The Birth of The Voice

This post is part of my “The Third Coming of Christ” series where I tell stories from my experiences during a psychotic episode in 2013-14. 

Please see the introduction for more context, check out the other stories I’ve posted so far, and subscribe for more posts about me and my mental health journey.

Hello, everybody. So I've been trying to write my stories from my perspective when they happened but it's actually a really taxing process, so this week I'm just going to tell the story so that I can put something out there. Life has been incredibly busy and it has been hard to sit down and write.

I’ve also decided to include the audio recording which served as the base for writing this piece. While it is certainly distinct, the content is essentially the same. It is complete with unintentional yawns, plenty of “um”s and a few awkward silences as I get lost in my thoughts. The text is a more refined and coherent story with it’s own unique aspects as well.

So this story takes place on the evening that I got back from a trip to the mountains with friends, which was at the end of “the weekend”. I’ve mentioned various times “the weekend” and I'm sorry I’m still not going to write about it yet. Someday, but it's just too much to process still.

I was sitting on my chair in my living room, done for the day just scrolling through Facebook. I couldn't tell you right now exactly what it was I was thinking about at that time. Honestly, I'm sure I was processing “the weekend” in some sense, which was both absolutely incredible and, in the context of my delusional predictions, a complete failure.

None of the magical things I thought were going to happen happened. There was no grand reveal of God. There was no end of the world, there were no new powers or mass dreams or anything supernatural like I had thought for the weeks leading up. Just a few wonderful days with friends and one weird night where I told them that I was Christ.

There I was, sitting on the couch processing all of this, still hanging on to these threads, trying to resolve the meaning in all that happened. I don't remember exactly my train of thought at that moment, but my usual pattern was to be lamenting to God about how things were going. I was both frustrated at the lackluster experience of my outing as Christ and enthralled by the other awe inspiring moments. I was continuously reassuring myself that the experiences were real. 

“You can't deny that you had these experiences, it was real. You felt that. You saw that. You sensed his presence.”

Up to this point the only physical experiences I had had had been very subtle. I was having these chills or goosebumps, “the fear” as I called it. It was a sort of resistance, like something that made it hard for me to speak and I couldn't get certain words out, which I took to mean that God was stopping me from speaking. Other times it felt like it was pushing the words out of me. An idea would be repeated in my head over and over, urging me to say it.

I could feel it in my throat like a lump, driving the words out and eventually I would speak. This was actually what first led me to say “I think I’m Christ” to my friend just the night before. For days I was like that and it was a period of weeks that this was all escalating, experiences getting more intense and me feeling less and less in control of what was happening.

So as I’m sitting in my chair, mind wandering, thinking about all of this and trying to reach some greater understanding, I arrive at some special moment, some thought, some profound realization. What? I don’t remember.

It's always something profound in those moments and I rarely remember why because it is not usually as profound as it seemed, but it’s what triggers the whole process. Usually the more significant physical experiences are actually also truly profound but still I can’t remember them all because there are too many profound things in the universe.

So that lump starts to form in my throat, it starts to push up and tighten, as if my throat is closing in. I think the feeling of a lump in your throat is commonly understood but if not, I could best describe it as if someone had put a ring around my trachea (or esophagus? I’m not sure which) and slowly made it smaller.

Starting a little bit below my Adam's apple the pressure moved up towards my mouth. As I'm feeling this I'm like: “Oh my God, what's going on? What is this thing?”, it’s like I’m a passenger in my body watching this unfold. It continues up to the back of my throat, at this point I feel even my tongue pressed and squeezed back restricting my airway until finally:

“GGAAHHHUYYYY!”

I make this strange vocalization, this guttural sound moving from low to high pitch. Everything in my mouth and throat felt squished together as it was happening. The whole experience lasted less than 10 seconds and it moved smoothly like a wave from the lower part of my throat up through my tongue.

The closest thing I could compare it to would be a baby cooing. I made an attempt at it in the audio for this post though honestly I have never been able to satisfyingly recreate that experience. This idea of a baby came to mind immediately and it also brought with it associations of birth. With everything that had happened that weekend it was as if I was being born again, or maybe this thing inside me was being born.

After some minutes sitting there processing what happened, I go back to scrolling on Facebook and run into a photo from my baptism the day before. Yes, I got baptized as a 28 year old. As far as I know It is not an uncommon practice - in evangelical churches - for people who have left the church for some time to do it when they come back. 

I was an atheist for many years, this after growing up in the church where I volunteered and participated actively, and I felt I needed to reaffirm my commitment to God. My decision was also driven by my delusions and the coincidence of the timing with the weekend, it seemed God had planned it that way.

So moments after I see this picture, me standing next to my pastor in the jacuzzi they set up in the church right before they dunked me in the water, I start to make a sound (example in audio) I could best describe as an angel singing. A high pitch chorus sound which I made with my head tilted back and extended up in the air. This lasted maybe 10-20 seconds and happened quickly, out of nowhere, and seemingly out of my control.

In that moment I was sure that God was speaking through me or was it angels, or the spirit of Mary or Jesus, All I knew for certain was that it was something powerful and undoubtedly external. “The Wholly Other”, I would call it, though nowadays I understand it to be my self reflection.

So I just sat there breathing deeply like what the fuck, not sure how to even handle the situation and what just happened. It was the first time anything like that had ever happened to me. It felt so alien. Not long after, the clicks came and for the next several months almost all of my decisions were driven by this inner voice that had come alive in me.