My Story

Lukas Allen

               This is my story of suffering and redemption. I haven’t always been lucid enough to share it, and sometimes didn’t event want to, as the memories were still so vivid and were still actively taking a huge part of my life.

            I had been on and off depressed in high school. It escalated to a point when I felt I should just jump off a cliff, because nothing mattered anymore. It wasn’t depression from a crushing tragic event that happened to me, it was just a wearing over time, mixed with teenage confusion and no direction where to go.

            I went to that quarry cliffside, located directly next to the high school, the exact events still stuck in my mind, but I assure you, have been dulled thanks to therapy, religion, and self recognition of trauma. Lately, then, I had been deciding things by the flip of a coin, just because I didn’t care anymore and none of my actions really mattered.

            I knew I could slightly sometimes change the outcome of the coin flip if I flipped it into my palm, so I flipped it to the ground beside me instead. I flipped the coin, heads I would jump, tails I would not. Staring off the cliff, down to my death, I got tails. I said, eh, best two out of three. I flipped the coin again. I got tails. I looked at the coin. I wanted to die! I wanted it just to be done!! I flipped the coin. I got tails.

            I flipped the coin off the edge of the cliff, and went home, bleeding from my palm after a confusing segment before the event of wandering around that cliff and wondering what to do, and I had slashed my palm with my knife. I went home, shambling back to my car in despair, bleeding on the wheel of my car.

            I only then, when I had looked back at the cliff, shuddered at the height of it and what I nearly did.

            2.

            Time passed, I graduated high school in a daze. I still didn’t care, I was still depressed, nothing mattered. I sought to let drugs guide me, and perhaps have a revelation of something great that could guide me through this faulty life I had inadvertently spared myself the ending of.

            I took Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds, with the chemical LSA naturally inside of them that my friends and I had recently been experimenting with. I was alone in my room, on a hot day, and drank a sip of my dad’s vodka to down the crushed in my mouth seven seeds. Three I had taken the night before in a test, and I thought it had promising effects as I hallucinated my skull necklace around my neck exploding.

            I had stolen the skull necklace from a shop, the necklace eventually becoming a symbol of a creature I previously created, the Lich, a symbol and being of obsession, madness, insanity, and sometimes evil. After I took the seeds the curtains started breathing. I felt inhibited from my shirt, and took it off. I threw up on my carpet, uninhibited like a cat.

            Despite what you may think, throwing up after taking a hallucinogen doesn’t purge it from your system, it in fact makes the trip only more intense.

            I could explain every crazy thing I did, saw, and thought, every meaning that had more meaning intertwined and jammed between the meaning’s meaning. But there were two events that really had main importance. The feeling of being accepted by God and being God, and the breaking of a window.

            The seeds acted pretty quickly, as I started to shamble through town shirtless and scary looking, with a skull necklace hanging down to my hairy chest. I was very strong in these days, I worked out constantly and dabbled in fighting sports, learning them long when growing up.

            And there was a feeling… outside of me, that was the feeling of everything, everywhere, always. I looked up at it, and then I became it. I was this omnipotent, omniscient feeling, and it was amazing, and would last always, but always only lasted for a few seconds in reality.

            I tried to grasp onto this feeling, trying to divine some meaning from it, as the trip continued and meaning overflowed my mind.

            I eventually came to a conclusion, I would change my name and become who I desired not hindered by naming rituals of the past, naming myself Balthazar from a Blue Oyster Cult song (E.T.I.) I was listening to on the trip, and that the truth was always a lie. A very confusing notion, because if the truth is a lie, then where does the reality of anything lie? It ended up to be whatever the first thought was in my head.

            I stared at the window of a shop. I always kind of wanted to break a window by punching one, and I thought since the truth was a lie, then I would smash this window like the truth, with my own fist.

            Smash.

            It was actually very easy, and satisfying too, but I knew I should run, as the glass scattered the ground and my fist bled. I bled through the streets, trying to go home and then warn my close friend of the truth.

            I heard my sister scream as she saw me shamble up to the house, my fist bloody, dripping to the pavement, drenched on my shorts. My dad immediately came up to me inside the house and washed my fist with a wet rag.

            I saw cops come down the road, and I thought they would do something horrible. I ran out the backdoor, and basically ran to my friend’s house. I had to warn him of the truth, something like a genie, don’t open the bottle. He and his girlfriend weren’t home, and I sat at the back as the local children stared at me, I believing I was like Cain, cursed on Earth.

