Two days before my first birthday, in the middle of the night, I succumbed to cardiac arrest. My mom, an extremely well-trained lifeguard and swim coach, went into lifeguard-mode and performed CPR on me until the ambulance arrived, and took me to the hospital. The local hospital was ill-equipped to deal with me. They flew me via helicopter to Riley’s Children’s Hospital. The cause, my kidneys had failed. They immediately placed me on dialysis. Tests were done, the doctors squished me between machines that were twice the size and weight that they are now, as the doctors diligently hunted for a diagnosis. The doctors, for all the technology they had in 1992, could not assign a cause of why my kidneys failed. However, based on what they did know, and medically capable of doing, I received a new kidney almost a full year later. My grandmother, a perfect match, gave the kidney. Despite continuous spouts of getting sick, I survived. I knew from an extremely young age, consciously or unconsciously, that I was special. I lived through something that had previously taken countless lives, and it was a miracle that I lived past going through cardiac arrest. That’s what I was. I was a miracle.
One of my first indications I internalized being a miracle was when I vocalized experiencing heaven. To this day, I still remember the bright light. I was maybe two when I started relaying my experience, and didn’t really have a concept of heaven. I was too young to understand, but I said it anyway. My mom still tells me this story, where one time, as a small toddler, I caressed the sides of her face and stared into her eyes. Yet, when she looked into my eyes, she didn’t see me. She saw God staring up at her. It lasted only for a moment, but it shook her to her core, and changed how she saw me. My mom knew I was connected to God. Another instance was when my grandpa, my dad’s father, died. I was maybe four or five and said that “Grandpa did not go to heaven”. I was young enough to not understand what that meant. That’s not saying much. I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out what I was trying to say. I went through different stages, feeling horrifically guilty for even professing such a bold statement.
For most of my childhood, I believed what my dad thought when I told him. If grandpa did not go to heaven, it meant that Grandpa went to hell. Around eight or nine, I finally got the courage to tell my dad. It did not go well. My dad scolded at me, saying I was wrong, and told me I would go to hell for saying such a thing. No irony there. Telling an eight-year-old they’re going to hell for saying someone else went to hell. However, that moment of shame brought out desperate explanations besides hell. Maybe he wasn’t in heaven because he was in purgatory or something? Or maybe grandpa’s spirit was still on earth, watching us. Whatever the explanation, it always felt insufficient, and entirely dependent on my own beliefs. I didn’t know anyone who even believed in purgatory. Did it still count as an option?
I would describe my mom’s side of the family as secular Christians. They belonged to the United Church of Christ. Attending church itself wasn’t particularly important. What mattered was how you treated other people. If you lived your life according to the positive biblical teachings, then you were a good person. I think for my mom’s family; the community was their priority, not the doctrine itself. My dad’s side of the family was nearly the opposite. As Lutherans, they believed attending church was very important, and knowing and understanding the bible according to their specific doctrine. One thing was evident though, despite the differences in approach, God had a plan and a purpose for all of us.
Because I lived through something I shouldn’t have survived, God unequivocally allowed me to live. This meant I had some unseen, unknown purpose. I never got much experience with my dad’s pastors. Although his family has been devoted to the church, my dad always changed where he went to church, and he seemed to attend church out of obligation. He is the man that’s a devoted Christian when he’s being asked about it. This isn’t a criticism; many Christians are followers out of expectation. They follow because that’s all they know and aren’t passionate about religion as a subject enough to do more than the minimum. I really don’t care about mathematics, I know how to add, subtract, multiply, divide and know enough to google equations to figure out how to log them into a calculator, but if you ask me to do an algebra equation with no resources I’ll fail miserably, much less something like calculus. My dad knows Christianity like I know math. Regardless, my dad’s surface-level commitment to Christianity meant I had little access to any religious figureheads other than my mom’s. This is important because with my mom’s pastors, throughout the years, all “sensed” something special about me. Whether this was because they knew about my medical background and manifested a destiny for me in their own minds, or because they felt something, it doesn’t matter. They believed it, and my mom, grandparents, and I believed it. My dad’s family called my survival a miracle, or a gift from God. This is where my ideas of being special were reinforced.
