August, 2020 - I have emerged from nearly a decade of heroin addiction. The final years of which I spent much of my time on the street. Barely surviving, living like a hunted animal, sometimes acting as predator, other times being prey. I have kept my manhood and my sanity although my mind remains fractured. It has been fractured since I was a boy - afflicted with something that medical consensus would call schizophrenia. Ancient peoples identified it as a kind of melancholy wrought by a deformed spiritual constitution. Apache or Comanche so afflicted were likely tortured for the purpose of slaying a malevolent intelligence that was believed - not entirely incorrectly - to be holding a human vessel in bondage. I do not gain any great insight into what afflicts me. It remains as unknowable to my rational mind as it was when I was a small boy. It is familiar - so familiar that if it simply were not there anymore I believe I would mourn it.
Even though this thing - this Entity - is trying to kill me and I am terrified of the environment it has transformed my mind into, it has become part of me. I only identify it as emerging from without because I the experiences it subjects me to within the place of my own mind, where I am forced to live, are so horrible that I cannot conceive of something so malevolent being native to my person. Perhaps were I to accept this I would be too disgusted by myself to endure it at all peaceably. All I know is that Heroin puts it - whatever it is - to rest. Its still within me - I can feel it. But its sleeping so long as I am shooting poison into my veins. The final year I am addicted to Heroin and sleeping rough, it is requiring more and more of the drug to lay the entity to rest.
Every morning I am desperately dope sick - horrible as the physical aspect of the sickness is, I can endure it. I can not endure the entity. I am always screaming silently. I consider the possibility, in dead earnest, that I am not actually alive but that I am in Hell. I can feel God’s presence but this is all the more horrifying. Every day my mind is being torn to pieces. My only relief is Heroin. I do not eat or sleep. I do not know the intimate touch of a woman or the warm embrace of a friend. There is only the entity, the sickness, and the Heroin that takes away my sickness and that briefly subdues the entity that is destroying me.
Sometimes after I get well from the poison that I inject at every opportunity, I take account of my existence. All of my worst nightmares have come true. After so many years in such a compromised state, I can no longer discern if I am remembering events from a life I have actually lived or if I am confabulating visionary narratives in the midst of Fugue states. It is impossible for me to conceive of a life prior to my voracious addiction or without heroin. Nor do I consciously recollect a time or phase of life when the entity had not completely fractured my mind and destroyed my ability to function as a rational adult Man.
For the first time in my life, I contemplate - completely objectively - committing suicide as I do not believe I can endure more months, years, possibly decades of sickness, pain and terror. I also consider that if I am in fact under attack by a malevolent intelligence, it matters not if it is merely part of myself that I cannot reconcile as such owing to a diseased mind - all that matters is that it hurts me every day and is going to kill me by slow torture. If the only way to defend myself from this fate is to kill myself, and thus destroy what is so gravely hurting me, then I must be prepared to perform the deed.
CONTINUED in NEXT INSTALLMENT
My oldest brother was in this state from when he was 14yo to almost 30. He was probably under the influence for over 10-12 and then fighting to get off. I could never deal with his demon, it was scary and outlandish for me, since I had all my shit together, and honestly, he behaved like real demon. For all I can remember, I avoided him. He ultimately developed an insane hatred of me. Dirty dealing in my back, orbiting my friends to whisper shit, stalking me on the internet. The latest years were definitely hell.
He tried to off himself and my family went bonkers. Everyone got s1ck. We may never recover... this entity you speak about it. I know it damn well. I might come back to listen to your story.
The brain is not one's enemy, but certainly isn't ones
best friend either.
I hear ya man.