            An ambulance and cops came by, and got me into the back. I believe I lied stating I was so depressed and angry because I broke up with my girlfriend, who I didn’t have. I don’t remember what happened next, only being in the hospital and allowing the nurse to stitch up my hand. “No drugs!!” I stated, when she said she could give me something to numb the pain. I didn’t even really feel the stitches, probably from blood loss and adrenalin still coursing. She stitched it pretty well, and it would leave a scar that lasted to this day on me, probably will until I die.

            I went back home with my parents, the bells of the church stating it was ten o’clock as the thunder boomed. I got back to my puked in room, colored pencils scattered everywhere from also drawing on my walls from the trip, and wrote the lasting revelation on my wall, “The truth is a lie.” Then I fell into my bed, falling asleep instantly.

            3.

            Time passed. Not very much time. I was still a tad touched by insanity after that whole trip, and still believed there was nothing to believe in anywhere. I had been messaging this one girl, becoming obsessed with infatuation over her, and she wouldn’t text back after a while, which only cemented my obsession more. She’s a fond friend to me nowadays, as I tried to reckon with the past and found out she wasn’t so bad.

            But, then, I only wondered what was so wrong with me that she would not message back. She had seen the messages (a bad habit of opening the messages and not reading them) but would not answer. I thought something must be deeply wrong with me, to repulse people so much.

            I came to the wrong conclusion that something must’ve happened to me as I was younger, that I was somehow “marked” by an event, which I thought then to be abuse by my father. None of the horrible things I envisioned happened, and I think I only used him as a scapegoat for my hate, even though we had been increasingly estranged from each other as I fell further into the pits of insanity and despair.

            I came home after a walk, pale at the thoughts running through my mind, and went to my father sleeping in his bed. I wanted to scream and shout, accusing him and asking him why, which I partially did. I woke him up, and after he got up, I punched him in the face. I was still calling myself Balthazar at the time, and shouted and screamed horrible things as my dad tried to subdue me, and my crying siblings soon came in trying to subdue me as well. I only pushed myself up from under them, stronger than all of them, laughing.

            My mom had called the cops to defuse the situation, and they came in and my dad and I froze from our fighting, my dad trying to pin me on the bed.

            Wish I could paste songs into my writing, instead of just telling them as I do. I’m right now listening to another Blue Oyster Cult song, the Siege and Investiture of Baron von Frankenstein’s Castle at Weisseria, and I can only make up my own lyrics as I listen to the powerful guest singer, “Drunk by the name of BAL THA ZAR.”

            As you can see, I am now very relaxed as I write about this day, which I can only compare it as the worst day of my life. Perhaps I am just trying to delay what comes next.

             The cops took me outside, as I spit all around the “horrid” place I lived at. I thanked them, but instead of defusing the situation calmly and peacefully, they arrested me, claiming, “No, you’re going to jail.”

            I was flustered and angry, and tried to get into the cop car, but they threw me back down onto the ground, later claiming I was trying to push against the cop car. I was only trying to get into the fucking car!!

            The cop who held me down as I started screaming and shouting again I blame as an agent of my folly, and no protector of the peace or noble soul. He saw someone he thought was mad and deranged, and he intended to put him away. There was some sort of changing of the shifts before I was arrested, and it perhaps caused some sort of confusion, but still I blame that cop, who appears later in my story again. I learned from my eldest younger brother, far later in my life, they even taunted him as he was walking around town, claiming that I was going to stay locked up, as he felt sad about the whole thing. My brother, who was only two years younger than me, was very bold and even went up to me as I was on the ground, saying, “Nobody likes cops, but nobody likes it when you do these things either.”

            They hauled me away in an ambulance, strapped down and handcuffed, and tried to drug test me in the hospital as I was strapped to the stretcher, expecting me to piss in a cup with the cop and doctor watching. Just held by them cup against my penis, and expected to go.

            Eventually they gave me some privacy, but I believed they would try to poison the results, and filled the cup with water, which worked. There were no drugs in my system anyway, so it was only a very minor thing to happen.

            Then, as I was taken back to the cop car, I saw a neighbor kid from my block walk past, who is now dead by a heroine overdose. I claimed, “They just love arresting me!” to him, which he laughed at. I was taken to jail intake, and I could not understand what was happening or why it was. I resisted, in a peacefulish way, and then was put in a small box room to cooldown.

