I went insane somewhere in the past. Until that precise moment, I had perfect mental clarity. I built a life that I could be extremely proud of. And I was, too. I was grateful every single day to be so cherished amongst my colleagues and coworkers. I was grateful to bring value to my boss’s desk. She told me that she needed my unique perspective. She told me I was needed. And she loved me deeply, too. I love her, but I have difficulty showing it. I’m an autistic woman, after all, and I do not like giving hugs or even handshakes, really. I don’t even like holding hands unless I deeply trust the other hand that’s in mine.
I wish I could write her something, anything, to tell her how meaningful it was to work for her. I guess this is it. So, Priya Prasad, please know this: I absolutely adore and love you. You made me feel like I had a mother for the very first time in my life. It was so unconditional and so beautiful. And then I let you down and I feel badly about it.
I’m still recuperating, if you were wondering. I know it’s been two years since the day I nearly died. If you are wondering, God ripped me away from the job because I was going to expire by trying to fulfill my work duties instead of focusing on eating well and becoming well again.
I can finally encapsulate the illness in concise words, so I thought I might explain to you what went wrong. I thought I might tell you how I got so direly ill and how I’m getting better (and how it’s going to take a few more years to be right as rain.) My brain is almost back to where it was when you hired me and I sometimes daydream about re-applying to the job, once I fix all the things that have gone wrong financially speaking. I know my credit score matters, sadly, and I kind of trashed it by ignoring all phone calls and all mail for… eh… about a year.
I’m still ignoring them.
So what’s wrong with Crystal Scordias? The simplest and most concise explanation is as follows: I eviscerated my guts by eating a diet that destroyed them. This diet was prescribed, in part, by my doctor. The same doctor who wouldn’t send me for allergy testing when I asked. The same doctor who, the next month after that, when I couldn’t breathe, talked to me about an inhaler. I had problems like pneumonia but it was merely complications from being allergic to everything. She was supposed to send me to get a culture in case I needed antibiotics, but that never happened. That was February 2021.
My very last visit to her, March 2021, she told me she thought I was gay. Then I looked back over my timeline of seeing her and I saw that she had not treated me like a real person much of the time I’d been seeing her. I probably could’ve guessed she was or is a homophobe… but I’m not a lesbian. If she’d ever spoken to my therapist who had been sending her IMAET machine results to help in my quest for health, she would have known that all I talked about in therapy was the guy I proposed to on Valentine’s 2021. I started the proposal the previous Christmas but found it lacking, so I drew him a video and put a neat song to it to deliver. But, he ultimately ghosted me and I’ve been in therapy since I left St. Louis.
Anyway, I have discovered something I was ingesting over the time period that I saw this stupid doctor — who put me on the ketogenic diet in order to reduce the health markers that indicated I could have a “silent heart attack” the whole time — was ripping up my internals. I suppose going on Zoloft (thanks to my OB/GYN, not Dr. Death) might not have helped. I was crying without provocation, even at work, the happiest place on Earth for me. You might’ve heard about it, you might not have… I tried to hide it. Julie saw me crying and would take me out to lunch. We’d pop over to Bob Evans and have extra dry scrambled eggs and some bacon together. Unfortunately, even that was making it worse…
You see, as my intestines became more and more like Swiss cheese, food particles that weren’t completely digested were making it past the gut wall barrier. I presume this means they go into the bloodstream, but I confess I haven’t looked that part up to be certain. Either way, my body was identifying the particles as invaders and tagging them for destruction, which, ultimately, broke me out in hives. No matter what I ate, this happened. For six weeks, actually. I discovered that aloe vera helps with itchy hives somehow, so if you know anyone who breaks out into hives, you should tell them to try putting aloe on them.