Skipping to fifteen, I’ve been taking growth hormone to grow to an average height, because I did not grow during that year on dialysis. This meant I saw a hormone doctor to monitor my growth. Despite me getting taller, I wasn’t developing into a woman, and the breast buds my growth hormone doctor said that had formed vanished. My doctor quickly ordered numerous blood tests. It was around 2006, and that meant more advanced and in-depth testing. The doctors diagnosed me with Denys-Drash Syndrome. This diagnosis was pivotal in my miracle-ness, because I found out several things: something like 90% of infants with this disorder die within the first year of their life due to cardiac arrest caused by kidney failure, it also affects your hormones, all of them, including growth, sexual development, and infertility, although it’s usually the males who are infertile. At the time of diagnosis, there were only about twenty people on Earth who shared my diagnosis. Although we don’t know how many had died before reaching an age where their symptoms would be obvious. About five years ago, I checked to see how many people shared my diagnosis, and it was up to two hundred people. This information really added perspective to my survival. I was as much of a scientific miracle as any extraordinary person.
With the estrogen medication, I developed physically into a young woman. And through that development, I also activated something far more traumatizing. Around this time, my grandpa’s sister died, and although I only saw her a handful of times, the moments we spent together were fond memories. Nearly a year after my grandpa’s sister, Aunt Margot, died, I had a dream where she came to me and told me, “Do not be afraid, but something is coming.” And I remember this being an emotional moment. I believed I had a connection to the afterlife. I had so many stories where I just felt things and I couldn’t describe it other than being spiritual. In many respects, this was one prophecy I truly predicted accurately, yet I have absolutely no illusions about how incredibly easy that prophecy is to fulfill.
I was just starting to be introduced to depression on a personal level. I didn’t know her very well yet. You could say we were loose acquaintances. The Vacation of Death single-handedly got me and my depression to speak to each other. The Vacation of Death was a trip I went on with my dad’s side of the family when I was about fifteen, traveling from Illinois to Oklahoma. Throughout the trip there was a limited amount of attractions to visit, and the ones that existed were all related to war, or death, or dying. We saw civil war museums, civil war monuments, battlefields, and of course, we changed it up once with the Oklahoma Bombing memorial. That was our last attraction. It seemed like each of them was more traumatic than the next. There wasn’t a single place we went that didn’t involve death to some extent, except my uncle’s ceremony, where he was formally inducted into the church as a pastor, which was why we went to Oklahoma.
Regardless, I had my second major spiritual moment. Before we even walked onto one battlefield, I felt this overwhelming sense of anxiety. That battlefield was almost a complete blur. Almost. I remember walking, slightly downhill, and I saw this tall tree, thick, old, and then with a blink it was skinny, small, a man laying underneath it wearing a blue uniform, with blood flowing out of his chest, another person talking to him, trying to help him, they both were crying, the wounded man’s head droops. With another blink, it disappeared. I still see it in my mind’s eye, although the image has faded. I now understand that the tree wasn’t thick enough to be over two hundred years old, and that battlefields were fields, and any trees were cleared away. Yet I felt something heavy inside of me, as much as I conjured the image, and it was traumatizing regardless. So did the screams from the recordings at the Oklahoma Bombing memorial. The Vacation of Death was just traumatic all the way around. In hindsight, spiraling downhill was inevitable. I can’t blame that vacation. Depression pulled the trigger before then, but like I said, I didn’t really know her yet.
Depression was so foreign that I didn’t know what was happening to me, despite Depression forcing our relationship to deepen in ways I can never undo. My mental illnesses reared their ugly heads. Losing all sense of who and what I was, I felt like I was a burden on everyone I cared for. I knew my pain was their pain, and that they were doing everything they could to help, but the depression warped their love into me being undeserving, and that their help was useless because I was useless. During this time, I was alone, no matter who I was with. I was abandoned no matter what anyone was doing to rescue me. I needed support; I needed someone… Alex. She was the first spiritual being who came to me. My first guardian angel, provided by God, to be my source of comfort. Before Alex, I used Brian, who was my childhood imaginary friend. I knew he wasn’t real. Alex was my first real spirit, my own supernatural entity who acted as a barrier between my delusions. You know that voice inside your head that tells you that you’ll be okay, even when nothing feels like it? Maybe you know the feeling of praying to God, asking for guidance, and that voice floating a response to you, the voice of reason and wisdom? Alex was like an extension of that.