            I immediately pissed in the small grate, and roamed around the room in a circle, shouting and roaring.

            I was soon taken to a cell, with one way mirrors on the door so they could watch me. Those stupid mirrors don’t work. You can see through them if you put any sort of shadow over them, like from your arm. I shouted and taunted the workers right in front of me, and they just ignored me, either used to this sort of thing or believing they couldn’t be seen. I think I got to a few of them in my time there.

            Three days I was in that cell, not eating the food and only drinking tap water because I thought the food was poisoned, until my family posted bail for me.

            4.

            I was picked up at the dead of night. I rather would prefer to skip over some of these events, as it would take a long time to tell and only really had importance to me at the time, so I will keep it brief. I jumped out of my mother’s car and ran down the street, as they stopped at a traffic light. I had shouted to my mother, “Don’t you see?!” thinking she was only seeing the lies and not the truth, especially with glasses on which I believed to be “obstructing” her vision.

            I spent the night hiding under someone’s porch in the county’s main city. In the morning I wandered around, eating flowers. A lady cop stopped and asked me if I was ok, saying it looked like I fell. I had certainly fallen from my ways, but not literally fallen. She drove past as I told her I was alright. Eventually I got to the train tracks, thinking I could go east and go back to my hometown, or go north. I went north, thinking I’d go to Canada. I asked for water from a house I passed next to, and the person gave me a cup of water, which I thanked them for. After, for so long walking barefoot on the railroad tracks, I stopped to rest by a tree opposite someone’s house, a cop picked me up.

            I was traded off to my mother, which the cop didn’t ask many questions to and my mother acting calm and cool, and was taken back home. Her and my youngest brother were driving around all night screaming out for me.

            I eventually was fit with a GPS bracelet, probably even more out of my mind after all that happened, and cut the bracelet after my friend came to visit, exactly after he gave me a knife he picked up as a gift. He was shocked, of course, and I began my escape.

            With only my dad’s guitar and my friend eventually leaving, after following me a good ways, I escaped down through the marshes of Wisconsin and trying to get to my drug dealer friend’s house so he could help me. It was a long walk, barefoot with a guitar, but I eventually got there. His dad offered me some old shoes of his, and they felt comfortable.

            After we did some things, visited some of his friends and went to his girlfriend’s house, she also now dead by an overdose, him and his girlfriend took me back to my hometown the next day. I assured them it would be ok if they dropped me off at my friend’s house, so they did.

            I knocked on my friend’s door, he opened, and said, “Why are you here? Go home.” Then he shut the door.

            I knocked a little longer, but sighed and played some of my crazy guitar that really I didn’t even know how to play, and then went to walk home.

            But that same cop drove up to me and began putting on these plastic gloves. I told him I just wanted to go home! And I continued walking, guitar over my shoulder. I had thrown the knife after I had seen him approaching, and he retrieved it and also charged me with carrying a concealed weapon, with my previous charge of assaulting an officer (spitting… Not even trying directly at him, but changed in his report) and now felony bail jumping.

            A different cop, a sergeant, stopped me in my path, and the other cop arrested me. I had to beg him not to leave my dad’s guitar on the side of the road, so he took it with him. The guitar had been vandalized by myself, scratched with the word “Death,” and had wild string ends coming out of it, as I constantly replaced them from breaking the strings from playing so hard.

            I was taken to jail again, with a much higher bail, and would stay there for around six months.

            5.

            Jail is… it’s just awful, especially if you’re not used to it. The food is bad, there’s not enough of it, and you’re constantly trying to fight for yourself, in any way possible, with the damnation of the courts ever at your neck. The people aren’t always very friendly, and I got into some harsh verbal fights there. I was still very strong, and continued to work out in jail, as that was what kept the cobwebs out of my head. I was nuts when going in, even more insane, but I sort of gradually lost my insanity, along with my smoking habit. The smoking habit I picked up again outside of jail, bored. I always will thank my grandma and my youngest brother for talking with me on the phone in my time there, always having to punch in my long, memorized jail ID and waiting for the jail exchange on the phone to be finished.