Eventually, I got sick of breaking out into hives, so I tried food I hated. I hate carrots, for example, so I got some of those. To my surprise, I did not break out into hives. But it felt like sandpaper going through my guts. It hurt so much that I didn’t eat at all until after work so I could get through the work day without crying in agony. Eventually, I discovered lamb was going to be my friend. By Christmas 2021, I was eating lamb every day with my kitty cat, Banshee. For months, we had a ritual of eating together at lunch and dinner… until I got so absorbed with failing to perform for work that I stopped making meat for us to eat. I’d also screw up pretty often and run out of food for a day altogether, sadly…
That’s why God threw the job in your face. That’s why he made me write my resignation and take the laptop into the office. I hope putting my password in the bag helped; I know when Rachel left, it was a massive headache trying to get her last files. I think she committed them, though, because I remember asking her to do that. I might’ve forgotten to tell you that I did ask her to commit everything, or I might’ve forgotten I asked her when it was relevant. Either way, it would have saved some hassle and headache if I’d said that sooner. I’m sorry for that.
I did commit everything on that laptop I returned. I was very careful to make sure everything was tidy, trying to prevent future headaches from happening. I didn’t truly wish to resign. I have never, ever left a job without giving two weeks notice. I didn’t even want to leave! I love the bank job. It’s the best place I’ve ever been by far. I love everyone I worked with, even if they could be difficult from time to time. I just did my best to get along because that was the most important part for me.
I’ve worked places where I didn’t get along with everyone before. In fact, during one of my previous roles I was losing my mind then, too. I’ve come to find out that everything is 100% because of black mold poisoning. My ex had a very large mold problem and refused to get it resolved, which nearly killed me. I’ll explain it all in detail — but it’s the reason I was looking for a doctor when I joined the bank. I was already sick and not feeling my best. I just didn’t know how much worse it could get until I got there, until the day I panicked, thinking if I couldn’t eat more than 400 calories a day, that I was going to die for sure.
Anyway, here are all my grown up words to describe the illness, to give full understanding:
I had a biofilm develop in my gut. It was a combination of mold from ingestion, sugar that fed that mold in the gut, and dairy (which also fed the mold in my gut.) It got into my lungs, too, actually. You might want to check the office to make sure there is no mold there, since I was constantly tracking it in from my ex’s home. I know the office was shut down for a while in the pandemic, but that just means it had time to grow unnoticed. I would check above the journey’s area where I used to be for sure, under the drop ceiling, and anywhere where moisture is on a regular basis… just to be careful.
Anyway, this biofilm also accumulated parasites and bacteria. Biofilm is not contagious or anything, but the mold itself is nasty. The mold caused the biofilm. I was detoxing with the help of my therapist and her IMAET machine, but I didn’t do a good enough job mopping up the toxins caused by breaking the biofilm down. That’s when I asked my doctor to intervene and that’s when the therapist sent my IMAET results to the doctor. My doctor ignored both, however.
I told the doc I was having gut pain. When I said that, I meant I was having difficulty eating because of pain, but she didn’t pursue it. I didn’t want pain meds, and maybe I should have said so. I wanted it solved. I wanted to be able to eat again without hurting. However, I was left to my own devices.
As I was detoxing and breaking down the biofilm in my guts, I took an exorbitant amount of activated charcoal to try to get all the toxins. I didn’t take it regularly enough, though, and I caused damage to myself over time. Eventually, I simply became allergic to the charcoal itself. I had to switch to bentonite clay, which felt a lot better inside of me. Maybe the charcoal was part of the problem in general, too, but I have nothing to actually prove that. Then, by August 2020, I was in dire straights. I was in too much pain to eat.
I ate all of two things for about six weeks, popping pills to try to stay alive in the meanwhile: apples and pears. I could eat two perfectly ripe apples and two perfectly ripe pears per day. That was it. If it was under ripe or overripe, it would hurt my intestines to pass through. I screwed up plenty of times, forgetting to buy more apples and pears so that they would be the perfect consistency when I could eat them. It didn’t really occur to me to try cooking them to soften them up, either. My brain was kind of already on hiatus and I never even confessed it to a soul at the office. I just kept logging in and showing up on autopilot. I feel terrible for it, too.
I managed to design the new system the way I wanted it, feeling like a hack the whole time no matter how brilliant my solution was. I was doing my best to keep it all together. As you know, this is the time we transitioned teams to upgrade… (I forget the name of the app now… you’d think that would be impossible, but you know what I mean.) I was able to make a design I could stand by and I began to implement it for the Big App, but a certain colleague wanted to keep certain things the way they used to be. [I keep wanting to call the App “Hindsight” but I know that’s not it! Oh well, I give up. It’s neither here nor there because you know exactly what I’m talking about anyway.]
