When I was on this manic journey, I thought the government was spying on me. Now I know this wasn’t just my paranoid mind, because we’ve learned they were spying on everyone. The whistleblower Edward Snowden brought this into the zeitgeist. Now he’s a household name. We were being spied on in very intrusive and illegal ways. In my madness, I thought I was at war with the powers that be. Sometimes the paranoia and delusions can be true. Sometimes “they” are watching you. The authorities were looking for me because I was considered armed and dangerous. However, if they were spying on me, I think they would have found me.

My first act of war was at the top of a water tower, staring down at the public property I had just destroyed, screaming at the top of my lungs, “Come get me, Obama!” What led me to this point? I don’t have a clear recollection of my past. I have to piece it back together from what I remember and what my friends and family tell me. I do remember, once I’m reminded, and sometimes randomly. One thing that comes to mind is burning all of my manic writings and journals I kept, and all my journals from when I was a kid. It was cathartic, but I now regret it.  At the time, I thought that I was a spiritual leader on the level of Buddha, Christ, and other teachers. Jesus didn’t tell his own story. God commanded me to burn these writings because chosen ones like myself didn’t write their own stories. Oh, the hubris. Inflated sense of self? I thought the government was like Big Brother and that Obama was the anti-Christ.  

The cops, of course, came to see what I was doing on the water tower. I didn’t resist. I got in the police truck, and they hauled me off to Purgatory. Yup, Purgatory is the name of the county jail in Southern Utah. My delusional mind thought I was in a physical representation of the mythical place. I knew I was in an actual jail, but I thought it was a spiritual place that presented in the physical world as a jail. What a horrible name for a jail. I guess they do not sugarcoat the situation you are in. At times, though I thought I was in actual Purgatory.  

When I was put into a holding cell I asked if I could have a cigarette. This is not old-timey jails, you can’t smoke anymore. I find cigarettes help my anxiety and relax my mind a little bit. The sergeant said, “You bet.” Then he left me, went and smoked a cigarette, came back reeking of smoke, and laughed at me. Then I took the cup they gave me and flooded the holding cell. I used my sleeping pad to surf around the cell. Then 3 of the Polynesian guards came in, restrained me and put me in cuffs, and took me to one of the psych watch cells. I’m a large, strong man, and when I’m manic, I am especially strong. But these guys threw me around like I was a small child. I don’t know how much you know about Polyneseans, but they love fighting and they are very large people. 

The cells they reserve for people with psychological problems are heinous. The cell isn’t much different then standard cells. The big differences are the lighting situation and the checks every 15 minutes. The lights never turn off, and the guards will knock on the door to get you to move to make sure you’re alive. I could not sleep, and with the insistent knocking and bright fluorescent lights, I definitely wasn’t sleeping. I spent a month in that cell before I calmed down enough to be transferred to general population. When I was on this psych watch, I only got to leave the cell to take a shower for 15 minutes a day. For the first five days or so, I wasn’t let out. I had no concept of what time or day it was since I was in a concrete cell and the lights never changed. Some of the guards would show me the time. I didn’t trust the time they told me, and I wanted so badly to see a clock. Of course, my psychosis didn’t get better. While I was in the cell, I would constantly see images in the walls. Mostly demonic faces. Sometimes they would be moving, sometimes not.

These faces don’t just happen when I’m manic; I see faces when I’m asymptomatic. The hallucinations are way more intense when I’m manic. They don’t often move when I am not manic. My mind, trying to make sense of the experience, has concluded that all physical matter is also spiritual matter, and I can see the spirits in the inanimate objects. The reality is that I have a chemical imbalance in my brain, and that there is zero reality to these images. I know this logically, but to try to make sense of how real these images appear to me, I believe I am seeing spirits of a lower dimension embedded in physical objects around me.