one-thousand, nine-hundred & ninety-one years after the supposed birth of Christ,
two wildly incompatible people joined in union.
the woman’s womb had been determined barren by doctors;
despite this, consciousness became established there.
that woman — my mother — had been raised on a farm.
she cut tobacco as a child, smoked it as a teenager,
and as an adult, almost died from respiratory illness (among several other near-fatal diseases).
now, in her old age, she coughs more than she speaks.
beneath the floor of her childhood home, her family discovered a baby’s skeleton. anyone who knew its story is probably a skeleton now as well. that home was said to be haunted by a ghost named Nicodemus.
the man — my father — had been haunted by specters of the North Vietnamese Army since the age of 19.
the shrapnel in his leg reminds him of horrible things that resurface during night terrors, and he cries out in his sleep.
when my mother learned she was pregnant, her sister took her out for a drink.
that sister eventually got drunk and drove through a house, causing a wooden beam to crush her skull and pulverize her brain.
this made her a different person.
when my father learned she was pregnant, he wanted her to abort the fetus.
after he laid eyes on my newborn body, he remarked that i looked like E.T.
they both loved me as best as they could. they gave me everything i could have ever wanted.
even if i were given a million years, i would never be able to repay them for the upbringing they gave me.
two things stand out as salient themes in my life: religiosity & unwellness.
that the two are not entirely unrelated is not lost on me. much of my childhood was spent in pews or on sickbeds.
i was raised as a Southern Baptist Christian. unlike most children, i had a hunger for church, never needing the threat of punishment to sit through threats of fire & brimstone coming from the pulpit. thoughts of heaven & hell possessed me. stories of angels, demons, kings, and prophets filled me with dreams and terrors.
every winter, like clockwork, Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria would make a host of me. this sometimes left me so fevered that my brain would overheat, causing hallucinations. time would warp around me, and the distorted image of my mother’s worried face served as a bizarre accompaniment for the sometimes sped-up, sometimes slowed-down voices that would pass otherwise unprocessed through my ears.
the fevers would follow me into my dreams. one night, i shot upright in a cold sweat, not yet wholly freed from a nightmare in which the armies of God and Satan were swallowing the world. my mother wept beside me as i sat muttering, “don’t kill me.”
eventually, i grew out of my annual strep infections; still, illness stayed with me.
eventually, i left the church for Baalim and the Groves; still, a preoccupation with religion stayed with me.
i was a teenager when i stopped believing in the God i had feared as a boy, but disbelief is not enough to destroy a fear so deep-seated, especially in a brain disordered by obsessions and compulsions. to this day, when something goes awry, a voice resembling my own can be heard in the back of my skull, telling me that i am an object acted upon by an angry Lord. i don’t believe it, or pay it much mind at all, but it’s there.
where faith had been, anger and resentment took root, and i lashed out at the world around me. i never had a great relationship with my earthly father, and losing my Heavenly Father left me feeling hateful and lonely. i was insufferable. i won’t commit the details to writing; take my word, i was insufferable.
i entered college as a biology major. i wonder how different my life would be if i had been able to study the pathogens & spores that occupy so much space in my mind (“and my body,” i think anxiously)... i’ll never know, because i flunked out of the program in my first semester. i spent too much time getting high to make it to the laboratory.
my university presented me with two options: i could either attend a long seminar and remain in the biology program, or i could change majors. my academic career as a scholar of religion began because i couldn’t be bothered to attend a seminar after failing to be a biologist. truthfully, much of my life is a result of not bothering.
i thrived on the third floor of our university’s oldest building, where administration saw fit to hide away the Religious Studies department. my advisor recommended that i enter a program which would allow me to begin graduate school during my last year of undergraduate studies. i did so gladly, because by this time, he had become a role model to me, and it was under his tutelage that i moved away from studying religion broadly in order to focus on Buddhism specifically. the spanish mystics moved me, the story of Gabriel seizing Muhammad in the cave captivated me, but listening to my advisor speak about Buddhism lit a fire in me. he would speak about staying in Sri Lanka, and i couldn’t help but think “this is important.” he would show us photos of opium sap offerings dripping from the mouths of statues, and i couldn’t help but think “this is important.” it was thanks to studying under him that i attended a kathina ceremony - an event where new robes are given to monks. at the time, i didn’t consider myself a Buddhist, but sat there in the midst of a bunch of immigrants, hearing the monks chanting, watching the garish LED halo dance behind the Buddha statue’s head, i couldn’t help but think, “this is important.”
i went from studying under him to working for him as a student teacher. one day, he stopped me in the hall. he had prosopagnosia - commonly called “face blindness” - but he could always recognize me because i never shaved and always hid my hairline beneath a beanie. hickies often covered my body, because i was in love with a woman who enjoyed doing that. i was a clown and it’s hard not to recognize a clown, even when you have a neurological disorder that keeps faces from sticking in your memory.
