I was a very shy, sensitive, introspective child. I never identified with children my age. I didn't understand their silliness.
I preferred to be with adults. I was raised by my mother in a nondenominational, evangelical church. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior at a very young age.
I used to witness to kids at school and proudly carried my Bible around with me.
At age 10, I was driven to school on a day there was no school. I thought I had missed the bus.
My best friend showed up too. Then another boy showed up, driven there by his father.
When we found out there was no school that day, the boy's father told us he would give us a preview of a magic show he was going to perform for the school.
I just wanted to go home, but I had no choice. The man gave us sugar cubes on which he dripped something.
He told us to hold it on our tongue and watch the mural on the wall until we could see it move. My friend saw it move, but I didn't.
The man gave me another sugar cube. My vision suddenly went bad - like static on an old tv and never returned to normal. I felt really sick and panicked, like I had to get away.
I remember running down the bus loop, thinking, if only I could reach the house across the street, I could get help.
Suddenly, I was on the cement and there was blood everywhere. The man said I passed out and hit my head on the curb.
I later found out that he had hit me on the head with a brick. My skull was cracked and I was bleeding, but the man kept me there. He claimed to be a doctor.
He said I had the flu. The rest of the day was a blur. He played with us and raped us over and over and gave us other drugs like heroin and cocaine.
Then he gave us "candy" (pills) for being good, and drove us home. We didn't tell our parents what happened.
The next school day, we asked our teacher when the magic show was going to be. He became suspicious. We told him what happened, and he tried to explain LSD to us.
I still didn't understand. He promised us he wouldn't tell our parents. Three days after the incident, our teachers informed us that the man had jumped in front of a train.
I was scared. I thought that would be my fate, and it almost was. My friend and I swore to tell no one what had happened.
What was to follow was even worse. My friend's family found out what had happened to her, and my friend told them I did it! On her birthday, I was at a party at her house with other classmates.
When the party was over, my friend's brother drove us home. He gave us all lollipops. The green one he gave me was unwrapped. I said I'd eat it later, but he demanded I eat it right then.
He dropped off each kid, one by one, and I was getting worried, because they lived farther away than me. Why didn't he drop me off yet? Finally, it was just me, him, and his girlfriend in the car.
He said he had to pick up his paycheck at work. He drove us to the swimming club where he worked as a lifeguard. That's when I started experiencing the now-familiar acid trip.
The rest of that evening was also a blur. He chased me around the pools and the pond and the showers, saying he was going to do terrible things to me, disgusting sexual tortures I couldn't have even imagined.
He was going to drown me. Just before he could carry it out, another lifeguard heard my screaming. He came into the bathroom where I had hid and asked what was going on.
My friend's brother said "It's ok. She's my niece. We're just playing a game." The lifeguard said to me "Is that true?" I couldn't speak out of terror. I shook my head and whispered "No. No. No."
The lifeguard interceded and drove me home.
To my horror, one of my closest friends invited me to a birthday party at that swim club! I was still tripping and I begged my parents to not take me there. But they did, and I was terrified.
My friend (the birthday girl) kept reassuring me that there was no one there who was going to hurt me, but little did she know. It turned out though, that he wasn't there. But I was having a difficult time with the acid trip.
I couldn't walk on the hill where the girl's family had set a place. My balance was totally gone and I kept feeling like I was going to fly off the side of the hill and end up in the pool.
I had to crawl everywhere on my hands and knees. I couldn't see straight, especially in the sunlight. Everything was topsy-turvy. I can't recall exactly when the trip ended. Time had stopped for me.
I eventually suppressed the memory of these events. Soon after, I developed severe depression and anxiety. I was never the same again. At age seventeen, I finally got professional help.
Thus began the series of anti-psychotics, mood-stabilizers, anti-depressants, sedatives, and psychiatrists. I was in and out of hospitals. By age 21, I had become really messed-up and in terrible torture because of all side effects of the drugs.
I had been working out at a gym with a personal trainer. But he had gotten injured and I got a replacement trainer. I didn't recognize him, but he recognized me.
He asked me if I knew who he was, and I said no. Then he wrote his name on a piece of paper and showed it to me. I still didn't remember. He took me to a corner area where no one was around and
started describing the sexual tortures that he had threatened me with when I was 10. I still didn't remember. I thought he was out of his mind.
He kept saying he wanted to take me down to the pool. I sensed it would be a terrible mistake to agree to that.
