So, it has recently come to my attention that some people associate believing you are the second coming of Christ with narcissism. I don't know what it's like for other people, but I know for me it wasn't about narcissism. Yes, I believed I was someone extremely important and yes, I believed I was on a divine mission. Big deal. What's wrong with believing you are on a divine mission? What I'm trying to say is I believed these things, but I didn't believe I was infallible or sinless.
I realized when this came to my attention that this would be good topic for an article I submit to magazines, not a blog. So I started writing that. Then, I realized I could both write a blog about it and an article, as long as the two things were different. So that's what I'm doing!
One of the things that made it possible for me to believe that I was Jesus/God but I wasn't perfect because one of the ideas behind my delusions was that God isn't infallible after all. The whole thing about God being infallible was a lie.
The moment when I was figuring out my delusions and I figured out the thing about Jesus, it really scared me. No, I did not want to be Jesus. But I talk about this in my book. For awhile I was in denial about it, telling myself I wasn't really Jesus, I was just the one who happened to fall at the center of this whole thing.
It's not that there is no narcissistic element at all to it, because when you go around believing you are the messiah for an extended period of time you start to feel pretty special. And the thing that made it believable is that for as long as I can remember, especially when I was really young, I had a sense of being someone exceptional. It's not a feeling I had control over. That's just how I felt. So that's what made the Jesus thing believable.
One of the many conflicts in my book is me trying to figure out why someone not all that great such as myself would be the second coming of Christ. It was confusing. Then there's also the knowledge that once my messiah-ship (that's probably not a word) is made public, I will never be able to live up to peoples' expectations of how the second coming of Christ is supposed to act. It's a great responsibility, being the second coming of Christ. I didn't tell my parents that I thought I was the messiah because I knew that made me sound crazy, but I would always say to them, "if you knew what it really was, you would wish it was just a mental illness." Because I knew that living a life as the second coming of Christ would be much harder than any mental illness, probably. It could be exciting, it could be thrilling, but it would also be terrible at the same time. Grand but terrible. I couldn't even really imagine what it would be like. I wondered if all this doctor crap even compared to the shit I would experience as the second coming of Christ.
There was never any desire to be worshipped. The thought of people worshipping me scared me and made me feel really uncomfortable.
When my delusions were disproven, I got the idea I could write a book about it. That was a great thing, because I could be famous and not be the second coming of Christ!
So I guess what I'm trying to say is, believing you are Jesus feels kind of cool, but at the same time it's pretty freaking scary.
No comments:
Post a Comment