The Man in the Mirror and His Music

The man in the mirror keeps looking at me. He speaks to me and knows what will break me. He picks away at me like I will crumble. Sometimes he transcends the mirror and sits beside me on the couch or holds a knife to my face, whispering that I should let him take over or kill myself now. When we were little we used to toss a baseball back and forth. Or we would take turns scoring goals in soccer. My imaginary friend looked just like me. I grew up, and he became less imaginary and far more destructive.

Growing up I was always isolated, and that's the way I liked it, but I started struggling with depression around the fifth grade. It got worse as I got older into middle school and high school until I was finally hospitalized for depression and suicidal thoughts. I've always had an unusual state of mind, finally spiking in my sophomore year of high school when I was attacked by demons in my house and was sent a vision from God that the world was ending. Since then I've stopped being a Christian and I find there's a lot less restriction and paranoia that way.

When I became an adult, around my early twenties, it was like hitting a flaming brick wall. My anxiety, delusions, paranoia, suicidal ideation, and occasional auditory and visual hallucinations got intensely worse. Fantasy and reality collided. Every day I was just fighting to live. I got used to the whispers and the drive, the pull I had, to kill myself. I just desired it, to die, and I didn't fully understand why. It was like some people are given an inherent will to live and learn over time that they want to die, but I was given the will to die and had to learn the will to live. I had to fight for it. As a writer I always said, "Suicide or another chapter?" And ultimately I always chose another chapter.

My doppelganger would try to convince me I would be better off with him in charge. Or he would take a kitchen knife and try to kill me. I had to physically fight him off and tell him that I had to live to make stories. But even sometimes my delusions would urge me to die so that the world would be safe from me. I thought that whenever I became really angry I had a flash of violence in my head, and it would cause an act of violence in the world. I caused Sandy Hook. I caused 9/11. I caused the Boston Marathon Bombings. The world would be safer without me. Without the inner voice that wanted me to destroy myself or other people.

Before I left for college in Lawrence, Kansas, I was invited by an alien race to become a higher power. I still insist to this day that it happened, and it wasn't a delusion. My consciousness sailed across the stars using the stargate in my mind to a castle of stained glass floating in the black. Inside were all the tomes of knowledge from the entire universe, all of the answers I could ever want. I was filtered into a makeshift body that was waiting for me. I was in what was like a dentist chair. At my feet was a kind, short man with a bulbous head that resembled a turban like a sultan would wear. And that was what I called him. The sultan. There were crystal shards beside me in a tray that kept changing shape. In front of me was a large room with a row of doors leading straight out into space. One of them opened, and in came a tall, gangly man with pure grey skin. The Grey Man had no face and the features on it kept shifting like his very skin was rippling. He came towards me slowly, and a multitude of whispers grew. I got so scared that I grabbed a shard of glass and stabbed the sultan. I still regret it. He was so kind. They invited me to see if the human race was ready to achieve ascension, and I failed all of us. I feared the unknown. They sent me sailing back into my head on Earth with the knowledge that I should tell no one of this.

I kept that secret for a long time, until one day I wrote a poem about it.

And I was punished.

My anxiety and paranoia in public was getting noticeably worse to the point where I couldn't go out and write in coffee shops anymore because if anyone smiled I thought they were inside my computer stealing my stories and laughing at them. It was one such day, where I was sitting there questioning the darting eyes of the people around me, where things really came to a head.

I tried a new kind of coffee and set it at my table. I went to the bathroom and came back to do my writing and drink my black coffee like normal. It was a relatively calm day, and I left to go to the library afterward to finish working. At the library I became nauseated. I thought maybe I just needed to eat, so I left to go home. But on the way to the parking garage I began to question everything about the world. Did I die yesterday? Was I in a parallel world? The Afterlife? Is the guy in the wheelchair next to me real or am I imagining him? No one else looks at him except me, so maybe he's not real.

I got into the parking garage and felt a writhing in my head. I could hear children laughing at me, but there was no one around. My hand enlarged and shrank. I started to scream, "There's something wrong with my brain," repeatedly. I drove home and ran into my house. There I collapsed in an explosion of screaming and crying. I couldn't stop. The tears just gushed out.

"There's something wrong with my brain," I cried.

