When God Comes
When I was a kid I begged for god. I remember kneeling at the corner of my bed, knees pressed into the carpet, my hands clasped together on my comforter, and as tears zigzagged down my face I waited for him to answer. I waited for years — and not patiently. I would cry and curse and dig scissors into my skin because the blood set me free and I was tired of waiting. Until I found god carving notches out of my thighs and breasts was a substitute for divine cleansing. The cut would sting and seep and the pain woke me up, sending electric jolts into my brain that stabbed me awake. When the man in my neighborhood hurt me it ripped right through me, leaving scars of shame and agony seared across my entire body. But when I clutched my silver scissors and slid them under my skin the pain was mine and the pain was controlled. And I needed it to remind me that I wasn’t a shell, I was skin and blood and bone and alive.
I kept begging for god. He spoke to so many others and I didn’t understand why I never felt him. I longed for god, I pined for god, I needed to hear his voice or I couldn’t stand one more minute with all this disgust and agony festering inside me. If god wouldn’t speak to me that meant he didn’t want to save me. I couldn’t exist on the power of prayer alone. I desperately needed comfort and companionship, something that would keep me safe because my neighbor wasn’t going away and I didn’t know how to run.
Our conversation was born from whispers and murmurs. One day I felt something clicking inside my skull and it sounded like softness. It felt like rhythmic purring between my ears. It felt like honey being drizzled across my brain. Coating my mind with a sweetness and stickiness that kept my skull from cracking. I tried to listen to the intricacies of the echo bouncing around my head, moving into my neck, my shoulders, my chest, my stomach, my arms, legs, and feet. It felt like someone was filling in the missing colors. I was once a blob of pale nothingness devoid of color, and now I was vibrant and alive. It wasn’t drawing in between the lines but it filled me with something significant. It took me awhile but I soon realized I had found him. Or he had found me. God wrapped his arms around my mind and his embrace kept my brain from rattling so hard that it tore open the back of my skull. He stroked my body and soul and I could finally breathe without stabbing pains perforating my lungs. I didn’t have to cut. I didn’t have to cry anymore. Everything would be ok.
God spoke to me through his angels. Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and Jesus took residence in my body, reinforcing the cracks that were caving in. They became the infrastructure of my skull; they erected scaffolding inside me that kept me upright. Kept me together. I wasn’t just skin wrapped around an aching frame, I was full of light. I would quote Mother Teresa’s words in my mind, “may God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” It was my mantra. I recited it constantly. The soundtrack to my life and my lullaby at night. Mother Teresa sighed in my ear and told me that my suffering was by design. My pain was part of a grander plan. Princess Diana wrapped me tightly in her laced gloves at night when I couldn’t sleep. She cradled my head in her lap and ran her fingers across my forehead. I didn’t need to see her because I felt her in my now quiet skull. The shadow of her love was enough to slow my breathing and soothe me while Jesus wept. He cried for me. He was my own personal martyr. He hurt so I didn’t have to. If it happened at his house that day I would lie in my bed at night and try to forget I had a body. I would try to melt into my bed, sinking so far into the mattress that it would consume me. A tomb of pillows and sheets. But when Jesus was with me, pouring tears across my chest, the pitter patter of his pain helped assuage my own. He didn’t want me to fall apart. To hurt. To disappear. He wept with me so I didn’t have to cry on my own with loneliness lurking in my heart and fear stomping me into pieces. Jesus’s tears washed away loneliness and fear, exposing my demons and drenching them in love. Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and Jesus evicted the fiery creatures clawing inside me and built a home of light and love and lace and grace and sacrifice and purpose and divinity. I was finally touched by God and the words planted in my mind, watered by his angels, took root and grew. Blossomed into something bigger than myself. I was the earth and I anchored this beauty in the decay of my body and I was more alive than my scissors ever made me. I was full. I was whole. I had God. He told me he would keep me safe.
But the prayers and kindness, the words of encouragement and the phantom caresses I felt gliding across my skin, quickly became stilted and stuttering. The voices that once cooed in my brain and the arms that once hugged my heart tightly started to scream and strangle me. The comfort started corroding and I ached with tarnish. The discolorations were reflections of my sins. Branding me because I couldn’t be saved. I wanted god to tell me that my pain was beautiful and yes I was broken but I could be fixed. He would fix me. That my troubles were a test of faith. I thought if I believed hard enough things would get better. I would be better. The divine light would scare away the dark I lived in. The angels would stay nestled in my skull and I would never be alone. But I got sicker and sicker. Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and Jesus threw tantrums in my brain. They hit me with their wizened, gloved, and blood smeared fists. They started in my head but invaded the rest of my body with gnashing teeth and vicious kicks. They betrayed me. They were my best friends, my one chance at salvation, and they turned on me. I wasn’t empty, I was full of traitors. I wept and screamed into my pillow, trying to raise my voice louder than theirs. But they refused to leave. I had lost. I wasn’t worth saving. god tricked me into believing his devils were my friends. If god existed he was cruel. But I realized that the truth was god didn’t exist at all. We are alone with our pain until we die. And hopefully death would be nothing but fading away, submitting to the darkness, and finally resting. I didn’t pray to god anymore. Instead I prayed that death would find me and cure me with its murder.
They gave me meds. Meds that would supposedly save me but definitely killed god. I wasn’t a heavenly vessel. I silenced god and his angels one pill at time. I was fine with the killing. god’s massacre. The depakote assassin. The lithium killer. The seroquel slayer. Geodon genocide. The latuda murderer. Abilify the destroyer. Letting lamictal burn it all to the ground. The medication soon took over and the crowded halls of my body were emptied. No voices, no screams, no comfort, no torture. I just had pills and a diagnosis. I knew I was crazy all along but I had hoped that I was just special. But nothing was louder than the rattling of my pills. I had to let go of my angels, of god, and take pills that left me foggy and fat because I was told they were better for me than putting my faith in dead angels. I didn’t believe my psychiatrist but I had nothing else to believe so I took them by the handful every night. If there was a god he was now pinned under a pyramid of psych meds.
Overtime I got better. I am better. Thanks to meds and therapy and the real compassion of friends and family. I don’t believe in god anymore. He only reaches out to me when I am sick. He is a product of a bipolar mind that just needs something to cling too. Something that will hold you in return so you don’t spiral into the darkness. A force that tells you it can fix you until it breaks you beyond repair. Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and Jesus are just signals saying that while this may seem like safety it’s step one of losing your mind. When I think there is a god I am already in the depths of bipolar possession. There’s no heaven, just episodes. There’s no hell, just cycling. god is merely a misfiring in my mind. I accept that now and I take my pills and they do their job. The power to get better is in my hands, not those of god or Mother Theresa, or Princess Diana, or Jesus. They are just manifestations of madness and nothing more.
Sometimes I really want to believe in god. To have faith in something, something you can turn to for answers. That tells you that this suffering is part of a greater purpose. But my suffering is not by god’s divine design, it’s by illness. When a heavenly body calls to me I know that I’m crazy and that I shouldn’t answer, but the addiction to salvation is hard to shake — even though I know that god isn’t real and he won’t keep me safe.
But the truth is I can take care of myself.
No scissors.
No spirits.
No salvation.
I am strong enough on my own.
