirty slut.
“They follow me everywhere. They tell me to do things. I can usually keep them under control. The alcohol helps, and the coke either helps or makes it worse, fifty-fifty. I don’t know what they want with me. They appeared one day and never went away.”
Fuck you, you whore.
“Tania,” started the first doctor. “We think that based on your current and previous drug use, you have what is called substance-induced psychosis. Basically these substances that you’ve been abusing are driving you mad. We need to admit you. Now.” I was admitted to their psychiatric wing a couple of hours after my arrival at the emergency room.
On my fourth day at the ward, as I napped between Life Skills and lunch, I was brought back to the present by a hushed, “Miss? Wake up Miss.” The young male nurse who took our vitals appeared in the doorway, his hand flipping away the dreads on his shoulder. He brought the rest of his body in and leaned his back against the frame. “Are you alright? You’ve been sleeping quite a bit.” I pushed myself up and nodded, scooping sleep gunk from my tear duct with my pinky.
“This place won’t help you, you know.”
“Excuse me?” Newly awake, my throat stumbled on sound.
“The only thing that will help you is God. You must be spiritual.” He took two steps into my room and leaned toward me to share a secret. “What you must do is run a bath and submerge yourself in the water.” He walked me through a ritual that included infusing the bath with flowers and herbs. He offered the commercial name for plants my grandmother used to grow in her backyard in Puerto Rico. I listened to his instructions closely, as if I were planning to execute them. His long dreadlocks swayed slightly as he listed home remedies for addiction and depression. “You must cleanse your spirit of demons, and then you will release your afflictions.” He waited for my reaction.
“Thank you,” my voice pushed out in one raspy whisper. I laid back in bed, awake, and didn’t get up until dinner time.
Four days later, I was discharged from the unit. As I walked out, the nurse caught up to me, dreadlocs flapping behind him. The body of the books and clothes I had amassed during my stay weighed inside my duffel bag, I still had my prescription in hand. “Remember what I told you,” he said with a pat on my back. He left his hand there for one second and continued, “or you’ll end up right back where you started.”
I listened to his instructions closely, as if I were planning to execute them.
In different cultures, or at different epochs, the ability to hear voices—from beyond, God, the stars—has been revered as a tight spiritual connection to the greater powers that be. We see less of this mindset in contemporary Western culture; less but not none. It’s been found that a fraction of people first go to their pastor or religious figure of authority with issues of mental health. And, it’s been recorded that people with psychotic symptoms who are religious are more likely to have what the psychiatric community calls delusions with religious ideation. It makes sense to me that a person’s mental illness would play on the ideas and ideals they already espoused, that previously religious folks are more likely to believe that they are Jesus, or the devil, or a saint is a testament to how mental illness interacts with identity.
How do you convince someone they aren’t hearing angels when we’ve revered religious spirits for the same thing? I imagine church scenes, not from years ago, but from our time, where people are consumed with the Holy Spirit, their bodies flailing about or falling backward, their tongues manifesting language we are too earthly to know. Were these people not protected by the cloak of religion, their actions would be perceived not as divine, but as psychosis. I imagine modern day prophets, be they living on a New York street corner or preaching in a privately-funded church. I do not doubt the purity of faith in the every-day person, but, despite my mother’s efforts, I do not veil myself in a religious system and therefore do not doubt the intrinsic nature of mental illness.
My mother, who was medicated for depression after spending a year crying, calls herself spiritual but expresses spiritualism in terms of Christianity. Although she won’t admit it, she believes in ghosts. I know this because, shortly after her sister passed away, when my cousin and I were in the first grade, I would often find her standing in the middle of a given room mumbling, “I know you’re here. I can feel you here.”
2
Jacob and I met and began dating a year after my hospital stay, when I was 22. Born and raised in a homely town nestled between the trees in the Pennsylvania woods, Jacob was a true country boy and indoctrinated in God’s plan. I was an agnostic city girl. Every Sunday, he got up early to go to church, and I spread out my body, arms and legs reclaiming the bed space he’d left. Once, I asked him if it bothered him that I wasn’t Christian. “I hate the sin, not the sinner,” he answered.
