Trip Like Jesus: Part 18 (Parental Advisory: Explicit Content, 18+)

At the hospital, I had to sit alone in a room, on a padded table, like the first time I came to the hospital back when I was first diagnosed. On the way to the hospital, I had sneaked an Adderall out of my bag and popped it. I sat on the table and thought. What do I do now? Well, I had gained something from this experience, and everything that had happened. I had gained a lot of self-confidence, confidence in what I was doing, confidence talking to people. I would have to refuse all medications, that was for sure. I was Jesus. But would anybody know that? Maybe, but probably not. So what I do now is, once the put me off in a ward, I go around asking people: “Would you know Jesus if he was staring you straight in the face?” The implication was that I was Jesus. But I wasn't actually going to say that. Just ask this question. Eventually, after a really long time, I was given a room in a ward. This was not the psych ward, yet. I actually don't know what ward this was. So I did exactly as I planned. I went off and asked people, “Would you know Jesus if you were staring him straight in the face?” I asked both patients and hospital staff. Most people said that no, they wouldn't. They would not know Jesus. They treated this like a serious question. Because it was a serious question. I honestly don't remember if I told anyone that I believed I was Jesus. But what I do remember is that they tried to give me medication, which I refused of course, and they were prepared for that. They were going to inject me with it. I was distressed at first. Then I got an idea. I would willingly take the medication. Then I would like, go crazy. For as long as I could stand I would act out of control. Then, they would think it was the medication, and they wouldn't give me medication anymore. That's the thing. They didn't treat us like we were humans, with free will. They treated us like everything we did was the product of chemicals, weird behavior was unbalanced chemicals. It was too late to willingly take the medication by mouth. They were going to inject me with them. They were injecting me with an antipsychotic called Haldol. A whole herd of doctors and nurses were required to pull it off. They held me down, injected me. I forgot to scream. I got up and started dancing wildly. This was some of my acting at its finest. All the doctors and nurses quickly moved outside the hospital room, and all stood around watching me through the window, while I performed for them. I danced around, jumped, and went crazy. “Oh, the medication! The medication! Acting like a fucking weirdo because I was injected with medication!” I moved my whole body about wildly, jumping from one side of the room to the other, repeating this over and over again. I tried to leave the room. The door wasn't locked, but the doctors were all standing there and held it close. They watched me. And watched me. I danced and danced until I got tired out. I couldn't keep it up. Eventually, the drugs started to take effect, and made me sleepy. I went to bed and fell asleep. Chapter I was moved to the psych ward of the hospital. When I got there, I took a pen, and wrote all over the walls. “If I'm not free to make my own decisions, how can I be responsible for my own actions?” The hospital staff were quite upset that I had done this. I was scared about something. What if I act crazy after all the medications they give me, and they decide to move on to another form of treatment? What if they decided to give me electroshock therapy? That could permanently damage my brain. When I first got to the ward, they gave me my phone. I texted Erik, telling him I thought they were going to give me electroshock therapy. Then I had my phone taken away, so I couldn't receive his response or text back. I was given medications. My antipsychotic Invega. And then... Adderall. They actually gave me Adderall! I had never gotten Adderall in the psych ward before. My parents came in, I tried to reason with them, perhaps tried to convince them that I was Jesus. But it was useless. My parents wouldn't respond to reason. Then I got an idea. Instead of writing on the walls, I could make signs and put them on the walls. That way, I could try to kill everyone with the great amount of intelligence and wisdom that I possessed. The hospital staff were all for this. They didn't want to see me writing on the walls anymore. So they got me poster paper, and crayons. While doing this, I remembered that I had synesthesia, a condition where you most commonly associate numbers and letters with specific colors. I had observed that this condition was commonly associated with intelligence and creativity, though I wasn't sure there was actually any correlation. So when I colored the letters on my signs, I colored them according to my own synesthesia, and the colors I associated each letter with. “When will we stop telling Rachel what she needs and listen when she tells us what she needs?” “When will we learn that forced druggings and hospitalizations are ineffective?” “We don't want Rachel to talk. We hate the sound of her voice.” That one wasn't about my parents or any of the doctors, but rather the people from my high school. “If I am absolutely certain of something that means it's true. I know this for a fact.” I wasn't sure if people would get it or not that I was being sarcastic, because sometimes, people could be slow. So at the end I added: “/sarcasm.” Then, I decided to make a fake advertisement for Fox News: “Fox News. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.” “I can lead you to the truth. But you have to open your own eyes and look.” “Your daughter does not need makeup. She is beautiful just the way she is.” “Medication: Makeup for your mood.” “Feeble minds refuse to accept things that are unusual.” “The minority opinion is always wrong.” With that one, I was being sarcastic. “We are too old to encounter something we have never before encountered.” “Medieval medicine: Barbaric! Modern day medicine: Ever so peachy!” I got really, really sick of coloring when I got to this one. I didn't even bother to color it. I also made a point of defining peachy for them, because they were slow. “Peachy: Wonderful.” “I believe in the impossible. I don't place limits on my thinking.” “You hear what I say. But you aren't really listening.” “A guy poked Kristen in the boob with a knife. He was just pointing at her Gap shirt.” This one was a reference to something that happened during a vacation to Italy when I was