This essay was originally written while I was an English major in college, and it was published by Foliate Oak Literary Magazine. I have made it available here. You can also find a narrated version on my YouTube channel.

There isn’t a place quite like one’s home church. It had been a while since I was last home, and I was glad to be. The pastor’s wife had sent me to the children’s room, for those aged three to five, to retrieve some cleaning supplies.

Walking over those laminate-wood floors with the smell of freshly painted drywall was so nostalgic, the whites and blues brilliantly etching into my retinas, the brass door knob sliding coldly into my warm hand, the door pushing away to…

Reveal the comfortable carpet and tiny plastic tables for children. The room was filled with decorations that hadn’t been there before, wood stands with picture books on them, paintings of dogs and flowers on the walls, a television…

Attached at one end, and hanging in the middle of one wall was a cute little-

Noose. How carefully those threads were woven, strands intertwined and knotted up so perfectly, looped appropriately small. How odd, how horrible, how fitting, to get rid of little devils so cleanly. That noose was empty for the moment, but

a moment later I could see that I was in it. Limp, cold, grey, hanging like a piñata for the children, all of them dancing around me, laughing and giggling and shouting, grabbing for the attention of my dead eyes. Then… silence. No color.

Just me, hanging, no one else. They’d find my body in a few minutes, deafened by silence, blinded by death.

Oh! That’s not a noose, it’s for a tire swing! Silly me.

Don’t listen to the meshuggener, nonsense will contaminate every thought seeping through the spaghetti maze in your skull. Fear psychosis, it will animate and give life to the neurosis in your nerves. Schizophrenic.

What does this mean? Is it all in the mind? The Greeks had many philosophers with many differing philosophies on the mind and soul, yet all of their philosophy did not solve the problems of psychology. Psyche. Psukhē.

It was common philosophy of pre-Socratic Greeks that soul and mind were one and the same. Modern thought might disagree, but that philosophy permeates the name of the field. What is called “study of the mind” is actually “study of the soul.”

If soul and mind are synonymous, then each fragment of consciousness splits the mind as many times as skhizein psukhē. Phrēn now fiend, not friend any longer. Do separate pieces of the same soul have separate destinations in the afterlife?

Black is red and night is dead, bathe the head in color stars bled. If one finds others of kind, hide the mind, keep the soul blind. Cry into the silence, no one sees the violence that creeps past darkened eyelids.

Alone but not.

Even in the careful crafting of this voiceless shout, words take shape into whispers and screams. Why is there no in-between? Perhaps because the visions and the voices are both terrifying and comforting.

To the common ear, these words are meshugaas, crazy talk, nonsense. People fear what they don’t understand. We fear the meshuggener, who is just as fearful of others, but even more afraid of the self.

Who can be trusted when the mind itself can’t be trusted? Yet this also brings comfort; Anything that is horrifyingly detestable can be attributed to fiction: rejection, competition, contradiction, affliction.

“You are the failed child. You are a disappointment to your parents and your entire family. You are a sickness, a darkness, a disease. You are the reason your friends attempted suicide. You are the reason your sister left.”

“You are the burden, the problem, the demon in everyone else’s lives.”

Could it be that demons haunt the troubled soul, or is it that the troubled soul is a demon in disguise? Would the demon know itself or would it be too twisted to recognize its own identity? Unless psychology is a misnomer…

Divide soul and mind, as some later philosophers would suggest, and come to a different problem: how does schizophrenia divide with them? It’s not so easy to quantify.

What if it’s all just in your head, in my head? The soul is merely a deceptive construct of the voices meant to distract from the real problem. It’s just you, me, there is something wrong with us that cannot be fixed.

My friend came running at me, ecstatic that I had shown up. He had such a silly grin on his face. I realized he was so happy because of the dead puppies he carried by the collar in each hand. They were so cute.

The puppies had pale, golden hair that looked soft enough to have been put on a plush toy. I imagine they probably felt like plush toys, soft, lifeless, limp, cold… black eyes glossing like black beads, ears flopping every way.

“Hannah, do you see…” My voice trailed off because what once appeared to be two dead puppies now revealed themselves to be a pair of sandals.

“I thought for sure I had seen him carrying dead puppies.”

Emotions go haywire when you don’t know what should happen and the unexpected always happens. It’s easy to become calloused to others and react in the wrong way to the wrong situation. It’s easy to hate yourself, myself.

It’s hard not to know yourself, or maybe to know yourself too well. There isn’t a single easy answer. Maybe there is. The easy answer is that it’s all in my head.

But…

I am not a solipsist. I am a meshuggener.