            It was a tough time, and perhaps you can find the exact details of those events in some of my other works. But I won’t get into them right now. Six months is a long time, especially in jail, waiting for the clock to change hours and my hour to begin, just so I could take a shower and call my family. The rest of my family wasn’t very happy to receive me, but my grandma and my youngest brother always obliged. I learned to say my prayers in jail, as my grandma told me to. I only got books around the end of my time there, but there is nothing so good as books in jail, no matter the subject. I enjoyed the cooking book I had traded two of my breakfasts for. The writer, who I don’t exactly remember who is, stated that stolen food always tastes better, and I remember that I do agree with her on that.

            Eventually, my bail was posted, a $5000 bail, and was taken home by my dad and grandma. I was so happy to see the sun, blinding me outside, which most of the time in jail was unavailable to us prisoners. Actually, only in the detention place, the hold, I saw the sunlight through windows. Strange, that, giving me what I desired only after I was more accidentally than purposefully brought to that place.

            I loved the sound of the radio, jazz players and reggae music, Bob Marley singing Iron Lion Zion. I loved the homemade peanut butter sandwiches my dad and grandma gave me to eat, so good, with an apple as well. Better than anything I ever ate in jail.

            I was brought by my dad to a psychiatric hospital, and after I explained I was a vegetarian again, they said I didn’t need to be there. I went home, seeing a sculpture one of my brothers made of a wooden man put together by logs, and I hugged everybody, so happy I was with the people I loved. I went to my cleaned room, not even any crazy drawings on the painted walls anymore, and went to bed where my mom’s cat, Paws, was sitting on.

            A long time passed, as I and my family fought for my case. My dad got a lawyer which even more money was sucked up by, but without her I would’ve been sent to a hospital for the criminally insane, to be there until I was 25 or longer. I was still only 18 at the time.

            Three years passed, as I tried to woo and persuade my case managers to my side. One was very easy, the actual probation officer who was very easy to get along with, the other was not, the mood and more psychiatric probation officer, who I think just didn’t like me, perhaps because I was a “criminal.” She was actually the one to deny me going to Stout University, as she stated my case couldn’t leave the county.

            Eventually, though, trying to be the absolute kindest I could and following their rules, the psychiatric case manager approved, after three years of gut wrenching court and probation, saying with the rest that I could be let off the leash, and be freed. The opposing side, the state, did not accept this, but the judge said I had been under probation for long enough, under court mandated therapy, and also said I could be done. That therapist I had to see… He was such a good guy. We just bullshitted most of the time, and he allowed my trauma to show its head when I felt like it. Went on to be an army therapist, as he had also served in the military.

            The only time I really broke the rules was when I smoked marijuana with my friend that I reconnected with, after my eldest younger brother had tried to kill himself. We watched Cheech and Chong. I was smart, and knew when they would drug test me, so it was never found.

            The entire, grueling, three year long case was summed up to be “drug induced psychosis,” and my crimes were wiped cleaned from me. I felt so good, I felt golden. I hugged my family and my lawyer, and I went home with my family a free man.

            6.

            I had a little bit of drama at my friend’s wedding, who was marrying his girlfriend who actually called the cops on me at their front door way back when. She hit me after I was slightly rude, I blocked the next and accidentally hit her back with a raised arm in defense, and I went home as she threatened to call the cops on me… again. We had all been drinking, and they were stoned, but after that hit I desired not to fight anymore, and ruin this freedom that I had. I skipped the wedding, who I was a groomsman for.

            We later, my friend and I, reconnected again. I was always surprisingly good at reconnecting with old friends. I later went to Europe with my youngest brother, and we had a good time.

            I was working at a grocery store, trying to get my life back on track after it went to so much shit, and I enjoyed the job despite the boss starting out paying me less than what I deserved, minimum wage like a teen, until that was straightened out. I thought it was sort of a good sanctuary, and thought I performed the job well.

            But I will never work at another grocery store, after the hellish trauma I was put through there.

            I had been dabbling with writing again, and made this whole story with all my trauma jam packed into it. I, under the name of Balthazar once again, served demons in a bar, all the bad thoughts and trauma, and tried to befriend them instead of chase them away. It was surprisingly therapeutic. But then… I desired a more firm companion than my human headed dog, Barcough, and thought I could add someone from my work into the story who I kinda liked.

            The story, Balthazar’s Bar or The Land of Doubt, progressed, and you can find it on my blog, drugsjailandschizophrenia.home.blog. I went on a dark adventure with her and later far into the pits of insanity. Even the Lich, under the name of Evil, appeared again, an omen that further suffering awaited.

            And then later, I felt an itchy anticipation under my skin, as I listened to the last Dio album, Magica. I played a bit of my crazy guitar… and went out for a walk.