My parents rushed to me. My mom climbed on top of me, pinning me to the floor trying to calm me down. My dad brought me water. I drank three cups, calming slightly. Then it started up again. The writhing in my mind. The screaming. The crying.

My parents took me to the car, and we picked up my brother, as they took me to the emergency room. On the way, I used tissues to clean the snot from my face, as I continued crying, but I started to eat the tissues and the seatbelt. My hand. Anything around me I started to chew, and I didn't know why. My brother asked me what was wrong, and I tried to tell him that I didn't know, but what came out wasn't English.

I lost the ability to speak my native tongue, and instead spoke what sounded like some foreign language. It had an organization to it. The same sounds meant certain words, but no one could understand me. They brought me into the hospital in a wheelchair. I started to lose control of my limbs. My arms were just flopping about. They asked my mom if I had taken any drugs because this seemed like side effects they had seen from psychedelics, but she told them I was careful about what I put in my body. Then I thought about how I had gone to the bathroom earlier in the coffee shop. My coffee was left unattended. Maybe someone had drugged me. Maybe it was that it was a new type of coffee. Sometimes certain teas like Irish Breakfast had been known to make me hallucinate.

When I got into the hospital room they asked me more questions, but now even the made-up language failed me. All I could do was grunt. All I could do was scream behind a mouth I couldn't control. Finally, all sounds stopped, and I had a seizure. The nurse told me to open my eyes, and I couldn't. She told me to squeeze her finger, but I lost all movement. I was paralyzed. One of my worst fears. Having an overactive mind in an inactive body. I thought, "Will I be stuck inside this body forever, or is this how I die?"

They gave me drugs to calm me down and slowly my control returned. After, they checked my blood and scanned my brain and found nothing wrong. I faded in and out of consciousness through the drugs. I just remember the blue halo of the machine as it scanned me and how the ceiling was made of snakes and the curtains beside me were smoking. Through the events that transpired afterward, I was still drifting dreamily even though they had stopped giving me drugs and started giving me potassium because I was low.

That's the second time I ended up in a mental hospital, though this one was just a mental ward and not its own facility. It was definitely lacking funds, but everywhere else was either full or our insurance wouldn't cover it. I was so scared and out of place, because I only started to regain control of my faculties after I was already shipped off in a barred security car to a mental hospital where I stayed the night in a padded room with no handle on the door and a mattress on the floor, until they could find me an official room to stay in. I woke up in confinement. It took days for me to fully awaken, and by then I was already trapped. I started to think about why I was there. It was the aliens. They had punished me.

I was urged to try medication. I always refused, because I'm paranoid about medication affecting my brain. Our brains are the makeup of who we are. If we alter that, we are fundamentally altering who we are as people. As a writer, I didn't want it to stifle my creativity. As an actor, I didn't want it to quiet my emotions. I still needed access to my creative side, and I was afraid meds would destroy the beauty. When I'd write novels sometimes it really felt like some higher power was funneling words into my soul and I was just pouring them into the page like music coming through my fingers. I didn't even understand some of the words I was writing. Half of the time I made words up and found out they were actual words or right next to those words in the dictionary, I had just spelled them wrong. But I always found the words I wanted.

Through this experience, it finally forced me to face myself and my problems. No doctors wanted to diagnose me, because they kept saying, "We treat symptoms, not a diagnosis," but finally I started to get them to formulate theories. The one I got the most from doctors across the board was schizoaffective disorder, which for me is a combination of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. At least I know. And there's power in that.

Finally, the doctors convinced me to take meds, and I'm really glad they did. I can function in society. Get things done. I still have problems. Medication didn't fix everything, but it quieted the excess noise. But I'm still working on the writing part. Since then I've written a couple crappy screenplays and one good one. Mostly poems. Sometimes a good one. Mostly bad ones. But it took me awhile to realize that I haven't written a single new novel since I became medicated. I haven't found the magic. My mind doesn't make the same connections it used to. But I opened some old documents and looked into the things I had written off of medication. Some things really surprised me with their brilliance, but for the most part it was just rambling ugly chaos. Maybe I was never any good. Maybe there really wasn't any music.

But at least it was better than the puzzle I put together today.

At least it was better than a blank page.