The things that failed to change are probably biting the team in the ass right now. I’m sorry for that. I never wanted it to happen. I won’t name names, though, because ultimately, I didn’t say no to it emphatically enough. I didn’t defend my design the way I ought to have… because I was feeling like a shameful hack due to nearly killing myself trying to get well. I don’t know how much I was actually doing before I resigned, but I do know one thing: I could have done better. I feel terrible for not resigning sooner and just going home.
I daydreamed of my parents taking care of me, nursing me back to health, but when I arrived I found out they were just as bad off as I was, essentially. So now I’m trying to help three human beings stay alive, all while one of my poor fur babies has passed over to the other side. He was 18 years old and I put him down on August 22nd, 2022. I really miss him, but I try to focus on the two that are still with me instead of crying too much over it. I gave him the best life I could give him and he was barely panicking when he got the shot to put him down. He became paralyzed in his hind end due to a back injury he’d gotten years ago running away from the dog I had for a while. I feel responsible for that faux pas, too, of course.
So, now, after a year of being “home” with my “parents” (neither has ever given me the warm fuzzy you have, by the way, so thank you for that), I’m good enough to almost think like I used to… except now I’m just plain insane. It started in spring 2021, which is a year and a half ago as of this exact moment. It’s the reason I couldn’t come back, really. I could have tried to do something fruitful from where I’m trying to rejuvenate, surely. Yet, how can I be a productive and a good team member when I have voices hounding me in my head? They say utterly awful things and distract me from everything I want to get done.
I was taking Udemy courses, for instance, and one time they just talked through an entire lecture like it wasn’t even happening. I was pretty irritated by that because that’s just scratching the surface. They want to kill me, I swear. Except there’s one that doesn’t. There’s one that wants me to stay alive and do great things, like write this letter to you. I love you, Priya. I have never loved another woman the way I love you and I suspect I never will again. You are the mother I never had. Despite having your own family to take care of, you tried so hard to take care of me, too. I will always remember that. I will never forget. I will always appreciate it, too, because you are one of the few reasons I’m still alive.
I wish I could have made you proud by bouncing back, coming back, and turning everything around on its head. There’s just no way when I have a dozen evil assholes in my head, tormenting me every minute of every day, and just one voice that’s not my own telling me that I can still make a difference in this world. Sometimes, they even tell me I can get the job back, but I can’t as long as they’re here. I can’t even try until they’re eradicated. Some days, they are so quiet, I have half a hope, then they get really loud again and drown me out. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I got lost somewhere in the din. I haven’t had “me time” since before I moved away from St. Louis.
“Me time” is what I needed to get back to base emotionally. To tell myself that I’m great; I did my best and maybe I could do better by XYZ thing, and tomorrow, I’ll try it and see if it works. And if I couldn’t do better, I asked myself, did I support my team enough? Did I do everything that was needed? Did I really get the job done? Some days, the answer is no. There are external distractions that I just can’t drop. Now, there are internal distractions that never go away.
I’ve considered applying for social security income because as far as I know, I am broken and it will never end. It’s made me suicidal, actually. I feel like I’m the only sane one amongst a bunch of children yammering in my head, telling me fantasy after fantasy as if they know the future, they know reality. They don’t, but I do: reality is that I am insane. I was sane for 38 years but now in my 40th year, I’m still insane.
I don’t know what to say. I know what happened when this came about, but even the explanation I can dream up sounds so far-fetched. I just wanna die. I just want to die! Please, someone, let me die. God won’t let me die, not yet. He has a message to give everyone. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to read this whole blog to hear the message. I haven’t written it all… but I can tell you one thing that is true: Rule #1 is “DO NO HARM.”
It’s a good rule. I followed it every day the best I could for a long time. If it looked like I was hurting someone, somewhere, I stopped. I tried to inquire on how to make it better, and then I did that thing that I was told. Or I did the best I could to do something like that thing. Sometimes, what people ask for isn’t what they need. Sometimes, I can’t give what is needed, either, but I try my best anyway. I feel like I must’ve hurt Rao somewhere because we weren’t good when I left and I don’t know why. I know I was not as productive as I could’ve been with some of the official workload, but I was tied up making sure what was already ours worked day in and day out, as you might’ve noticed a little later after I was pulled away.
