My story is a very strange one, and not entirely for the faint of heart. My life has always been a book open to anyone willing to read it. I believe that when you surround yourself with secrets and never let anyone know who you really are, you are missing out on a vital point of being alive. Secrets will come back to haunt you. Masks will only make it harder for you to see everything around you and how beautiful it can be. Our souls are meant to be shared with each other.
I was born and raised in Michigan. I grew up on a dirt road in the middle of the woods, surrounded by lakes and trees and my mother’s gardens. Strawberries warm from the sun. When the pond across the street froze over I would skate on it until the sun went down. Forts built out of sticks and grape vines. Fish-bitten toes. I had a happy childhood and I remember it fondly, but I was always the weirdo. I was picked on a lot in school starting as early as 3rd grade. My imagination was always running wild, immersing me in other worlds that felt more real true and fair than the one we all have to live in. Art teachers loved me. Math teachers were convinced I had ADD.
Middle school came with a whole new set of problems. I was the fat, curly-headed weirdo who was awkwardly emerging into womanhood, but my imagination never stopped with it’s wild attempts at entering my reality. The games were no longer games. They were real. I was followed by a strange bird-man, who was always flying in the sky above me when i was outside. around the end of 7th grade I was diagnosed with ADD and given adderal, which turned me into a zombie. A month later I went back and they put me on something different, something new, “something still in the testing phases”. Straterra. Straterra is an ADD medicine that is made up of a ton of anti-depressants. By the end of this horrifying cycle (of which, in the story, we are only at the beginning) I was taking 800mg a day. Four pills. 3 in the morning and one after school, to help me do my homework. This was all at the behest of doctors, who, when I mentioned feeling out of sorts, (though without the specifics because the specifics were so real to me I never imaged them to be psychosis) they would simply up the dosage. The simple mentality of “oh this isnt working? well, maybe more will work. and more. and more.”
8th grade was when everything went haywire. I stopped sleeping as much. One night after I finally had slept, I awoke to find some papers under my pillow written with strange visions, some in other languages completely made up. These visions were of past lives in different worlds, in which some of my friends had played a part. Zephyria, with silk-soft grass and pale violet skies and castles made of quartz and amethyst. Dragons and mermaids and faeries and demons and magic, all of these things were reality to me. I told my friends of these visions, I showed them the letters, and instead of thinking “what the hell? this person is mentally ill!” they decided “me, too.” They believed me, or at least played along. They claimed to see the same things too. Demons hunted us, starting with a shadow man named Ling, followed soon after by my own personal satan, Dakin.
One of my friends was cutting herself. I thought it seemed like a pretty good idea and started doing it too. The first time I ever did it was in the middle of my art class. We were cutting out foamcore with exacto knives, and someone started teasing me about being a fat weirdo, and when none of my friends even tried to stand up for me, I went to town. The teacher didnt stop me or anyone else from their laughing at me. I stood up and walked out of the classroom and she didnt even try to stop me then. I had this chaos raging inside of me, these extremely detailed worlds populated with lifetimes worth of memories that all were my own. They were all real to me.
At some point one of my friends told her parents, who yelled at her and grounded her, then promptly called my parents to alert them of the lies I was telling their daughter. My parents yelled at me and told me to stop making things up and telling other people they were true. They said that if I wasn’t lying, then I was insane and would have to go away to a mental hospital. I didn’t want to be put away for something I knew in my heart to be true, and I told them it was all a game of pretend that had been taken out of context. I lied to protect the secret worlds inside of me, where I was important.
Some time after that things developed somehow. I feel like this is where the doses got upped, because the “story” as we who lived it call it, grew. It evolved. Suddenly the thousands of past lives collided and made sense. We were gods. I was the reincarnated goddess of the moon, sent to earth and various other worlds at various times to fight off these demons that hunted us. I called myself Lunari. My other friends (I will only use their “story” names) were my “sisters”, Reye, the goddess of the sun. The friend who was the first to cut herself. Frale, the goddess of fire, who still holds on to the story and continues to believe parts of it true it seems. Entia, the goddess of the earth, who was the first to stop believing, at least a year before everything ended. There were those that only we could see, lovers and friends from past lives. I don’t remember the names of anyone else’s, but I had Shale. Shale was a demon boy with white-blonde hair and honey colored eyes. He never existed. He was never alive. And I watched him die.
Highschool began and we were all a part of this insane reality. Others soon joined us, starting first and foremost with Aros, who I am still friends with to this day.
Shortly before I met Aros, I watched Shale die. He had followed me for a year or so, and only I could see him. We were in love. We were going to run away together. We were in the woods in the middle of the night and I was having second thoughts. We had stopped walking so he could reassure me, and out of the shadows Dakin emerged from behind him with a knife. He slit Shale’s throat and blood sprayed everywhere. I never felt more pain than in that moment, watching one hallucination slaughter another hallucination. Even though none of it was real, to this day the memory haunts me. I have broken down in the middle of a whiskey drunk because the only man who ever loved me was a figment of my imagination, and I watched him die. I spent the entire night digging at the earth with my bare hands to make a funeral mound for him. The mound is still there in the woods, right next to the path, covered in moss. I visit it every now and then.
