Peter Rogers6
Newcomer
3 messages
joined Mar 2010
Wondering how much schizophrenia—if at all—actually compares to the headspace, perception, and thought loops you get on a trip.
So, I was tripping in a park with some friends, and right before dawn, this older lady wanders up wearing this pink nightgown-looking thing. She just sits down under the tree with us. From like two hundred yards away, seeing her grinning and looking straight at us, I thought:
- "Yeah, she’s one of us."
She was just waiting for the local Episcopal church to open so she could head to early mass and flirt with this young priest who’d just started his ministry. She joined our convo immediately. Straight up called us out, pointing at the "moons in my eyes," as she put it. We were so fried; we couldn't even talk to the sober crowd hanging out by the pub earlier, so we bailed to this little patch of nature downtown to escape the bad vibes. But with the lady in the nightgown, we vibed perfectly, even when the associations got totally wild. She talked like she was part of the crew, dropping lines for an hour that had us rolling on the grass laughing. No need to hide the trip from her; her own mental movies were moving way faster than ours, and nobody even suspected she might be crazy. It felt totally normal. She carried herself like an intellectual from some high-society family in Chicago. Turns out she used to be a fashion designer in Paris back in the day (not my own theory, though—one of my buddies is her nephew, and he confirmed the whole story). Now, she heads to the front pew every morning to stare lovingly at the priest while he talks to God, blushing under his gaze. Then, after service, she’ll grab his hand during the greeting and won't let go, telling him how wonderful he is:
- "Oh, my sweet little man!" and he just fidgets, clearly uncomfortable, praying she'll stop:
- "Ma'am, didn't we talk about this yesterday? Don't we do this every single day?"
And then she’ll propose to him again, and he’ll just stumble through saying he’s a man of God before ducking behind the altar in his purple liturgical robes. When I asked her later, "What's her deal?" she just laughed and said:
- "You think I'm crazy? I know nothing's happening in the sky. He's just a drooling priest..."—she kissed the rosary around her neck, looked up at the sky, and muttered forgive me, God, then gave a little smirk: - "...and I'm just an old woman!"
The church doors opened, and the guy in the purple robes stepped out to face his congregation. She jumped up like a hawk and whispered conspiratorially:
- "I love teasing him." Then she bolted toward the church, yelling:
- "Coming, honey!"
Anyway, damn, I'm rambling now...
Fast forward a week. I'm sober, walking through town, and I run into her. She was exactly the same as that morning, but I felt different—kind of broken. I couldn't follow her train of thought; half the stuff she said made zero sense to me, and I finally realized she was actually pretty far gone. It was exhausting. She'd talk about things that made no sense to me, even though she had to head to church right after. I told her I had to run, and she showed me where she lived, inviting me and my friends over for coffee sometime. I promised I would, though I never did. That gap between how I perceived her madness while on acid versus how I saw it during my everyday life made me dig a little deeper. I connected the dots with her nephew—who, by the way, looked like he was at his wit's end talking about her—and eventually found out her diagnosis. Schizophrenia.