When my session was over he gave me a drink from the gym bar. I went to my best friend's house after the workout, and it was then I started noticing strange feelings.
I couldn't stop laughing and I fell down the stairs. My friend asked me if I would be able to drive home. She didn't know what was going on.
I got home just in time. Everything started swirling and looking distorted. I was so dizzy, I couldn't stand up. Sounds were loud and colors bright.
I sat in my room staring for long periods, then laughing uncontrollably, and playing a little tune on a keyboard over and over for what must have been hours. I had no sense of time.
I didn't know what was wrong with me. I became paranoid. I screamed for help but my parents didn't know what to do.
It lasted a week before it started to fade away.
That year, the drugs, um, I mean meds, had taken their toll on my health too. I had to crawl up stairs on my hands and knees. I couldn't hold a pen in my hand. It became very hard to read.
And then I developed a bizzare condition. My temperature kept going up and down within minutes.
When at a faire with a friend, I was walking around in the sun and my skin started tingling and itching, then burning so bad, I had to go see a nurse.
I became progressively more and more exhausted and could not regain my strength. I was starving to death although I kept my stomach full all the time.
My sleep became erratic. I was overheated all the time, and needed my room to be very cold. I developed all sorts of weird sensitivities. Everything was hyper-intense. My reflexes and perceptions were superhuman, as attested to by doctors.
I tried everything to regain my health - more meds, herbs, special diets... Doctors told me my condition was beyond the knowledge of science. What kind of explanation was that!?
Tests showed I wasn't eating enough, even though I ate huge amounts of food every three hours. I didn't gain weight either. When they tried to take blood, they couldn't find any and then when they finally did,
it was so thick it wouldn't go in the needle. They said they had never encountered anything like that before. I went to a sleep center,
and they said my alpha waves were abnormally active and I stopped breathing throughout my sleep.
They found so many other problems they couldn't list them all. I had developed a circadian rhythm disorder as well, and couldn't sleep normal hours.
I had to urinate huge amounts every fifteen minutes. There was a excretion that smelled weird. I can't even descibe all of the weird things that were happening to me.
I began having these vivid semi-conscious dreams of a demon doing weird sexual things with me. That went on for years and got me involved in the occult.
Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and I decided to take my life. I took a massive overdose (far over a gram) of phenobarbital, a powerful sedative.
I was really dizzy and falling all over the place for a week. But I didn't die, thank God!
In the summer of 2002, I was so ill I couldn't exert any energy at all, mental or physical. I couldn't even dream. I was bedridden and too exhausted to even go to the bathroom.
It reached an impossible state. Then suddenly one day, God healed me! Unfortunately, I had a mental breakdown from the torture. I ended up in the hospital psych unit again.
But I was able to see the psychiatrist I had known since I was seventeen. I was put on a cocktail of medications that really helped me. I went back to college. I had a real life again.
A few years later, I had become convinced that the medications I was on were going to cause terrible harm to me, so I stopped taking them.
I became terribly manic and had delusions and hallucinations again. There was this weird smell, and I thought I was decaying. I thought God was telling me to destroy all my possessions.
I broke my several CDs and thought God was testing me. I took large shards from the CDs and shoved them into my eyes. When I pulled them out, I found no harm was done to my eyes. I did this over and over.
I pushed the shards in so far, they must have gone into my brain (I knew that because of the length of the shards).
The shards had goo all over them from my eyes, but miraculously, my eyes were completely unharmed. God protected me. But then I had this idea that I had to kill myself or I would be damned. I went into the kitchen and grabbed a large knife.
I plunged it into my chest until the handle banged against me. Blood was flowing out, especially after I pulled the knife back out. But I didn't die. I didn't understand why.
I still don't understand why. It was a miracle from God! But when I saw I was still standing, I grabbed a bottle of tranquilizers and a bottle of Tylenol and gulped them down.
I heard noise outside my door.
I woke up in the hospital. I don't know how much time passed. I was told the police broke down my door and called an ambulance. My first instinct was to rip out all the tubes in me.
I looked at my chest and felt where I had stabbed myself. It had healed to the point where it was a shallow cut. Another miracle from God! I saw my blood-soaked shirt. They had to cut it off me in the ambulance.
I was transferred to the local psych unit. My psychiatrist told me he was so worried about me that he had called the police. I thank God for him!
I got back on my meds and I have been stable ever since.