I met Aros in gym class and we both liked anime. We “dated” briefly, but only ever held hands just once. We felt connected and we felt a love for each other but failed to identify as what it truly is. I was not feeling the romance and I decided to call things off. He was deeply hurt and proceeded to scare the shit out of me, and I had a “memory” from a past life of him killing myself and a child I had had with him, and long story short we didnt talk for a couple of years. Others came in the form of Arc and Aryoshi. Aros, Arc, and Aryoshi were all archangels.
Now, at this point in the real world, I met someone I will refer to as Hades. Hades was not a part of the psychosis, he was a real boy in the real world in my real english class. He was charismatic and attractive and charming and every female I knew had a crush on him, myself included. He was in theater and choir and gave really good hugs. He was a player. I wrote a lot of depressing poetry about how he would never love me. I wore arm warmers a lot to hide the wounds on my arms. I wore a lot of black. I was miserable from losing shale and the teasing at school and the constant terror of Dakin.
Dakin had charcoal black skin and yellowy eyes with snake like pupils. He had four horns on his head, and always wore a long dark brown robe. His teeth were sharp. He liked to torture me. Half the shit I remember happening with him all happened in some other plain of reality, where a strange version of myself operated on auto mode in the real world while somewhere, somehow, I was in some terrible bird cage in a dirty dungeon fighting for my life. My parents discovered I was cutting and I bounced around through various therapists, never telling any of them of my secret world that continued to grow darker.
Tenth grade arrived, and brought with it my first “boyfriend”, who dated me for two weeks (where we saw eachother twice) and then promptly dumped me. When I met him for the first time, we were already dating because we had been internet buddies mostly. He brought a friend who was called Spaz. Spaz had blue hair and pretty eyes. Around a month or so after first “boyfriend” dumped me, Spaz and I had been talking for a while, and I decided I liked him. I also decided he was the reincarnation of my dearly departed Shale, and that we were meant to be together. I lost my virginity to him a few weeks after I turned 16, in the basement of the university of michigan language building in ann arbor, during their animania thing they used to (or still do?) hold. Spaz was 19 and my parents were not cool with that. We “dated” in secret for a while, resorting to telephone and internet communication because he lived 40 minutes away and had no car. My parents caved and let us see each other every now and then under their strict supervision.
On Halloween in 11th grade they let him come to my halloween party. A bunch of us snuck off and Spaz an I did it in the woods. While we were in the woods the rest of our friends (a majority of them involved in the psychosis) were suddenly attacked and Frale fainted. On the way out Spaz began acting strange, and he shoved me into a bush of thorns. This was the first time a man had ever abused me in some way, and excuses were made that it wasn’t his fault because he had been possessed by something. Of course, I believed him. Around mid-November word was going around that Spaz had cheated on me. I was hurt, believing him to be the reincarnation of my past life soul mate, and called things off for a while. It started out as a “break”, but within a week things had ended. When I told Hades about Spaz cheating on me, Hades said that made him so angry he could punch babies.
Just before christmas Hades and I had sex in my moms car outside the movie theater. He didnt call me for two weeks. I got back together with Spaz. Spaz threatened to get some of his friends who were in a gang to beat Hades up or even kill him if I ever spoke to him again.
Summer came, and I woke up one morning to find a newspaper clipping at my place at the table in the kitchen. It was about how 3 out of 4 people on straterra had attempted suicide or reported depression. “You see,” my mother said “it’s not your fault. That wasn’t your hand holding that knife that cut your arms up, it was these pills.”
So I stopped taking them. And slowly but surely, the worlds inside of me calmed and began to fade. I told everyone to stop talking about it. I decided to forget it had ever happened, to move on. I realized none of it had ever been real, and I was ashamed of myself. I realized Spaz had used my psychosis to his advantage, and had been emotionally abusive and controlling throughout our entire relationship. I broke up with him. I had a lot of self hate. Even though I could no longer see Dakin, he was inside of me then. A darkness too terrifying to describe. I had stopped cutting a long while ago, but found new ways to continue hurting myself. I contacted Hades and told him about Spaz’s threats, explaining why I had been avoiding him for the past six or more months. Hades and I decided to meet up, and in a field just off of door road under the stars the beginning of hell graced me with his lovemaking.
Senior year I lost a lot of friends due to the change in my perspectives as far as reality went, and because I no longer enjoyed anime. What I did enjoy was sneaking out to my car with Hades when he was supposed to be in play practice, and smoking cigarettes while laying in the grass by the lake out back of the school. I wore wildly bright colors, erupting from my darkness, though I still never really happy. Hades and I were never ever “in a relationship”. I fell in love with him all the same, my infatuation from freshman year finally being appeased on a physical plane. He would lie to me and manipulate me, using his charms and his seductions. His touch was all I craved. He was the only thing I wanted. He played with me all year.