            Then, like a wham to the brain, I heard her speak to me in the night. Another voice as well, who I now intensely hate as he has been constantly harassing me for a little over five years since I started hearing voices. I believed, again, I found the hidden nature of truth and thought the entire world must be like this, and that I was just now somehow let in on the grand secret. That these people truly were speaking to me in my head. Telepathy. A horrible belief that has horrible consequences.

            More, and more, and more voices, some with origins impossible, spoke to me constantly. There was no sleep. Only voices. I sent pieces of that writing, jumbled together and the wrong parts, to this woman I worked with. I heard a distinct voice say, that one voice, “He sent it!” but I shrugged it off, thinking it unimportant.

            The once pleasant grocery store turned out to be actual Hell. I quit, before the woman called the cops on me, them finding no reason to arrest me but passing on that I was banned from the store. I just thought so much horror and evil was everywhere, especially in that grocery store, because of voices which told me so and that I believed. I had made accusations to the woman that she was having sex with our boss, and that’s probably the main reason she called the cops on me.

            It was so much horror, and I can’t even remember every little thing that happened. I believe this is called repression. I went into a psychiatric hospital three times, trying to understand and get help for whatever in Hell was happening to me. I was diagnosed with schizophrenia by a nurse practitioner I was seeing, and she gave me some pills she thought could help. “It sounds like schizophrenia.” she said, as I told her I could hear voices telling me to kill myself. The pills made everything worse, and I tried to kill myself with razor slashes because of that.

            I was so paranoid, because the voices told me that something just out of reach and horrible was happening. I constantly asked my mother to help me deny a paranoid thought, and she did for a few minutes, until I had to ask her again. All of this, telepathy, religion, and even more darkness and dark thoughts, enhanced by voices I could hear, sometimes in sounds around me, like a bird calling out in its tweet, “You’re scary.” but also seeming to come from inside my head. Literal, auditory sounds.

            I had more hallucinations, sometimes the feeling of people touching me, visions in the dark, sometimes smells or tastes which were intrusive, or sometimes even that the voices were pushing a form on me that was not mine, and not only auditory but auditory being by far the most common. I’d lay in bed, with my green lava lamp and fan on for protection, trying to sleep as voices mocked me, taunted me, hated me, and told me to kill myself. Only once, on Easter, did I hear Jesus’s muffled voice in the fan tell them off, all of them, in angry hatred of them.

            I screamed and shouted at them in anger at times, roaring, and insulting them with every hateful thought I knew. This actually helped a lot, because I could not punch them nor walk away from them. Only respond in angry hatred, or use wit and humor to fight them. It is very difficult to use wit against something which is already in your head, absolutely no thought private, but like they could surprise me with what they said, I could use the brief millisecond to respond and attack back with my words.

            It hasn’t stopped, this sort of horror, and it has pushed me into a more hermitish life, despite trying to survive and even trying to make a life in Europe with my eldest younger brother, specifically Holland. I found a few meds, through constant trial and error with docs, help a lot, but it still isn’t very easy. If I am off the meds I have a psychotic relapse, with the hallucinations and new dissociations even stronger. I write this, as behind me in the next room over someone just called out my name, but I knowing I’m in the house alone.

            That is the current story so far. I found, after that first writing story that drove me to insanity and thinking I’d never write again, that writing is a great and therapeutic outlet. I can fight my demons, battle my problems and find solutions to them. I can befriend enemies, or cast down and imprison evil. It’s an adventure, a wonderful time sink, that I briefly and prolifically go on. I meet so many awesome people, who somehow originate from inside me. Saviors, like Yule, firm and lasting loves, like Jane, a brother that I never thought to be, like Matt. And all the beautiful rest, starting out my self publishing with Lucy and Lucy’s Looking Glass.

            I found my religion again, even in the darkest abyss of psychotic relapse, with Jesus and my dead friends and relatives by my side, directly there as dissociations and hallucinations, always beside me and always will be. I let out tears for them, and cannot stop the flow. I only wish to continue to remember them, and continue to spend time with my living friends and family.

            I continue, and I’ll continue to be writing, having a grand story of a vampire hunter coming out soon, Hunter Wolf, and working on the sequel. Thank you for your time reading this condensed nonfiction account of my own life. I wish that you also find some relief to horror and trauma, and can continue as well.

Have a good day.