The Four Ericks

This post is part of my “The Third Coming of Christ” series. Previous post here.

Please see the introduction for context and subscribe for more stories about my mental health journey.

The following story takes place sometime in the summer of 2013. It’s meant to give an idea of my internal struggle in the period before “The Sign”. Although this exact sequence of events never occurred in one night, the ideas and experiences are real and I am taking some artistic license to attempt to weave a single narrative. For several months I was in a loop, living a night like this again and again.

I was still some ways away from completely believing that I was the messiah. It was more of a fleeting fantasy like how you might daydream of winning the lottery - you don't actually ever believe it but for a few minutes you think about what might happen if it were true. This is how the severe delusions began to grow.

“Erick? What a coincidence, nice to meet you. My name is Erick too.” I said to my new next door neighbor as we met late one afternoon.

“You think that is a coincidence, the guy that rents the apartment behind me is also Erick” He replies. I couldn’t believe it, when I moved in a few weeks back I had already learned the other renter behind me was Erick as well.

“You won’t believe but the guy behind –”

“Is Erick too? I know it's crazy, right? Four Ericks living next to each other”. He cut me off as he already knew the punchline. 

I continue to try my best to react in socially acceptable ways as he drones on about some neighborly things, there’s too much in my head right now to pay attention. Is this another sign? Is God telling me something? I must be on the right path, why else would I have found this perfect house and what are the chances that three other Ericks would be living here?

“I’ve gotta get going, need to take care of some things around the house”. I said as I started to walk away. “See you later,” he replies. 

What does this mean? What does ‘Erick’ mean anyways?

“Ever or eternal ruler” I read on my phone as I headed inside. It must be a sign, I am the eternal ruler. Does “ruler” even make sense as a title though? Not very “Christ-like” but it fits well with the book of revelations. Revelations. I need to do my studies.

I grab a small stack of books I keep in the dining room and sit down at the table to read and journal. First my “Jesus Calling” book, a daily devotional given to me by my mom a few months ago, another sign. Today’s talk is about relaxing in his presence and letting him transform my spirit. When will the transformation take place? I am ready God.

I reach for my read-the-bible-in-a-year guide to read a handful of new testament and old testament verses. As is usually the case it’s not very insightful today but I must go on, I must read it all again. Eventually will I just know the bible instinctively? Can this information be imparted to me or do I need to memorize it?

Time to journal. The prescribed format I’ve been using feels so tedious at times but my pastor recommended the book so I’ve got to push on.

“What are you grateful for?”

“God I am so thankful for your presence in my life and your guiding me down this path. Thank you for choosing me to be your servant on earth”

“How can God help you?”

“Please take me Lord to be yours, bend my will to your plan. I submit myself wholly to you, use me to serve your purpose on earth”

“How can God help others?”

“Bring your peace to earth God, shine your light down on all of us and save us from the end which is coming. Fill me with your spirit and let me be your instrument of good.”1

“NO! Don’t! You can’t control me.”

The neighbor on the other side is shouting again.

“They’ve been watching! I’m going – You can’t! Stop!”

Peeking out from the front door I see her standing out near the street by their house. It’s not completely dark yet but there is a light fog, that point where the street lights turn on and create the illusion of darkness around their pale yellow glow. She is there under the light screaming into the shadows, talking to what appears to be no one. I know they told me she is schizophrenic but what if it’s really demons?

Is this my moment? I feel nauseous just thinking about it though it feels like the right thing to do. “Go to her, cast out the demon.” says my inner voice. “God is testing you and you must rise to the challenge. You can help her, can’t you hear her suffering?”

“Hey! Shut up and get inside!” shouts another.

As I step out onto the porch her roommate comes out and steers her back into their house. Missed opportunity or was I just saved from making a fool of myself? What would I say? How could I help her anyway? “You will know when the moment comes,” it tells me.

I’d like to clarify that it wasn’t a literal voice in my head at this point. I have been living with imaginary voices in my head my whole life and it wasn’t until much later in my psychosis that I began to have distinctly auditory hallucinations. 

