The Sign
The end of the beginning and the beginning of the end.
This is the third part of my “The Third Coming of Christ” series, previous post here. Please see the introduction for context and follow for more stories about my mental health journey.
"How can I make it stop?"
This unbearable noise in my head hasn’t left me for days, like a thousand tiny needles piercing my brain. “There has to be something I can do,” I mutter as I finish wrapping leftovers in foil one afternoon in the summer of 2013. Technically, it's called tinnitus1, a loud incessant ringing in my ears that I have experienced on and off my whole life. Thankfully, I usually go long periods without noticing it at all, but sometimes, like today, it's all I can hear.
It all really started a few days earlier. I was watering the lawn, fulfilling my landlord's requirement to maintain the yard, when I began to have this profound sense of inspiration. As I stood there holding the hose, the sun warm on my back and a light breeze wisping by, I came to the unsettling conclusion that I was a slave. Not in a literal sense, of course. I had a high-paying white-collar tech job and lived in a two-bedroom house in San Diego. I was far from a slave in any traditional sense.
During that period, I had been spending an unreasonable amount of time reading the Bible and many other evangelical Christian texts, along with attending church activities two to three times a week. Servitude or slavery is a common theme in Christian texts, and I was taken aback by the realization that my allegiance was misdirected, that my “slavery” belonged to another. Somehow, this triggered a powerful emotional response.
This felt like a pivotal epiphany, a deep understanding of the meaning of my “slavery.” It was about more than just watering the grass. “We are all slaves to society,” I thought. “We are slaves to our families, our friends, our pets, to ourselves even. We have lost our natural freedom, that which the humans who once walked naked on the earth had.” That was the metaphor that came to me as I stood there, spraying the water back and forth outside my craftsman home in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
There's a clear disparity in the sentiment: a cis white male in the US complaining about his “slavery.” For as much as humans have progressed, unfortunately, actual slavery is still a real problem in the world, and I by no means want to belittle it. I do believe there was some morsel of truth in my line of thinking, though I’ll delve into that deeper philosophical discussion another time.
As these thoughts flew through my mind, the ringing started in my ears. At first, it sounded very much like typical tinnitus, but then it slowly grew louder and louder. Along with the ringing came nausea, and I felt something was wrong. I turned off the hose and went into the house, straight to my bedroom to lie down, all the while the sound was getting louder and louder, higher and higher in pitch.
Once I lay on the bed, the sound evolved from a single tone to a full chorus of harmonies. It was utterly deafening. My mind was filled with the imagery of people all around me, brightly glowing and singing in unison, like indistinguishable spirits encircling me. At that moment, I began to think they were singing to me, that I was being worshiped in some sense. The moment my self-importance came front and center, it all vanished instantly, leaving me feeling empty and alone in the silence and darkness of my bedroom with the impression that no, it wasn’t all about me.
I was sure I had connected to something so real and big for a moment, but clearly, I had understood it wrong. Despite my perceived failure to comprehend the experience, the power of it fueled my delusions more. That wasn’t my first hallucination or delusional “calling” from “God,” but it was one of the first major experiences that really set me hard down the path of “becoming Christ.” My mission hadn’t changed; I just had to do better.
Since the “angel” experience, the tinnitus had grown much more intense, a constant background noise accompanying my every waking moment. Am I hearing some signals, are there waves that science hadn’t yet discovered transmitting information to me?
“Maybe I'm experiencing ‘brain wave transmissions,’ high-frequency blah blah blah?” I mused, fabricating some kind of physics-sounding explanation that felt plausible.
The foil on the counter catches my eye, could the trope of crazy people putting tinfoil hats on their heads be real? Could it drown out the noise? Maybe the aluminum would somehow block these “signals” I was picking up?
I proceed to fold and form a stereotypical cone-shaped hat and stick it on my head, making adjustments for several minutes.
“I’m an idiot”, I laughed realizing it’s all in my head and threw the foil away.
Tinnitus: 1
Aluminum hat: 0
Delusions: 9000
I’d love to say it all stopped there but it was just the beginning. Months of these physical experiences lay ahead, progressively more intense and more meaningful. Less than a year later I would be jobless and living in my parents basement in Arizona still struggling to interpret “God’s plan”, still trying to understand the truth behind all these seemingly profound experiences.
Hallucinations can take so many different forms. The public know about voices, but there can be infrasound sensations, tinnitus type ones like you experienced, and tactile and other sensory hallucinations. It can be so lonely when you experience these things because there just isn’t enough understanding out there in the public realm, so you can’t really get help when you need it
It’s really something to share such a personal and intense experience. I can’t imagine how overwhelming that must have been, especially with everything happening at once. The way you’re putting it all out there is brave, I respect that. I hope you keep writing for a long time. It takes a lot to be this honest.