When Depression told me that this feeling was going to last forever, Alex told me it would be temporary. When the teachers and the school corporation accused me of faking my anxiety and depression, Alex told me they didn’t matter. When my psychiatrist told me I was spoiled and nothing was wrong with me, Alex told me he was wrong and that there was an explanation for this. When the mental hospital staff dragged me into the teen unit and threw me in a four-by-four white room, Alex was the only one there, soothing my tears. When I was at a different mental health institution, my belief in Alex and my connection to the spirit world, gave me the gift of feeling my grandma’s hand on my shoulder, who at the time had recently passed away, bringing tears and undefinable profound comfort and peace to me. When my psychiatrist thought I was far more damaged than I was, Alex helped me through. When I got the opportunity to go to a school for misfit kids, Alex was there to guide me through. When I got out, the psychiatrist I returned to said I would never be a functioning adult, that I wouldn’t drive, or work, or get a GED, and would never get married, well, by then I didn’t need Alex to tell me he was dead wrong.
By then, I was far more emotionally stable. Depression stole eight years of my life from me. Alex, my spirit, was my tool of survival. She didn’t work alone. There were others, Danny, Sammy, Rachel, Rosary, and Shon. All working to eliminate the overpowering sense of loneliness. Although I credit “her” with my survival, I am crediting myself. None of these spirits did anything to disrupt the loneliness. I was still lonely, I was still depressed, I was still feeling abandoned, helpless and a burden. I still resented my family, I still resented myself, I still resent the school and resent my psychiatrist for saying those things. These spirits did not solve anything. Over the years, I grew past my severe depression. I got a proper diagnosis with proper medications so I could level out enough to work on my coping skills. Alex and her peers slowly faded. I relied on them a lot less. I suppose you could say I didn’t need them anymore. But if I didn’t need them anymore, and they disappeared… where they ever really there in the first place?
Yet that’s what they were there for. That was why the spirits came into my life. Their existence was contingent on my need for them to exist. I wasn’t hallucinating; I wasn’t hearing voices. That I knew for a fact from the beginning. What makes these spirits particularly interesting is, I should have been more aware of what they were. When I was in middle school 5th and 6th grade respectively, I didn’t have friends. I had so few friends that guidance counselors played matchmaker, so I wasn’t alone. However, they didn’t share any classes with me; they didn’t even share a lunch period, and they didn’t live close enough to me for us to walk home. So, being the shy, insecure, and lonely girl I was, I talked to my imagination, Bryan; I named him. I spoke to him out loud, shared inside jokes and asked for advice and actively listened to what Bryan had to say. I knew he was imaginary.
I always used my imagination to cope and function. I animated everything, named everything, gave a personality to everything. I still do. It’s my comfort zone. Sometimes when I’m driving in my car and don’t want to listen to music but don’t want silence, I talk to Bryan, my imaginary friend from middle school who walked me home. Still, throughout my entire life, I’ve been encouraged to separate my mind into two opposing categories: imagination and reality, fact and fiction, true and false. You could say imagination is white, and reality is black.
My natural state has been to remain naïve that anything is possible, that there is no reality and no imagination, and that it isn’t black and white but a combination of cyan, yellow and magenta, of wavelengths and perceptions and complex things we don’t see. Yet every year I got older and was being pulled in fifty different directions, trying to find sanity and trying to find internal stability, trying to see the world in color, trying to see the world in black and white and trying to find truth, trying to trust my instincts, trying to doubt my instincts because I didn’t know where my imagination ended… and trying to find a purpose for existing. Why have I suffered so much if there isn’t a reason for it? Why throw these obstacles and these expectations if I’m not supposed to be something important? Why do I have to be this? Who do I have to be? When I realized I didn’t know where my imagination ended, when I realized my spirits weren’t safe from scrutiny, the concept of god crumbled at my feet. Because those spirits were a gift from god, and if the gifts are false, and then the giver is false too, especially when god is supposed to be the giver of everything.