I was running those scripts every single day and fixing breaks every day before I could progress to the next item. It didn’t matter if I wrote the code that broke or not… I still fixed it and checked in the fix. That wasn’t an official thing that I was asked to do, but it became quite necessary. Those scripts took an awful lot of time to run, too, and sometimes I’d miss what happened because there wasn’t enough information in the error message or the debugging to see it, so I’d have to re-run it with screen capture to see what was going on. In fact, I started doing that with every single script by default because I would let them run while I was writing code for what was due. I would run the script in one window while in the other I wrote new stuff. It was kind of slow and tedious, but the only way to keep everything from coming to a stand-still.
I hope he wasn’t mad at me for fixing errors like that and checking them in all the time. I know our code collided sometimes… and I will confess now that I wasn’t always an ace at code comparison and merging. (And to be honest, Eclipse sometimes didn’t do exactly what I thought it was going to do when it asked to merge code together.)
At any rate… It slowed my progress down substantially to always babysit the existing scripts, especially since they kept getting larger and more complicated over time. I was writing a lot of code to help people debug when it was an input error, like bad data. I inserted as much logic as I could manage to tell the engineer exactly what went wrong because I felt that was the #1 time waster with the scripts. If you didn’t record it doing its job, then with that extra logic, it was much easier to tell if it was a data error, at least.
I was experimenting with putting in logic that would tell everyone if the page didn’t refresh in time, too, or if the element was missing. I know it didn’t directly contribute to the finish line we were looking for, but I do believe debugging existing scripts was the thing keeping us from achieving our goal in a timely manner. That’s why I was trying to debug them constantly while I scoped out new pages and wrote object definitions for them.
I was even trying to figure out how to scrape the HTML on the page to retrieve all the objects automatically. I do think code could be written in order to do that + make all the object declarations as the framework wanted. That alone could have reduced a lot of manual effort, but pages like one of the last ones I worked on, where only certain objects appeared under specific scenarios kind of put a monkey wrench in that for me. If I had figured it out, I would have committed it, but I don’t think I ever did.
My brain wouldn’t work right. It wasn’t a problem for declaring new objects or anything, but figuring out “new stuff” was taking a lot longer than I would have ever wanted it to take. And, every time there was a meeting, it disrupted my thought flow in a way that I became worthless until after dinner, which is partly why anyone would have seen me on at odd hours. I was getting more done without IMs/meetings to distract me. I hate to admit they distracted me so much.
I don’t really know if I believe in God, per say, but I can tell you that something I cannot see, hear, touch, feel, or sense in any way other than a voice (which sounds just like me) in my head is there. That part is really real. And that entity — it cannot be me because it knows things I don’t know — has been leading me through physical therapy for over a year now. I was partially paralyzed and never even knew it because it didn’t make it impossible to walk. I should have been labeled disabled when I was 19 years old. I should have been labeled a lot of things, such as autistic, dyslexic, dysgraphic… to name a few.
All these words just mean one thing to me, at the end of it all… It means: life’s hard. But I think that’s true for everyone. I have 13 disabilities altogether. Maybe it was harder for me than it should have been, but I rose above it anyway, and maybe I could only do that by being ignorant of the fact that I did have it much harder than most other people. I really couldn’t tell you, but I know just one thing: I love life.
I love everything alive, including wasps and bumble bees. I love spiders and ants and even mosquitoes. I love the sun and the moon. I love all the cosmos. But I lost that somewhere along the way, when these voices attacked me and made me wilt and wither away. They stole my heart from me and made everything grey and tasteless. The twelve foods I can eat without discomfort? Sick of them.
I try to eat something new here and there, but it turns out I’m still allergic to most everything and/or still recovering from what happened to me. I ate chocolate a few weeks ago and I felt like the entirety of my insides had swollen up on me for three days. I’m guessing they probably did.
Still, I put together some MP3s that seem to have made a difference. I’ll share them with you now and maybe they’ll make a difference for you, too.