He’s going to ruin your life. I’d never told Jacob about the voices. I had spent a year substance free, but they still beat at my drums, chipped at me with insults. Even with group therapy and AA meetings under my belt, I needed help navigating my increasingly confusing mind. I was running out of energy to keep focused, and Jacob started to notice. Sobs came every night before sleep did, with or without Jacob laying beside me. Neither of us knew there were symptoms that hadn’t come into full bloom yet, but the glimpses Jacob got of what would become my psychosis worried him enough to suggest a cleansing. I agreed to go to service with him.
We made our way to the auditorium at the Times Center in Times Square, where Christian City Church, or C3, gathered. Jacob introduced me to friends I’d never known he had. On stage, a pastor in his forties wearing jeans explained what it meant to be loved unconditionally by God, how it can heal our shortcomings and lead us to success. His words ricocheted throughout the room, filling us all from different directions.
Why are we here? They came to me sitting in my seat, elbows on my knees. I blinked them away and focused on the pastor.
He got up early to go to church, and I spread out my body
Let’s go somewhere fun. I dropped my eye line to my feet for a moment, pushing against the voices. I quickly looked around at the audience, a crowd of young writers and actors and waiters and receptionists. They all nodded and smiled warmly as their leader spoke his message, his earpiece microphone jiggling slightly with each step.
Don’t test us. I closed my eyes and imagined a bright yellow light emanating from a black void. I prayed to it, asking for the voices to quiet. After a few minutes, I realized that my mind had eased, the stillness new, echoing. There was room in my mind to insert my hand and pick which thoughts I wanted to mind.
Soon, I was volunteering for the cause, spending less time applying for work and more time at the pastor’s townhouse in the West Village. Alongside his wife, their children, and other volunteers, I stuffed envelopes or crafted decorations for any given holiday. I joined a Bible study group with other women in their twenties. We went out to dinner and prayed over our food. We held hands for comfort. Our long-term relationship strengthened in God, Jacob relished in my salvation.
One night, about a year into my relationship with Jacob, as I watched TV in my empty apartment, a shadow slid up the wall, peeled itself off the cement, and began hovering around me, an abstract mass of dark. It kept to my periphery as I tried to catch a better look. Afraid, I started to wave my hands as if shooing a fly, moderately at first and then with more and more desperation. The mass began to torment me. It flew one way and then another, it got close and then retreated, got close and then retreated. You don’t have to be afraid. Drink yourself to sleep.
“No,” I said loudly. The shadow lunged at me and I dropped to the floor, arms protecting my head. It’s going to get you. You don’t deserve God’s love. “Stop it.” On my hands and knees, I crawled to my bedroom and closed the door. The shadow slipped in between the door and floor, and went up my wall, wiggling about.
“Please. Please help me. Please.” I sat at the foot of my bed, thighs against breasts, “God please help me.” There’s no one here for you. You’re all alone with us. I called Jacob, fingers vibrating from inside out. “Can you come over?”
“What’s wrong?” He heard my quiver instantly.
“I’m so scared, I don’t know what’s happening, I’m freaking out.” I’d been panting and only noticed as I tried to speak. The salt that had dewed in my eyes raced down my cheeks and met the corners of my mouth. “Please.” I couldn’t raise my voice, but managed one more plea. “Please.”
“I’m coming.”
He’s not coming. I put the phone down and covered my ears. When they got too sore, I balled my hands into tight fists. The shadow swam to an adjacent wall and covered the pictures taped to that wall. “Get out!” I climbed onto my bed and ripped off the pictures, clawing at the translucent mass. “Get out!”
The ire strangled me from the inside. My molars grinded against each other, jaw tense, temples tight. The loud knock on the front door brought me back at once. Jacob gasped when I opened it.
The shadow slipped in between the door and floor, and went up my wall, wiggling about.
For the first time, I felt my eyes swollen and stinging. The red rake trails that I had curtained my face with, from eye level to jaw bone, started to burn. Jacob lifted his cold hand and cupped my face. I let the tears go and fell to the floor, drained. Jacob squatted, and with a reassuring gaze, picked me up by the elbows. We walked the apartment as if it were a disaster area, hands held and slow pace. His head dropped when he opened my bedroom door.
“You tore it all down?” I nodded from the couch.