“are you okay?” he asked me bluntly. “lately you’ve just seemed… off.” “i’m fine,” i lied. i did not yet observe the 4th precept, but all the same, i didn’t like lying. i lied because it was easier than telling him i spent most of my time in the graduate office daydreaming about climbing up to the bell tower and jumping to my death.
in truth, my mental health had completely spiraled out of control. i couldn’t think straight. my obsessive thoughts swallowed the world around me, and my compulsions made every movement carry the gravity of stepping through a minefield. i kept my head above water just enough to help teach the students and meet with them in my office, but i neglected my own work and fell behind on the projects i needed to complete in order to earn my master’s degree. it’s tempting to paint this as an act of selflessness, but i want to be honest here, so i’ll confess: it’s because being seen as helpful and informative provides me with a more satisfying feeling than meeting goals i’ve set for myself. it was merely a more reliable way to make myself feel better.
eventually, another aspiring Buddhologist, also under my advisor’s tutelage, would join the graduate program.
he was much more promising than me: he had lived as a monk in Myanmar, he spoke Burmese, and quickly began to correspond with the local immigrant community. he helped the head monk when the temple was robbed.
he had real, lived experience, and a hunger for success in the field, and he was talented enough to get there.
i was just a little man who sat in the office, scared to death of everything, unable to shake the feeling that Buddhism was important.
i often drove to campus and let myself in the grad office late at night. i couldn’t think straight at home. i couldn’t think straight on the third floor of that old building, either, or anywhere else on the planet, but i loved being there. i told myself it was because i could be more productive, but usually i just sat there at my desk, letting the ambience drown out my thoughts. it was unnervingly quiet, but it was refreshing to be unnerved by silence. the typical anxiety which filled my body, stirred by the movings of strangers and the activity of the world, was dulled by the more natural uneasiness that comes from sitting alone, in the dead of night, in an old empty building. i was surrounded by uncovered windows, vulnerably visible to the outside unknown. it was a discomfort that felt less disordered, and that made it precious to me.
the woman that loved to cover me in bruises didn’t like that i would do this. she suspected i wanted to be alone with one of my coworkers. she suspected that many things i did were means to the end of betraying her. in reality, i hated when i would arrive to find a coworker there. i went there to be alone. there’s no such thing as being alone with someone else; you’re there with them, and the version of yourself you’re comfortable sharing with them. being alone necessitates the complete absence of any other person and any version of yourself which exists to be seen by another. i love being alone.
one night, i arrived to find the new guy there, the man who had been a monk in Myanmar. i liked him well enough, but i wished he hadn’t been there - a thought i often find myself thinking when others are somewhere that i am. by the end of the night, i was happy to have had his company. i found out that he also had obsessive compulsive disorder. the topic came up as we made small talk and carefully broached the topic of why we were both in this shitty old building in the middle of the night. when you are deeply, truly unwell, it longs to leap out of every word you say, no matter how much you’d rather hide it. it betrays itself to anyone who knows its twilight language. we completely abandoned any pretense of productivity and spent the night talking to one another about how awful it is to navigate a world that your brain makes poisonous. we revealed our secret techniques for stealthily engaging in our compulsive rituals while surrounded by people that could never make sense of us. for the first time in my entire life, another human saw a part of myself that i hate and hide away, and not only accepted it, but understood it. i haven’t seen or spoken to this man since that semester. i hope he graduated and saw all the success he deserved. i hope the world stopped being poison.
at that time, i was a different professor’s assistant, and working for her made my mental health worse. she was a wonderful woman but a terrible teacher. she once told the students to “read the Wikipedia page for the Dalai Lama and write an essay about it.” what does that mean? what kind of fucked up assignment is that? she held long lectures about nothing, speaking like a Markov chain, with any given word in a sentence being only tenuously related to the one which came before it or the one which followed.
she provided students with anonymous surveys for feedback on her performance. almost all were negative; some nested their critiques in gentle words, while others used the anonymity to tell her bluntly that they thought she was completely clueless. as she stood with me in the hallway, thumbing through these alarmingly critical reviews, she read one aloud: “scatter-brained! i get that a lot,” and before i could formulate a response, she proceeded to the next one. students would show up in my office, let out exasperated sighs, and say things like “i don’t know what is going on in this class and i can’t afford to fail.” at first, i gave thoughtful responses, but eventually, i just started promising that i would pass them.
two different students once came to me with concerns about Fs they had been given on an assigned essay. this puzzled me, because i had read and annotated their papers; they weren’t great, by any means, but certainly didn’t deserve a failing grade! when i asked the professor about this, she confessed that she hadn’t read anything the students had written. instead, she had skimmed through the notes i left in the margins, and determined that those notes felt like they were responding to something deserving an F. silence hung between us for a moment, until i said “...neither of these should be given failing grades…” to which she suggested, “very well! shall we give them C’s?” i was speechless.
my relationship had become so toxic that it was making my life worse. my girlfriend hated the idea of me meeting with young college students in my office, or being alone with that one coworker, because as far as she was concerned i was a malicious idiot driven entirely by sexual impulse, despite the fact that she was the only woman i had ever been with in any sort of intimate capacity. i don’t like other people. i like being alone. i loved her, but i shouldn’t have been with her because it was making both of us miserable.