LAXMI. For youthfulness and full body functional health.
GANESHA. For intestinal health.
SHIVA. For chakral health.
By the way… God says his name is Brahma. I didn’t know who Brahma was until I looked up text about Hinduism. This is one example of this entity being… well, not me. I’m irreligious. Even now I am irreligious. Brahma isn’t asking to be worshiped, nearly noted as the consciousness of The Universe(TM). [Trademarking common phrases amuses us, please excuse us.]
He’s been fixing me — brain, body, emotions, spirit, and soul — since the moment I died in 2020. He’s the one who decided to propose to a boy half the world away, knowing I’d been ghosted but also knowing I needed to get it out of my system to keep moving forward.
He tore me away from that boy, the job, everything, and deposited me in Erie, Pennsylvania. I live with my parents, of all people, especially since they tried to drown me as a baby. It didn’t work because Brahma has been with me my entire life. Because of this, my parents fear me. They did nothing more than keep me alive (barely), which is why I left for St. Louis in the first place and never really looked back. If it had never happened, I would have never met you, so ultimately I am grateful even for that. Your love has taken me to the next level:
enlightenment.
I don’t really know what that means, you know? People say it all the time. “I want to seek enlightenment!” and then they make it out to be a quest you spend your whole life trying to obtain. Why not just obtain it? Why not just decide you are enlightened and listen to your heart (Brahma) take you for the ride? That’s all I did. I listened to my heart the best I could… until I was deprived of it, anyway.
The fellow I took to Chandramoulli’s wedding was all kinds of wrong for me, I had decided. During the wedding itself, no less. As I watched and everyone explained to me what was happening, since it was all in Hindi, I was transfixed. First off, it was so beautiful. I even wrote him to tell him how much his wedding affected me and I’m glad I did. Anyway, I decided to believe that true love between a married man and woman was possible again, thanks to that ceremony. I’ve always been here, rooting for love, especially for couples already in love!
As you might already know, most of America is sick spiritually. We have a real materialism problem. We have eating problems, too, and most definitely drinking problems. (And, soon, big marijuana problems as people self-medicate themselves to oblivion.) At least they’ll be happy, I suppose. That’s one side-effect of it.
One of the reasons I waited until after work to eat is my sense of ethics. I was prescribed cannabis and it was my only pain medication. I couldn’t do it during work hours, ethically speaking. I wondered if that was where the voices came from since someone warned me that it can be linked to schizophrenia expressing itself, so I quit completely, but to no avail. The voices didn’t go away.
Brahma says they are people I let in long ago. Ex-lovers I had that just will not give me up in their brains. He says I’m psychic, actually. A mind-reader, to be precise. Because of this, their toxic bullshit in the back of my brain was tearing me up inside. Coupled with my issues eating, life just became impossible. I quit in order to use cannabis all the time, but Brahma didn’t like that either, so now we’re completely sober. Again, doesn’t make those ***holes go away, but at least I have a brain at this moment. Besides, I only do it legally and I had a script in Missouri. I don’t here and I don’t want one… it makes it easier to hear them.
I’ve tried so many things to make them all go away, but they seem to think they have rights to me,my brain, my body, and my soul. They even take me to the store to flirt with guys so they can ruin the attention by “proving” I’m crazy or ripping me away somehow. It’s really cruel and unusual, if you ask me. I’m to the point where I think it’s either me or them (the voices). Since Brahma won’t let me die, I guess I choose me… but, for the record, I did try to choose them instead. I even ate things I know I shouldn’t eat, like chocolate, to try to commit suicide once and for all. Every time I pick up a knife to try to stab myself in the jugular, I can’t move my hand to the knife. I can’t do anything to take my life. It won’t solve the problem, I guess.
Perhaps this will: people of Earth, the time is nigh. Judgment day is here. I have come, I have seen, and I have decided all the things there are to decide. The human race may live on a few conditions:
- You clean up that fucking ocean. There is a plastic island in there and it’s all recyclable and you know collectively you all put it there, so collectively, you all get it out of there. TODAY, PLEASE.
