Spring 2010. I am sitting at a rough-hewn wooden table in a coffeehouse near the university. Students dressed in the studied nonchalance a rich school fosters, stand in line at the counter talking homework and hangovers. There is laughter, high fives, bro hugs, cursing when a spilt latte ruins that blouse she just bought yesterday. Tucked away in corners, removed from the chatter, a few serious students peer into laptop screens or notebooks replete with neon post-its. It is a day like any other.
Or so it seems.
My senses are heightened. I spot the subtle signals and knowing glances. Oh, yes, I can see through this charade. Am I supposed to be unaware that this is all being staged just for me? Perhaps I’m more clever than they realized and I am spoiling the surprise. Hah! They have underestimated me before.
Mad World is playing over the speakers and I laugh softly to myself. The theme from Donnie Darko. I have learned to spot these confirmatory clues. Nice touch.
I am waiting for a couple who had contacted me a few weeks earlier. We love your writing and are moving to your area soon. We’d love to meet you. We’d love to talk about the things you are uncovering. We’d like to help.
I’ll bet they would. So obvious.
The two arrive and we find each other. She is a researcher at the university and he is there for graduate work in bioinformatics. They are both quite brilliant. As we talk, my confidence that they are in on this charade wavers. Their interest seems genuine and is focused more on my writings around cryptofascism in modern conspiracy theory than around the Great Mystery that has consumed me for the last few months. He, in fact, is encyclopedic in his knowledge of far-right movements. A Nazi-hunting savant.
We settle deep into conversation. I am energized by our discussion but as I look around the premises, the warm, slightly oversaturated glow of illusion flickers like a bulb in a David Lynch film. This is real. This is illusion. I just can’t tell. I am straddling two timelines. I am become Donnie Darko. Certainty is not allowed.
I am very ill.
By the end of our next meeting, I will have driven off my two new friends as I had driven off almost everyone in my life, both real-world and virtual. And while my mental and emotional tailspin was quite public for the few hundred people familiar with my blog, no one really ever knew the depth of my psychosis.
For several months I would slip in and out of paranoia and magical thinking. I was being followed. I could make it rain.
I stumbled through daily life, barely able to focus on anything in the here and now. I knew that it, whatever “it” was, or whether there was even an “it” at all, was beginning to crush me like the stones on old Giles Corey. I made it through the slog of each day only by clinging to my thinning hope that a Great Revealing was just around the corner; the puppet masters would emerge from behind the curtain, congratulate me for seeing farther than anyone else had seen and invite me to their inner sanctum to join in their World-Saving Work woven from intrigue, myth and magick.
Well.
The Revealing never came and would never come. The Puppet Masters stayed cozy behind their curtains drinking tea or whatever it is Puppet Masters do. Or maybe they did not exist at all. The effort of living in two parallel realities overwhelmed me. Something had to give. I blew up my personal life, quit my job, purged my online presence.
Delete. De-activate. Destroy.
That is what saved me, in the end. But it was a salvation at great cost, because what I sacrificed was the heady infusion of mystery into the everyday. Gone was the crackle and hiss of secret meaning behind every interaction. Gone was the myriad connections and patterns I could easily and rapidly discover lurking behind the most mundane facts. Gone was the quest. Gone was the mystery only I could solve, the puzzle with pieces hidden where only I could find them.
Daily chores and monthly bills were a pale, cruel consolation prize. It has taken me years to fully recover.