I once thought I was meant to write a novel, then to write an autobiography about how much I’ve gone through. Eventually, I would land myself on the Oprah TV show and have her tell me how inspiring my life story is. I would be smart, determined, and most of all, I would know who I am. I would have an insight into this world that no one else has. That didn’t happen. I thought I would get married, have a little girl named Ellen Anne, a combination of my two grandmothers’ middle names. I would be independent and traveling the world, at least by the age of thirty-five. Instead, I’m thirty, a sophomore in college, only taking one or two classes a semester, and living with my grandparents and my mom. I’m on disability and only just started working at a part-time job.
I’ve been everywhere, searching for the truth. Politically, I’ve been a liberal, I’ve learned about and identified with the ideologies of communism, I’ve been a conservative, I’ve learned about the ideologies of fascism, I’ve learned about the ideologies of socialism. I’m a centrist libertarian, at least right now. Religiously, I’ve learned about Christianity, Judaism, Greek and Roman Mythology, I’ve dipped my toes into learning a little about Islam, I’ve learned about Hinduism and Buddhism, I’ve even read books about aliens. I’ve researched ghosts and spirits, sought evidence that proved that Alex and her peers existed. I’ve indulged in attempting to curate an afterlife that was inclusive of all religions, so no one had to be wrong. I’ve considered all types of gods and concepts to make this world a less cruel place. Despite the diversity of beliefs and philosophies of all the religions listed above, they all have the same answer when you ask them what evidence do you have that what you believe is true? By the way, all the evidence is from personal experience. More so, these religions, with their varying beliefs and philosophies, have provided no unique insight or revelation to this known world that other religions cannot also provide to you. Not one of them is more insightful than the others. I’ve embraced agnosticism and even “spiritual atheism” in a desperate attempt to deny what I had turned into.
I watched a video about how a lot of mental illnesses are reduced from being a chemical imbalance of the person suffering into a sin. If you just had enough faith in god, your depression would go away. You must have let the devil in. What sin did you commit that is causing your schizophrenia? But throughout history, they did not limit it to mental illnesses. Sin also caused physical illnesses, everything from the flu to cancer to STD’s to an infection because you stepped on a nail. It didn’t even have to be your sin, it could be your parents or your wife’s or your neighbors. It could be blasphemy, disobedience, adultery, stealing, taking too much change the cashier gave you. It didn’t matter, the pastor or priest would find something. They would expect you to repent, and if the illness didn’t go away, you had to repent more. If you didn’t get better for too long, you would be possessed by the devil. If you got better too soon, you were possessed by the devil. This is the burden of a sin. You are supposed to be a bad person, an unholy person, a flawed person. A sinner has a specific path he must take. However, miracles or blessings are burdens, too. You are supposed to be a good person, a holy person, a person worthy of god. You have a specific path you must take. It’s why dissenters are villainized, it’s why priests and pastors are glorified. It’s why I am supposed to come back to god, and for others to never have been with god to begin with. These both are burdens to be thrust on others and ourselves.
I went from being a girl who believed she was a miracle, with a purpose that god gave her, to a woman who no longer wants the pressure of being a miracle. I don’t want to have some special knowledge or insight into the world. I just want to be Michelle, with Denys-Drash Syndrome, Intermittent Explosive disorder, and Dysthymia. I just want to be Michelle, who’s the writer who loves religion as much as she dislikes it, has a weird imagination and won’t stop loving princesses for anyone, even though she disagrees with the divine rights of kings and most forms of absolutism. Atheism is freeing me of a burden I no longer want. Instead of having to decipher my purpose, I can be purposeful. Instead of fighting for truth, I can be fluid in this world and can take what comes because there is no hidden message behind the curtain. I am free.
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