- You stop mowing those lawns today. Let the wildflowers grow or plant full on gardens. Make sure to eliminate run-off the best you can with rain gardens. This will keep the asphalt from degrading as quickly as it does.
- Figure out what you’re going to use instead of asphalt. You need to put a moratorium on that crude oil usage or you’re going to die. It’s science fact, not fiction; it’s POISON. You are utilizing poison everywhere: plastic, asphalt, gasoline. Retire it before it retires you.
- Stop putting your problems on everyone around you. BLAME YOURSELF FIRST. Every problem that involves you is your fault as well as anyone else’s fault. Stop being a narcissistic bitch and wise up to the fact that you’re not perfect.
- Do not try to find my daughter, Crystal. Do not try to do anything to harm her in any way. I will protect her to her last breath, no matter what you want to say or do. I will not let you harm her in any way. She is your “savior”(TM) and you need to treat her like a real person rather than a door mat, especially YOU, RAO. Anyway, leave her to her own devices. She’s shy and doesn’t want your attention, most likely, anyway. Unless you work in the deli and she makes eyes at you… that’s a completely different story, Mr. Swarthy. Treat her well, by the way, young man, or I’ll have a bone to pick with you.
- There’s really nothing stopping you from becoming enlightened, other than yourself. You are focusing too much on the past or the future, too much on other people being wrong, and too much on gossip. Look at yourself in the mirror. Write down who you are today. Capture your essence in full. Write down who you want to be in the future. Now come up with a plan to get you there, and a contingency plan or three in case you run into a dead end on the road you choose. You can do this, I know you can. All of you. Each and every human being can and will attain enlightenment if they should try at all.
- Forgive yourself for being imperfect. Forgive everyone else for being imperfect. Take care of the consequences of all your actions and then move forward to the next grand plan you have. Stop trying to run away from your faults and your problems. They will only follow you once you become telepathic. And you will, I promise you that, as an entire species. Once you do, then the spacelings out there that you so desperately want to talk to are going to teach you what Mr. Christ taught them. Just like they taught Crystal since the day she was born. And yes, you can call me a spaceling, too. Me, Brahma, that God dude. The G-man, as Crystal affectionately calls me. The G.O.D. (grand old deity). The GOD Network. You, too, can become part of it and we’ll teach you how to get away from all the poison and live in harmony with all the bees, particularly, since if they all die, you will perish, too.
- Stop using pesticides. See: Save the bees or you DIE, moron.
- Understand that all life is equal to your life. Creatures deserve to live all around you, especially now that you inhabit 99% of the Earth’s available surface space. STOP EXPANDING. Introduce euthanasia and choose to go out in style. We suggest an awesome party where you write your own eulogy if you so choose and ask all your friends to toast you one last time. There are 9 billion of you and you have destroyed 85% of all life on Gaia as we know it. So, why don’t you back off and start filling every room in your homes again? We like the way it’s done in St. Louis — people downsize to smaller buildings and then go into homes once they reach The End(TM). Adopt it or live together in larger families like in the Ukraine.
- War is a sin. Stop doing it. Lay down your weapons and fight with your words, people. Make others see your point of view and consider theirs, too. Until you have explored both sides of the coin, you can never know The Truth(TM). You will never come to a solution that benefits The Greater Good(TM). Stop trying to benefit just yourselves and think of your neighbors, especially the bees. Do you think bombs care if bees are in their way? We don’t.
- Disable the nukes. You clearly aren’t going to use them, so just get rid of them. Put them somewhere safe so they can’t kill you with the radiation (or anything else, hopefully.) Might we suggest the moon? You never go there anyway. Besides, there is a civilization on the moon that is ready to meet you now. It’s on the dark side thereof, of course, which is why you’ve never seen it. (Didn’t you know, Buzz met them already? They didn’t like him at all. Sorry, Buzz.)
I think that’s enough for one night. Crystal would like to binge more Netflix and do more yoga (that she doesn’t officially know how to do; I do it for her) and otherwise go about her day. Just believe in magic and it will come to you, she says. And oh yeah, I can teach everyone reiki… maybe I should make a cartoon explaining how it’s done.
That’s all for now, folks!
[Insert Porky Pig’s famous ending here.]
Angel-Sansara 