i no longer had any idea what i wanted out of life, but i knew one thing for certain: i had no interest in returning the following semester. i had already been told that i couldn’t be hired again in any official capacity, but the head of our department offered to scrape up enough funding to pay me under the table. i would have been the aide to the scatter-brained professor once again. i truly appreciated the gesture, but refused. i dropped out and never looked back. i ghosted everyone there. i never said goodbye to any of them.
i left an important assignment for my advisor unfinished for ages, and he was kind enough to leave it ungraded for far longer than he ever should have. eventually, i wrote him a long email explaining to him that i had lost control of my brain and that i had completely fucked everything up because i couldn’t be bothered to do anything to help myself, and that i had no intention of ever returning, of ever graduating, of ever finishing that assignment. i asked him to give me an F, thanked him for everything, and signed out of that email service forever. i never checked for a response.
that following semester, when the word “semester” no longer meant anything to me, one of the women i had shared the graduate office with reached out to me. she had become the scatter-brained professor’s new assistant. she asked me what it had been like, and when i told her it had been horrible, she revealed that it was horrible for her as well, and she wanted to talk to me to make sure she wasn’t imagining things. we laughed about how bizarre it was to try and make any meaning whatsoever of the chaos of her class for wayward students just trying to preserve their GPAs.
i never returned the keys to that old building. from time to time, i entertain the thought of returning there on some dark night, to sit in that old office once again, letting the uneasy silence suffocate the rest of my discomfort like i used to. i entertain the thought of doing many things i’ll never bother to do.
years passed. the belief that Buddhism was important eventually became the belief that Buddhism was true. i ended my unhealthy relationship. my unwellness waned to the point that i could tell people i was fine without lying. i fell in love with the sister of my former coworker. i was, perhaps, happier than i had ever been. then, something hilarious happened: a viral pandemic put a chokehold on the entire world.
i know many people do not see the coronavirus pandemic the way that i do. i know that many people would roll their eyes into the backs of their skulls upon hearing anything i have to say on the subject. i’m not looking to change your mind. i only want you to consider the following:
> i have obsessive compulsive disorder, which gives me a unique relationship to any virus whatsoever
> i love my mother more than anyone on this planet. she is immunocompromised, making her especially vulnerable. i was hypervigilant throughout the pandemic to ensure her survival. i do not regret this, even though my girlfriend broke up with me.
> the virus killed my aunt - the one who drove through a house. it almost killed my mother. my father still hasn’t shaken the rattle in his lungs. since being infected, i have not fully recovered from the fatigue.
> i recognize and appreciate that your experience with this disease may be different, and i am not asking you to renegotiate your opinions. i am only asking that you afford me the agency of being an individual informed by my own experiences and circumstances.
i won’t write much more about the pandemic. it made my life significantly worse and that isn’t particularly unique or interesting. let me simply conclude this section by saying that years of progress in managing my OCD was obliterated. i’ve only recently started to regain that lost ground.
when i was a boy, i was infected by an incurable virus that is capable of spreading into my brain through my central nervous system. my hands are covered in dozens of disgusting growths caused by a different virus. another virus altogether left me with an exhaustion that i am convinced will be with me until i die.
i know that i need medical attention. sometimes, frightening amounts of blood come out of my ass. i often feel like my brain is pushing against the walls of my skull. i ignore everything wrong with me because i hate going to see doctors.
some of my earliest memories involve sitting in pediatric clinics, lying on examination tables and being poked and prodded. they could never figure out why i was always sick.
they prescribed one drug after another. once, i was given a bright yellow syrup with a sharp, sweet flavor. as far as medicines go, it tasted wonderful. i woke up the morning after taking it completely incapable of walking. i panicked and dragged my pathetic little body down the hallway using only my arms, crying for my mother. the doctor explained, unburdened by even the affectation of concern, that impaired motor function was a rare side effect of that delicious medicine. he switched my prescription to something else.
i want to conclude this piece with a record of the happiest i’ve ever felt in my entire life. i had a sore throat; it was nothing serious, but i mentioned it to my doctor, and he put me on a corticosteroid. the following morning, i took one of the pills and drove to my university. it was the most lovely day i had ever seen; the sun shone beautifully over the fields made to dance by the breeze. i suddenly appreciated the freedom of driving my beat-up Pontiac Vibe, filled with the reverberations of countless pleasant memories made with friends since way back in high school.
i pulled into the miserable little parking lot down the hill from the building that housed the Religious Studies department on its third floor. i stepped out onto the gravel, glittering with the shards of broken beer bottles, and realized i was overcome by a happiness that was more powerful than i had ever experienced — behind this, however, lurked an awareness that this feeling was unreal. it was unnatural, unconnected to anything i could recognize, and deep below that pleasant feeling, a more familiar part of myself hated and feared what was happening. i later figured out that euphoria was a side effect of that corticosteroid. i stopped taking it immediately.