He walked into the room and I followed. It had taken him an hour to get to the Upper East Side from Brooklyn. I had torn every piece of paper in my room to shreds. The pictures on my wall, the poems I’d put up, everything I had put love into was now confetti strewn over every surface. “What did you see?”
“There was a shadow,” I regained my voice. “I heard… things.” Jacob sat on my bed and waved me over. I sat next to him, my head on the edge of his shoulder.
“I think you just survived the devil.” My heart muscle flinched in my chest, but I did not move. “I think that was the devil,” he repeated in awe.
“I’m exhausted.” My whole self was a ball of lead; Jacob tucked me in.
It became clear to me that I was destined for greatness, for golden light and joy. I had been born into Jesus’s legacy, had been chosen from birth. Jacob believed the same about himself. He put his complete faith in the hands of the Lord, and had yet to encounter his big break because that was the design of the master plan. By virtue of believing, a job I didn’t get or money I didn’t have were blessings. Instead, they pointed to a future where I would have earned those things the way that God wanted me to. I was constantly reminded by the church-goers around me of how lucky I was to have returned to God’s love and promise. I was a success story, a saved heathen with a new future. Except, outside of my fellowship, I was rotting.
God is not real. You’re a fool.
The voices ebbed in and out of my head, always returning a little louder. Compulsions brewed in me. I stole money from my roommate and used it to buy expensive purses and stilettos. I lied about completing errands at work and began to wear tight clothing. It was imperative that I appear fashionable, that I was seen in the trendiest bars. My drinking and stamina were sustained by my secret use of cocaine, a drug Jacob thought I had quit but that I had picked up again to fight the voices. I watched myself strut to work, my spirit hovering feet above my peacock body. I lied and cried often, the grip of truth squeezing my breastbone.
The noise inside me would quiet with God over me but I couldn’t keep God around long enough for the peace to be permanent. Each Sunday, hungover and sick, I vowed to be better, to be worthy. The pressure to keep up my personas of a perfect girlfriend, wise Christian, and fashionable city girl was breaking me. I did not know why I had to be so many people, but in doing so I was unraveling.
You’re a bad person. You’re not worth saving.
I was constantly reminded by the church-goers around me of how lucky I was to have returned to God’s love and promise.
When the shadow came again, after a year with the church, I surrendered to it. My bones ached, my joints stiffened, I could not stand through a shower, could not eat. It was just me and the shadow in a knot in the dark. The depression would last weeks, until I convinced myself that I would truly commit to God this time around.
But the voices and the orbs and the bouts of despair and paranoia soon developed complete immunity to God and His love. Jacob tried to keep me tethered to Him, but I severed that thread. I understood that God would not save me, that I was on my own. Almost two years into my relationship with Jacob, at 24, he and I broke up. I never returned to C3 and never heard from my Bible study friends, as if I’d never been there to begin with.
3
Two months after my 25th birthday, my parents flew to my neighborhood in New York for an intervention. The imbalance within me had resulted in a slew of bad decisions and false memories. Facing eviction and unable to function, I moved back home to Puerto Rico with my parents.
My mother and I sat across from a neurologist’s desk, the doctor behind it holding up scans of my brain to the light and reading through them. Please find something, please find something. She put the paperwork down and faced us. “All of the scans came back clean. As far as I can tell, there is no neurological explanation for these behaviors. Your next step should be to speak to a psychiatrist.” The truth hit me in the breastbone. I had wanted to be sick in a way that I could understand and explain. I wanted to be able to point at something and say, “See? There. That’s why.”
I was entrusted to the care of Dr. Robert, a man with a Freudian beard and olive skin, with an office in Old San Juan. I had never thought of myself as symptomatic, but Dr. Robert laid my own actions out in front of me. Puzzle pieces that he arranged to form the picture of Bipolar I. He went through my irresponsible shopping habits, my blackouts of memory. He quantified my actions as “lack of impulse control,” “illusions of grandeur,” and “hallucinations.” I was tied to the real world by the waist with a rope, and each checked symptom was a foot of slack, a measure of how far I was floating away from everything. I couldn’t feel my feet on the ground, couldn’t hear my parents’ questions. I was too far into the ether, where the ghosts had found me.