twelve. Kristen, who was fifteen, was sitting at the breakfast table alone while a guy set the table. While he was putting a knife down, he poked Kristen in the boob with it. She looked up at him and he was smiling weirdly at her. Kristen told people about it, and my mom said he was probably just pointing at her Gap shirt, since her shirt said Gap on it. How naïve, I thought. Sure, that guy wasn't thinking anything sexual. How naïve. She must not understand how guys think. Of course it was sexual. I worked hard on these signs, while hyped up on Adderall, and proudly displayed them on the walls all around my room. My mom came in to visit. When she walked in the room, she didn't even look at the signs. I expected her to walk around reading them but she didn't even look. She said she refused to look at something so childish and negative. Obviously, she didn't even read them. They were not all negative. They didn't do mouth checks at the hospital. So I was cheeking and spitting out my Invega. All day, I would make signs, and think. I thought deeply about a wide variety of subjects. It was a catholic hospital. I requested to talk to a chaplain. I ended up arguing with him. I told him that the reason Jesus was perfect was because he didn't have free will. The chaplain argued that the bible said that Jesus was obedient, which implied that he had free will, and the power to choose. I argued that from a philosophical perspective, it didn't mean that. Which lead me to wonder. How can anyone say the bible was the inerrant word of God? In this current day and age, we couldn't even agree amongst ourselves on what words mean. And then you add in the fact that the bible has been translated time after time, and the meaning of words change over time. There's no way it means the same thing today as it did when it was written. Words are fluid. My dad came in to visit me. This time I took a different, smarter approach to talking with him. I wasn't going to argue. When he came in, I said, “It's weird, because you like a lot of really intelligent things. It's weird that I talk and you don't understand what I am saying.” I talked about the guy who shot congresswoman Gabriel Gifford. I had read in a magazine that at some sort of conference, this man asked Gabriel Gifford a question. The question he asked was, “What is government when words are meaningless?” Gabriel Gifford paused, and then quickly moved to the next question. How was she supposed to answer that? But this is what angered her shooter. This was the reason he shot her, later. Because she didn't answer his question. While that was kind of a silly question, it had an aspect of truth to it. The meaning of words is fluid. The meanings change. Like the meanings of words in the bible. My dad pointed to one of the signs on the wall. “You believe in the impossible. How can you believe in the impossible?” “I was using your definition of impossible, not mine.” We had a good talk that day. I went into more depth than I had in the past about the Matthew III situation that happened senior year. My dad was interested. I could tell he was interested. I talked about God. My dad is an atheist, and he explained that he just doesn't think the idea of God is likely or necessary. I told him he didn't have a God spot, the part of the brain that is necessary for belief in the divine. That was another mistake God had made. Through evolution, some people had evolved to not have a God spot. At the end of the night, I shook his hand, and made an agreement with him. He didn't like the divine Rachel. He was unwilling to accept the divine Rachel. Therefore, I would go back to being the human Rachel. After he left, I sat, and I thought. I had proved my point to my dad. I had proved it to him. I was Jesus. But there is an error in human thinking, where they are unable to accept, at least consciously, things that seem so grandiose. He left that night, thinking everything was fine and normal. Soon, some night soon, he would wake up one night with the knowledge that his daughter was Jesus. I believed that this was going to happen. And thinking about it brought me to tears, tears of joy. That's one thing about being delusional. You become very familiar with what tears of joy feel like. So that night, I didn't cheek the Invega. I swallowed it, along with some Zyprexa, which was an optional medication, an antipsychotic, that I agreed to take. From here on out, I would take all my medications, so that I could go back to human Rachel. On the ward, there was an older man named Bill who was really out of it. I was standing at the end of the hall, when Bill came up and pointed to one of the lights by one of the doors. This directed my attention, for the first time, to this room. There was a sign that said “Lorena's room.” I had never met Lorena. Never even heard of her. How could I be living on this ward for as long as I had and not know who this woman was? “Who's Lorena?” I asked one of the staff members on the ward. “That's none of your business! Go to your room! Do we need to inject you with Zyprexa?” Boy, so friendly! There was something funny about this Lorena girl. People got really evasive and angry when I asked about her. There was something about her. It was almost like I had a memory of this, that this was part of the second coming of Christ experience. This woman Lorena. But I didn't know what it was. I was very curious. I wondered if maybe she had died. It wasn't until the following evening, early in the evening, I was out of my room in the sitting area when the phone in the hall kept ringing. No one wanted to answer it. “Rachel. Maybe... you should answer. It's for you.” someone told me. I went over to the phone and answered it. It was Lorena's mother, asking for Lorena. Now, I didn't know anything about Lorena, or what was going on with her, or if she was even still alive. But I did my best. “Oh, well Lorena's fine, she's actually doing really well, but... she's busy right now. Can't come to the phone. Call back later?” I didn't have the slightest clue how Lorena was doing. But this is what I said. We hung up. Later, I met Lorena. She looked like she was in her thirties, dark hair, with bangs. I told her that her mom had called and I had answered and what I had said to her. “Oh, God.” “Did I say the right thing?” “Yeah. You were fine.” I got the impression she was annoyed that her mother was calling her. Later, I realized there was nothing behind this Lorena mystery. She was just a regular, everyday woman on the ward. Which made me realize that my mind might be playing tricks on me.