From Paranoia to Purpose
TW: mental health, substance abuse.
In some parts of the “still developing” world, we use WhatsApp almost by default. The calls on the app are so notoriously bad that they perform a near drop: a beeping sound lets you know the other person may or may not be hearing you. A beep, a tempo, an ellipsis, followed by a capitalized “Connecting” that appears on the screen. The call links back and I hear my best friend’s voice. Before she continues to rant about the colonization of Puerto Rico, I make some sort of quip about switching to a more secure messaging service if we’re going to discuss these things. She falls silent. I’m not allowed to make jokes about being spied on without a disclosure that makes it explicit: it’s a joke, I was making a joke dude.
About six years ago, I experienced something horrible for the first time in my life.
It was psychosis. It seemed like a one-off event triggered by stress, until it happened again less than a year and a half later. This time it was clearer that it could have been related to the consumption of psychoactive substances. I got my act together, enrolled in a master’s degree, and the first semester hadn’t finished when I had already reestablished a (very sly, very secretive, very nonchalant) habit of consuming again. It was a whole “Yeah, sobriety was just not for me” phase.
The dance with mind-altering substances is a familiar one for artists. I was unaware of it then, but I had a creative crutch.
I spent three years in this see-saw: prioritizing getting high over getting groceries and simply surviving instead of excelling at my studies. If you squinted your eyes when you saw me back then, you could see a little devil on my right shoulder. It was Natalie Portman in a hoodie, doing the SNL skit where she sings: “When I was in Harvard, I smoked weed every day/
I cheated every test, and snorted all the yay.”
Except it wasn’t Harvard; it was the University of Puerto Rico (this is in no way a derivative comment, this is just to say: it wasn’t glamorous or well-endowed). Also, it wasn’t all the cocaine; it was all the Ganja. The vilification of consumption is a completely different topic. Drugs aren’t inherently bad and my point is not to delineate what is.
During my MA, I seemed functional. I was convinced that this was my truest form: “medicinal” Marihuana that I needed to consume various times a day, consistently being late, making a habit out of postponing tasks, being high at rehearsals; what could you do? I wrote it off as “a Gemini thing.” Not all medicine is for everyone, and anyone can take too much of it and get sicker, is my point.
Psychosis happened one last time. This time I could feel it happening again: the familiar increasing heart rate that I tried to soothe and oversoothe by trying various resting poses and different versions of smoke and oils. I could feel myself asking for help as the disassociation set in and I was beginning to not make sense. One of the recurring effects of all three episodes has been paranoia.
All three times, in my mind I was being followed, spied on, tracked, watched, etc.
Psychosis has been identified as a symptom, not an illness. The illness that may run in my family is still a very dense forest. The symptom, common accross a few ailments, has many manifestations which can vary by the person’s conditioning. I have always had a close relationship with technology, and I love spy movies so, I was definitely the target of some ominous “they”. I could be safe, but threats loomed all over. At the tail end of these episodes I have found many temporary solutions, but the most painful yet effective one has been sobriety.
My decision to become sober was made unintentionally. One or two days after leaving the psychiatric hospital after that third episode, my mom confronted me in the bathroom: “If you continue to consume substances, I will never speak to you ever again,” she said. I knew this crack in her voice, this disappointed wail. My habit wasn’t harmless, I was causing someone pain. Shame oozed from my body and it cornered me against the cool green tiles of that studio apartment in Miramar, sweet and sour setting of my lowest spiral. I promised her I would never make a habit of consuming mind-altering substances again (if only to never see that look on her face ever again).
I won’t get into the details of my (brief) relapses or how hard it was because that’s the part of the story you probably have heard. You probably know how hard it is to get sober either because you’ve tried it or because you’ve avoided it. Nope; I’m not saying I am better than anyone else just because I’m sober, for that matter. What does interest me is illustrating how the shift in perspective happens. In my case it was a two-step process: incursion into prayer and elimination of creative crutches. I know the idea of a spiritual practice can be alienating to some people, but a book like The Artist’s Way, for example, proposes a healthy perspective of the divine. I recommend it.
One of my mentors, my godfather in Ifá, alerted me to the fact that having a spiritual practice means making sense of the paranoia, not in a way that harms you further, but in a way that protects you. I took up bible study shortly after I got out of the hospital that last time. I was skeptical about it, even with 12 years a Catholic and all. I stopped being skeptical when they had us write to God in a journal, some sort of prayer through writing. I had never seen that. I had never written my own prayers. My own prayers were poems to my deceased father, they were lists of gratitude, they were my first incursion into the art of manifesting. At some point near the end of 2019, I fixed my altar, as instructed by the Orishas. I had to pay tribute to my grandmothers. I never got to meet them and yet I was named after both of these women. Now I get to see their picture every day and ask for their advice when I never had the chance to do that in person. I’ve begun to actually pray in a very unique way and, although, again, this makes me no better than anyone, praying is the mesh that holds my brain together these days (that and dancing).
Sobriety can be a lonely process, but I can attest to the benefits of having a clear mind and a light soul. I have achieved this through the integration of a spiritual practice.
A very common occurrence in schizophrenic and psychotic episodes is the perception of messages. I have a friend who has also experienced psychosis and/or disassociation and who is a translator like I am. When I told her how I’d read the license plates of cars and “made sense” of them, as an allusion to how messed up my episodes had been, she smiled: “Me too. That’s because we both have a literary brain.” If I’d been good at math, I’d have seen messages in price tags or zip codes. Through this process I have found allies both human and spiritual. If you squint your eyes these days when you see me you can see a little angel on my left shoulder: my moon in Virgo embodied by my sweet, smart Virgo friend.
I know that when (not “if”) there is a message from my ancestors that I need to receive I will simply perceive it: perhaps it’s a very bad date where the whole setting is red (or, Shangó telling me to stop playing with fire), or a woman wearing a blue shawl, elegantly stepping out of church that day I didn’t want to go (or, the Virgen de las Mercedes telling me she’s got my back), it is me seeing Orunmila in a sensless splash of green and yellow paint from a failed canvas (or, my luck which never abandons me, even though at dinner I toast with water in my glass). These interpretations make sense to me and the configuration of these thoughts protects me, they don’t threaten me.
During my first episode I remember being cornered by WhatsApp messages: my employer had “hacked” into my phone and my colleagues were “harrassing me posing as my contacts.” These days I have the capacity of putting the phone on Sleep Mode to not hear the recurring beeps. My heart rate does not increase. Aché. Amén.
*This piece contains one affiliate link because I am a merely a cog in the system.*
