My sponsor came to visit me in the hospital after he heard the news. He was the only person outside of my family who cared. I couldn’t really talk to my family and tell them everything that was going on with me without hurting them further. I tried once and watched as the tears welled in my mother’s eyes. So I became much closer to my sponsor and we started hanging out with his sponsor a couple times a week going to bookstores and WalMart just to hang out. They had invited me previously, but I was more interested in the girls and going to pool halls and the like. They seemed much more exciting, but at this point, dull and boring didn’t seem so bad. Come to find out, these guys were much more entertaining and were just as sick in the head as me. We got along great.
I started going to different meetings to avoid the drama, and started going to a biker meeting in the back of a Harley shop. I got along really well with the people there. They kept trying to get me to buy a motorcycle and be a part of their club, but I wasn’t interested in that. Then I met a girl who called herself Spike. She was new and she was a self-proclaimed satanist, which I found interesting. We started hanging out quite a bit and I introduced her to some of the other people I knew in recovery, but she wasn’t really interested. She was anti everything and said she felt sorry for me for needing a higher power to stay sober.
At one point she made it obvious that she didn’t just want to “hang out” with me. I had a feeling that this might not be a good idea, but since when did I listen to anyone, including my conscience. She was fun, the sex was fantastic, sometimes even more than I wanted, and we had commonalities in spiritual experiences. I was working at a movie theater at this point and driving one of my parent’s cars. When I wasn’t working, we would go to meetings, hang out at a tattoo shop or go back to the trailer where she was staying. She was living with one of the bikers and his girlfriend, which happened to be her sponsor.
One night we we pulled up to the trailer and we saw a shadow crouched down near the front door by the trees. It never moved and just watched us as we walked to the front door. It was like the shadows in my room with just an outline and no features. We walked inside and I immediately grabbed a bat and a knife to go confront whoever it was. When I walked out the front door the shadow was gone. I looked toward the car, and then I saw a flash of light while I felt something whiz by my head. Then I felt a wave of energy rush over me as I almost fell back into the trailer and shut the door.
I was visibly freaked out by what had happened, but she was calm. It was clear that this wasn’t a physical being. She said when I felt the wave of energy, she could hear jaws snapping at me. She also said something that still sticks with me, “What did you expect to happen? You came after it with a bat and a knife.” I had never thought of demons and/or spirits as having human qualities. It never crossed my mind that they would feel threatened by me. I just acted on impulse and so did they. We went to bed that night together in her room. There was a window A/C unit that was running and it suddenly cut out. I could sense a presence outside the window and started to get freaked out again. I asked if it normally did that, because it had never done that before. She said it was normal and not to worry about it. I thought I was losing my mind though, so I called my sponsor. He told me to get down to the ER at mental health. I went back to the car, and as I was driving away, I could see the shadow figure by her window A/C unit outside. I just kept driving.
The doctors at mental health said I was fine, but observed me for 24 hours anyway. When I got out, I talked to my girlfriend about what had happened. She said she lied about the A/C unit, that it didn’t normally cut out like that. Then she told me that after I left she could hear growling outside the window. More and more I began to suspect that these demons, shadows or whatever were not just in my head. The more people I talked to about these things, the more others confirmed that I was not alone. I had gotten in to some occult/pagan chat rooms over the years and even had some online romances with some of the people there, but I never got real serious about the practice of magick or paganism out of fear from my experiences.
I finally decided that the relationship I was in wasn’t going to work, because she wasn’t interested in recovery or higher powers. I felt that if we continued on, one or both of us would be drunk and getting high before too long. So I broke things off, which was the hardest thing I had to do up until this point. For the first time in forever I had a conscience. I was doing what I knew was the right thing, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do, it was what I had to do. She was angry with me for it, rightfully so, but it didn’t make it hurt any less. For the first time in my life I was trying to get better instead of just doing what I wanted to do.
We still saw each other from time to time after that. Kind of a friends with benefits kind of deal, but she eventually stopped the recovery program and started hanging out with different crowds. She just dropped off one day, and I haven’t seen her since. I think of her often and hope she is well.
To be continued…
Evolving Psychosis 