These imaginary voices are the mechanism by which I have managed my social interactions throughout life. I always have a principal character in my head which is like a running commentary offering opinions over everything going on outside and in. This character is usually some form of myself or my closest loved ones but in particular scenarios of daydreaming and planning it becomes anyone I know or can imagine.

I talk to this internal voice and imagine its responses and through these responses I can iterate through my reactions to either review a situation that has occurred or prepare myself for a hypothetical one. Most real conversations I have in life are conversations I have already thoroughly rehearsed in my head, usually in the hours or days before.

I believe it was through this virtual reality I had lived with my whole life that my delusions were able to come alive and be perceived as a wholly separate entity, an entity which I continue to feel and experience to this day. An experience I now understand to come completely from within. It is just me, just a reflection of my essence and I can control it.

Since I had lived my whole life like this, when the delusions first started I never felt like God was literally talking to me but instead understood it to be my internal intuition expressing its purest understanding, possibly influenced in some indiscernible way by God itself. That is, until the “physical experiences” started.

“Where is that magazine?” I mutter to myself as I head back inside. When I saw mom a few weeks back she also gave me a news magazine she had saved since 1986, a review of the happenings of my birth year 1985. 

I sit down at the table again to thumb through it. I'm hungry but I can wait a few more minutes before starting dinner. “The Best and Worst of Everything”, an ambitious title but surely to provide me with some entertainment if at least for the advertisements alone.

I flip forward to the page where the best and worsts start and immediately my jaw drops reading the very first entry:

I was born in July! Angels were seen in space in the month I was born? A glorious secret? This is too much, it must be true. Everything's coming together and the signs are too real, I must be the chosen one.2

. . .

“7:37”, I see as I glance at the clock on the stove while finishing washing the dinner dishes. There it is again, 37. Why do I keep seeing that number? What does it mean? Maybe it is the way God can communicate to me? Perhaps a subtle means to show me when I am lined up to his plan. It’s time for the routine.

I dry my hands and head out to the shed in the back. My personal sanctuary. Sitting down in my small raggedy sofa chair I get out my stash box and roll a perfectly cylindrical joint. “A joint a day keeps the doctor away,” I think jokingly. Let’s put Pandora on and see what song God has for me today.

(“Always Love” by Nada Surf comes on)

Sometimes it feels like these songs were written for me to hear at this moment. God must be nudging the random algorithm to speak to me. “The Weight is a Gift, interesting” I mutter as I google the album title. Is this album for me? The weight of this hypothetical responsibility, this mission of mine is like a heavy gift from God.

At that moment a bark from the neighbor’s dog rings out in the silence of the background and sends a chill down my spine. More signs. The bark was too aligned with my thoughts and that chill wasn’t a normal chill, there was something special about the way it felt. Something is trying to communicate with me, is it God? 

I would go on to listen to that album hundreds of times in the months leading up to my hospitalization. The songs spoke so clearly to me to the point where I became convinced that Matthew Caws, the band's front man, was also an agent of God and that the album was literally written for me, Christ. As I was trying to escape the hospital my first night there I was certain Matthew was waiting for me in a car in the parking lot.

These kinds of coincidences I’ve described above piled up over time and pushed me further and further down towards the christ delusion. The inclusion of a number, 37, also made it easy for me to constantly find meaning in everything. We are bombarded by numbers every day and it would not have mattered what number I had chosen, my deluded mind would have found connections with everything everywhere. I was not too far away from “The Number 23” level of madness at one point, thankfully someone else had done most of the ground work for me.

Still to this day I am plagued by coincidence, by the constant noticing of the alignment of events in the real world with the thoughts in my head. Now though I am able to recognize that most of the time the thought is actually a product of the external stimulus and not the other way around. Cause and effect get blurred in the wishy-washy nature of the human perception of time. There is also a lot of selection bias in these delusions of coincidence, how many dog barks did I ignore before the “special” one that gave me a chill?

Thank you so much for reading, I hope you got value out of the experience. Feedback or criticism is welcome. Questions are highly encouraged, they help me to delve deeper into unknown areas.

2

I wish I had noticed that it said “Weekly World News” was the source, a well known tabloid that publishes almost entirely fictitious stories, and that I had taken the time to google what other headlines they were reporting in 1985.