The time came for college, and I moved to the other side of the state and cut all of my hair off. He decided to go to a community college in the same city, despite plenty of community colleges being closer to home. He continued his manipulation and back and forth with me, his games growing darker and more frightening. One day he told me he had a girlfriend and that we couldn’t sleep together anymore. I was upset by this but agreed, and he then asked to sleep over at my apartment. I told him no. He revealed later on that night that he had been lying about the whole girlfriend thing to mess with me and gauge my reaction. I slipped a blindfold and a pair of handcuffs into my pocket and walked to his place. I handcuffed him, blindfolded him, and got him all hot and bothered. I then promptly stood and left, and on my way to the elevator he burst into the hallway, begging me to return. I laughed at the time, thinking it not a big deal, but I should never have gone back with him.
The next thing I remember is being on the ground, while he straddled my chest and pinned my wrists with his knees. He was hitting me across the face, telling me I was a worthless slut and no one would ever love me, because I was a piece of shit. I had a bloody lip and a little bit of a black eye after that.
After that he decided he would start choking me whenever he pleased, hitting me whenever he pleased, and fucking me whenever he pleased, whether I consented or not. I let these things happen, because I loved him, and because I felt like fighting back was futile. I was willing to be his torture-thing, his play-thing. I was willing to die, if it was what he wished of me. If it would make him love me. I was brain-washed. I lost myself.
For christmas I gave him a note book that I decorated with red velvet and gold lace, and on the first page I wrote “You are the best and worst thing to have ever happened to me”. I had thought we were going to spend new years eve together but he ditched me for another girl, a “friend”. A few days later I went to his apartment and she was there, and we all drank and smoked weed, and I felt my mind begin to unravel. I had had a couple strange “flashbacks” from my psychosis, moments where reality distorted and the horrors of my mind became reality. I had a terrible feeling, and it only intensified when he told me that I could not stay the night, because the other girl was staying the night with him instead. The shadows on the edges of my vision moved, alive. I told him of this. There had been a time when my mind unraveled and he had held me, keeping the broken pieces of me from slipping away. But instead, this time, he told me I had to leave.
I stumbled from his apartment and into the night, and the shadows began to take shape. I recognized them as a kind of demon called a “feeder”, which feeds off of negative emotions. My sadness and terror lead a group of them to chase me, and I ran for the veterans park in downtown, trying to cut through for a quicker path home. I slipped and fell into the emptied out fountain, hitting my head just enough for my mind to believe me to be falling into a casket of darkness, followed closely by the feeders. I awoke to a gay couple from the bar nearby asking if I needed an ambulance. I hastily waved them away telling them I was fine and continued my walk home. My forehead was all bruised and had a scratch on it. Not even a week later Hades revealed to me that he was dating the Other Girl, and that he and I had been intimate while they were together, and that she had told him to never speak to me again. I was free, but it took me a long time to realize it. Blackness took me once more.
Summer came and so did my pink mohawk. I finally saw a psychologist and told them about all of the strangeness that had happened, and he told me all about how I was schizo-affective and should be medicated. I decided against mediation, as it was medication that i believe got me into such a mess before. Hades and the Other Girl brought a little chaos and then were gone.
This was around the time that I began developing feelings for Wolverine. Now, Wolverine had lived across the street from me since I was a very little girl, and we used to play together as children. We used to play X-men, and he was always Wolverine and I was always Rogue. Wolverine’s kisses made me feel like nothing on earth had ever made me feel. My heart would fall through my knees, and my body would lose all weight. He called me an angel.
Then he fucked one of my friends, and a month later had a girl friend. We are still friends now.
Autumn and the house I had moved to and I were in chaos, and fights errupted. I moved into a horrid cave of a studio apartment where I did nothing worth living for. This was the point in my life where I starting smoking weed more and more regularly, until I was smoking it every day. That cave became a coccoon. Nothing much appeared to be going on on the outside, but inside, thanks to weed, tiny changes began taking place. My outlook began to shift. Spring came and I cut off my mohawk and my hair saw my natural blonde for the first time since highschool. I stopped wearing so much black. I had to spend half of my summer at home with my parents to save money, and at first it was difficult. Soon enough though I had formed a ritual where every day after dinner, I would walk to a field by the train tracks near my woods and sit on these giant rusted metal tubes. I would sit there, and listen to music on my ipod, and smoke a joint, and watch the sun set. I discovered a sense of calm, then. I felt the knots of chaos inside of me finally begin to unravel. I started to find myself, finally, after spending so much time in strangeness and darkness.
I moved out of the cave, and into a cute little one bedroom apartment with a beautiful (though much overgrown) garden in the back yard. A perfect patch of grass. Floral patterned wallpaper in the bathroom. I found a place where my soul could stretch it’s wings. I tried mushrooms in the spring and re-discovered my spirituality (which has been pagan by nature since high school). Ever since then I have been constantly changing, transforming, and finding new perspectives.
And, somehow, through all of this, I became who I am today, and the story isn’t even over yet. :)
