As I was saying last, I went back to college. The semester first, I realized a very simple thing that I never did before then: go to class, do the homework, and you will do well. I ended up that semester on the Dean's List, with a grade point average of 3.75. I was still talking to Rosanna Arquette and Jesus in my head. And I was still the Archangel Michael, first angel after Lucifer I cast out of Heaven. You know, I think that helped. It gave me a sense of belonging, a sense of nobility. I found pot, though, wherever I could, mostly smoking it on the weekend with the few friends I hung out with. It was a pretty good time, that fall of '96.
The next semester is where I got into trouble. You see, one reason I had to behave was that my aunt (the one I had been living with in Korea) was with me all that semester. The spring semester, I was alone. I smoked more pot, masturbated more to pornography while high. Bad move. I started losing it again, losing my sense of place in the here and now. In the semester before, despite the feeling I was an angel, I was pretty sane in most other respects. You couldn't really tell there was anything wrong with me. But now, I started skipping classes. Then I just stopped going, and I was living in my head again. I did have the presence of mind to drop all my classes, though, and declare I was having a nervous breakdown. True enough. The forces of good in my head were not amused.
Again and again, they would convince me I was the Antichrist — wherein terror would ensue — then they let me off the hook. Several times, they made me wander through the streets of Pittsburgh, PA, me not ever knowing where I was going in those walks, but eventually returning safely back to my apartment each time. I should be thankful, I guess, that nothing bad really happened to me besides the fear. Anyway, my aunt had to come back to Pittsburgh, and I checked myself into a mental institution for the last time in this, the long first episode. I told them I was having visions of angels and devils, and they admitted me with paranoid schizophrenia.
It was there that I had the critical meeting with a denizen. This guy told me he was having visions of the Virgin Mary, that she looked like his girlfriend but he knew it was her, and that she was standing on a vagina. Man. I thought to myself, "You're nuts." And then, somewhat later, it struck me: "That's how I look to other people." And when my parents took me back to their house that spring, that fateful spring, I snapped out of it. All that I had seen, heard, and imagined, I knew it now: it had just been a psychosis. None of it had been real. I was then no one but myself — not God or Archangel — just a human being again, plopped back down on Earth. I was sane for the first time in 6 years, that spring of 1997. Hardfought. But won.
M-C-D
6:42am saturday, 1st december
I feel I may be Schizoophrenic. Whithin my mind I hear many things, as well as God speaking to me telling me as if I am Jesus Christ.God calls me his son and tells me I am the Christ an that he loves me. I search everyday for some kind of answer I can't find. I am lost in my thoughts hearing arguements about who I really am and telling what or what I should not do.
Stand
6:56am saturday, 1st december
Mat, get some help. It sounds like to me you are beginning to succumb to hallucinations and delusions. You may need psychological help (therapy) as well as psychiatric help (medication). Talk to someone, please, and I suggest you do this right away. What you're talking about is a classic messiah complex, of which I had once, too.
Deamon
5:49pm sunday, 2nd december
I thought I was John Lenon until recently
shy
10:11am monday, 3rd december
I was doing a report for class hopefully this will help.
Deamon
1:33pm monday, 3rd december
It's not that I mind the drugs its the way they put them in that is not so enjoyable
M-C-D
Stand
Deamon