Sometimes I'm a Satanist. Usually on Thursdays. But only at Night.

SANCTE Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio, contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae caelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute, in infernum detrude. Amen.

Here is my story....a current piece of it. It might be the end of my story.

Many years ago after a failed attempt at college due to what I now know was my first depressive episode, I got tired of being a waiter and decided to return to school and become the great musician I was destined to be. I arrived at this pseudo-ivy league college with a world famous music school to study saxophone hopped up on antidepressants to assuage my depression and anxiety. Those antidepressants were about to set ablaze a wildfire of destruction that would transform the rest of my life.

You see....I'm bipolar. We didn't know. Bipolar disorder+antidepressants=mania. My grades at the end of that semester were all failing. I had been launched into a manic psychosis, and one of the consequences of this is an insatiable sex drive. The opportunities to act this desire out with another person were not available to me for a number of reasons, and one day I picked up a copy of The Village Voice and on the back pages were listings for gay adult phone lines.

I called. I was addicted instantly. I was a sex addict. Eventually, after flunking out of school I returned home and was treated for my bipolar disorder and it abated quickly. I was treated with a drug called Tegretol and became stable. I worked as a waiter for a time, I gave up drinking, I returned to school to study culinary arts and restaurant management and I was happy. All the time my sex addiction raged on.

At the beginning my behavior, consisting entirely of phone sex and solitary behaviors, was very "vanilla". That only works for so long. Tolerance. Time to increase the dose. So my fantasy life became more and more colorful...exotic....taboo....shocking. There was an escalation of the darkness of my fantasies over a period of about fifteen years.

While I was in culinary school, being extremely successful I might add, and very happy for what would be the last period of happiness in my life thus far, I was avoiding intimacy with real live people. Small town, small college, lots of homophobia, fear for my safety....you get the picture. So I continued to engage in my phone sex behaviors.

I spent thousands of dollars on my phone sex addiction. I stole credit cards from my parents and rang them up to satisfy my addiction. They never took legal action against me, they just let me continue and paid the bills while screaming at me to stop. I begged them to help me pay for a psychologist. That, they refused to pay for. I pointed out that if the behavior could be arrested thru therapy the whole family would benefit. They disdained psychiatrists and psychologists. They were afraid, and I quote, that I would go to therapy and "talk about them". So I never got the help I needed.

I was about to finish my culinary degree when I was hit with my next manic episode. This was particularly bad and I also suffered from psychosis during the course of this episode. This time hospitalization would be required. I went to a community hospital psych ward with woefully under qualified doctors as I could afford nothing better. I had no insurance and was put on drugs based on cost rather than effectiveness. I returned home sick, a failure, despondent. It was at that point in my life that I made the decision to cease living. I gave up.

I was home with my parents with no job, my education failed and done, suicidally depressed. My sex addiction took on new dimensions at this point. It was all I had in life. It became my life. The only time I felt good or felt at all or felt anything other than suicidal was when I was acting out my addiction. I continued to use mom and dad's money without asking (some people call that stealing) and I could have cared less if I went to jail. I could have cared less if I died. I don't know what stopped me from killing myself that year after my hospitalization as I woke up every morning and my first thought was always, without exception, "I want to be dead".

One year later....hospitalization number two. My psychiatrist, in front of me, told my mom and dad that people as sick and I were the people you see eating out of garbage pails on the street. He was a real gem. The only up side of the second hospitalization was that I was able to get Medicaid, SSI and SSD. Now I could afford the more cutting edge medications. I was placed on Risperdal, Tegretol and Prozac. I was normal in a matter of days. The moment that I would return to work I would lose Medicaid and not be able to afford the drugs. I was still stuck. I would never get unstuck.

I went to a community mental health clinic. When I told the doctors about my sex addiction they told me I knew more than them about the subject. I had therapy session with counselors who's only concern was that I had food to eat and a place to sleep. No therapy available. No one wanted to listen and no one cared. There were hundreds of poor patients who needed help and I was functional enough that they couldn't concern themselves with me. My addiction raged on.


This is the point in the story where you imagine what life is like for a mentally ill, sex addicted person who gets essentially no treatment whatsoever. No imagine this going on for years.

continued in the next post....finding God.