Some Kind of Reality
I FIRST HEARD voices in the winter of 2017. I was home for the holidays from UC Santa Barbara, where I was to spend one school year and not a second longer. I had smoked a lot of weed that first quarter, but had emerged mostly unscathed. I recall one memory—distant even then—of a night in high school, when I smoked with a group that I wasn’t really a part of. We were all packed into one car, driving through the hills by my town. I remember feeling like a black seed was growing in my brain. My untreated depression had, in Andrew Solomon’s metaphor, grown around me like a vine does a tree, to the point where it was no longer distinguishable from the “real” me. I have rarely felt the pain of isolation more acutely than at that moment, surrounded by friends who were not my friends, in a car rushing blindly through the night.
I smoked to escape from my depression, but it only prevented me from doing the real work to alleviate it. In my first quarter at UCSB, I smoked and drank, like many freshmen, well past the verge of excess, but it wasn’t until I came home that I had another traumatic experience like the one in high school. I was broken up with by a girl named Jessica, and a couple days later I smoked alone in my room. I saw a beast with a wolf’s body and my mother’s face stalking towards my bed. I shut my eyes as tight as I could, and when I opened them it was gone. I heard screaming from my parents’ room, assumed they were fighting, and burrowed myself into my covers. I went back to UCSB several days later, and started smoking even more.
ONE OF the reasons I smoked is because I am bisexual. Smoking allowed me to peek over the wall I’d subconsciously erected around my straight identity and fantasize about having sex with men. The next day, the foggy afterglow of the weed would help me to push down the shame. I did this for a long time. In the end, of course, it didn’t help. I had already given up, so I lived like it.
The main reason for this attitude of defeat was left over from high school. In the spring of 2017 I had been accepted to Amherst College, but I couldn’t attend for financial reasons. At UCSB I made sure everyone knew this. I had idealized elite northeastern colleges to the point that I felt like an utter failure for not