As I processed the diagnosis, my instinct was to refute it. I had heard voices. I had seen ghosts. That these manifestations were not real was besides the point. Were it not because my mania had led to eviction and debt, I would have put up more of an argument. Under a diagnosis, I came to understand that there was nothing special about me. I was different, yes, because I was sick. Now, when the episodes of mania accelerated my thoughts and hinted at bringing back the ghosts, I would find myself sitting down, laying down, with my palms pressed to my temples as if the pressure might quiet my mind. In my delusions, I was meant for something. Diagnosed, I was a statistic, a numerical anomaly, randomly plagued.
My doctor explained that perception and imagination use the same pathways in the brain. Perception moves from the outside to the inside—bottom up—and imagination goes inside to outside—top to bottom. Two lanes on the same road. Some of my friends find it funny that I don’t believe in God, but believed that two men were following me and giving me orders for the first half of my twenties. It took me a couple of years post-diagnosis to understand that this was in part because I already believed that it was possible for ghostly men to haunt a person. As I embarked on my journey back to baseline, I found it more and more difficult to differentiate between myself and my mental illness. I didn’t feel so much that I had bipolar, I felt that I was bipolar. When did my imagination start fueling my perception instead of the other way around? I’d once tried to introduce an imaginary friend to my cousin, who insisted he couldn’t see anyone standing next to me. Was I sick then?
I couldn’t feel my feet on the ground, couldn’t hear my parents’ questions.
Depression met me when I met my diagnosis. For days at a time I would lay in bed, silent, eyes fixed on the wall. I lay there through my mother poking her head into my room to ask if I was hungry. I lay there as she and my father presumably tried to understand how this bipolar had changed their daughter, how they themselves would cope. It was all I could do to lay still and be quiet. In my head, the chaos and guilt thrashed against itself, my thoughts either drowning in helplessness or taken over by the next one. After a couple of weeks, the aura of exhaustion around me was visible. I had no energy left for living. My mother suggested that I return to church. I gave a half-hearted “Sure,” even though I already knew that it wouldn’t help. Still, in an attempt to remain cooperative, I took my friend Liliana up on her standing invitation to attend the youth group she frequented.
One Friday night, she picked me up and we drove to her church. We pulled into a long driveway and went into what must have been, at one point, a two story house, now somewhat converted to a temple. She introduced me to her friends and we gathered in the former garage around soda and chips under fluorescent lights. After a few pleasantries, worship began.
“Come,” the pastor signaled for all of us to come to the front of the room. “We will pray for each one of you.” I followed my friend up to the altar, all of us pillars in no particular order. Everyone closed their eyes. I cracked one open. The pastor went pillar to pillar, and moved to a young man next, putting his hand on the man’s head.
Suddenly, a rabid growl and terrified scream filled the church. We all looked around, startled, and saw the pastor pinned down by the man he had been praying over. “Fuck you!” the man yelled in a deep and scratched-up voice. The other men in the group ripped the angry man off the pastor. “Hold him down!” yelled the leader of the church. “Bring me the water!” His wife ran behind the lectern and produced a small glass bottle. “The devil is in you!” the pastor yelled at the man squirming and turning fire-y red under those holding him down.
“Everyone, give him room!” yelled the pastor’s wife as she approached her husband and handed him the glass bottle. The pinned young man thrashed violently, fighting the grip of the guys weighing on his legs and arms.
“You are nothing! You are no one! There is no God!” his blasphemous claims echoed all around, into us.
The pastor opened the bottle and threw the water on the man’s face. “The Lord demands you gone! The Lord will condemn you! Leave this man, demon. Back to hell with you!” The man on the floor began to cackle maniacally, loud and insulting. “You motherfucker! You are a liar! You piece of shit, you have the love of no god!”
The other members of the group had formed a circle around the spectacle, their hands extended over those doing the physical work, their individual prayers and denunciations amassing into a unified hum. I stood on the far left, just outside the circle. I extended my arm toward them all and whispered to myself with eyes tightly shut, “God help us. God help us. God help us.” I prayed with every cell, with every pore, despite not knowing exactly what we needed protection from or that protection would come. The man on the floor had begun to release white bubbly saliva from his mouth. The people holding him down grew tired, and others jumped in to replace them. The pastor called out, “The Lord condemns you!” and slammed his Bible on the affected man’s chest. At once, the man stopped his fighting and laid limp on the floor. We all took a collective breath.
The pastor went pillar to pillar, and moved to a young man next, putting his hand on the man’s head.
Before I could collect my scattered thoughts, the man on the floor came to life. “You’re all fuckers! You have no god! Fuck all of you!” The hatred that sprayed from his mouth jarred us back into surreality. Those acting as human binds jumped on top of him before he could get up, the man already preparing to lunge at the pastor once again.
The pastor threw more water at him. “The power of Christ demands you gone! God will prevail! Demon, leave this man!” The circle reconvened around them and the hum grew louder. Arms stretched over the man on the floor, some members sobbed their cries to God, “release this man, release this man from evil.”
Liliana backed away from the circle and tugged at the hem of my shirt. She nodded for me to follow her, and we walked to the office in the back of the room. The cubicle windows faced the altar, a swaying group of bodies begging for mercy. “Are you ok?” she asked, motioning for me to take a seat.
“Yeah,” I lied. I was physically unharmed, but emotionally distraught. The confusion had seeped into my bloodstream. I had no words to describe what we were witnessing, making my desperation even more palpable. The pastor’s wife entered the office, shutting the door behind her carefully and quietly.
“How are you doing?” she asked, her eyes meeting mine.
“I’m ok.”
“Do you want to talk about this? There is no need to be afraid. We cannot have fear or doubt around us now.” Her tone felt accusatory.
“I don’t need to talk. I just defaulted to prayer.”
“Good,” she sat down by the door. “It might be a good idea to stay here for a while, until they get the demon out of the boy.”
The scene carried on for another hour. And then another hour after that. I felt exposed, susceptible. I wasn’t sure what afflicted the man, but I knew that my own headspace needed work. I had improved, but I was not in control of the way my brain processed information, or how my emotions reacted.
His voice broke through the prayer hum, spreading through the church in waves. The circle’s shoulders slumped. Members broke away, staggering to sit on the altar steps. The man writhing on the floor was finally liberated after one hundred and fifty minutes.His whole body was red, stark against his white polo shirt. “Come,” motioned the pastor’s wife, “It’s over.”
The pastor helped the man up, his face wet with holy water and sweat. He’d popped blood vessels from screaming. He sat on a pew, weak and panting. My friend and I stood nearby as members of the group fetched him drinking water and a towel. “Are you with us?” the pastor asked him, gripping him by the shoulders.
The man blinked and focused his eyesight. “Yes.”
I wasn’t sure what afflicted the man, but I knew that my own headspace needed work.
“How do you feel?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to me.” The terror in his face only softened when the pastor placed his hand atop the man’s wet head.
“God is in you now. There is nothing to fear.”
On the ride home, Liliana broke our silence. “It’s not always like that. This doesn’t happen often.” Her hands held onto the wheel, her fingertips turning white.
I nodded, eyes fixed on the road ahead of us.
“God is with us,” she whispered to herself.
I arrived home three hours later than expected. When I told my parents why, what I had witnessed, they believed me immediately. It was a reaction I wasn’t used to, as they had struggled to believe my hallucinations and delusions. They didn’t believe me when I said I had no memory of certain things, or if I remembered them differently. But they believed this happened. They had vocabulary for it, a religious baseline that I never fully adopted. “Say a prayer before bed,” my mother offered, “just in case.”
I did not return to the youth group, nor did I return to the church. But that night, I did say a prayer.
Dr. Robert prescribed a combination of medication as treatment. As the medicine began to kick in, it replaced my symptoms with a slight numbness, almost a gentle humming that overrode the loudness of my half-thoughts. Reading was often difficult as I would forget the beginning of a sentence by the time I reached its end. My thoughts slowed, sometimes to a glacial pace. There was an impenetrable stillness in my mind. The orbs of light in my periphery dimmed until they disappeared. The voices held on for as long as they could, but they lost volume, then lost consistency, until they were lost.
I became aware of the quiet surrounding me. No more visions, no more ghosts. I swallowed a sudden loneliness. I was part of the world now, a world I knew very little about. I still believed in ghosts, but I didn’t tell Dr. Robert that. It would always be the only reality I knew, that which was not real at all.
