The Legend of the Persistent Fool
Meet the Persistent Fool. She tells us about some of the misadventures that brought her to be and where she plans to take us in the future. Fun or scary, she plans to take us deep inside her experience. If you make it out, you might have a little better understanding of the human condition.
I am the Persistent Fool. I took this moniker, both self-effacing and bragging, from a proverb in William Blake’s The Marriage Between Heaven and Hell: “If the fool would persist in [her] folly, [she] would become wise.” The Boyfriend, the great love of my young life, introduced me to Blake, saying, “This guy reminds me of you. Like, you may be him incarnate,” and tossed a well-worn paperback into my hands. And while he said it with some reverence, he didn’t mean it entirely as a compliment. As I read him, I agreed that Blake was a delirious, self-indulgent manic-depressive who assailed listeners with his prophetic visions. A creature after my own heart.
To the heartache of those who love me, against their advice, against all odds, oblivious or indifferent to signs of turning back or impending obstacles, I skip gayly, stagger blindly, or even sometimes scratch and crawl with spiteful determination down this path that others disdainfully refer to as “the hard way.” I cling to the battered trophies of my relentless wandering; I polish and display on my mantle the hard-won lessons I have wrought. Like the fool, I have the optimism of an amnesiac but the mental and physical grit of a hardened soldier. And I have travelled all this way, dear reader, to tell you about my misadventures and the bittersweet fruits they have yielded in wisdom and resilience, in grief and righteous indignation, in deep awe and gratitude, and in hearty freedom, laughter, and joy.
I was born to young parents, drug-addled and immature, in a poor, working-class suburb of a major Midwestern city in the 80’s. I am the oldest of two girls, and I felt a great responsibility and care for my younger sister, although my actions routinely betrayed this. She excelled, unlike me, at responsibility and stability, so sometimes I feel I am ‘big sister’ in title only. My parents loved us, continue to love us: my mother sacrificially, and my father in whatever way sates his sick, selfish fear. We didn’t have much money, but we never wanted for food, shelter, electricity, school clothes, birthday parties, etc. Despite this, the irreconcilable contradiction is that we were horribly abused.
My parents were daily drinkers, often to the point of blackout, and then transforming into monsters, leaving my sister and I to fend for ourselves and to ensure their safety as well. And for now, I will just say that that wasn’t even the worst of it. My point in telling you this, as I describe how The Persistent Fool came to be, is that I wasn’t entirely aware that we were being abused. Not as I was growing up, nor for many years after as I struggled to succeed as an adult and was utterly baffled and ashamed that I could not. The dilemma of my childhood is that I was also raised Baptist by my strict grandmother, and across the breadth of my family tree were wholesome, salt-of-the-earth people with strong moral values. Moreover, I was devout in my religious practice, guided by a deep and abiding faith. If you had asked me then if there were something wrong, I would’ve said only with me.
The memories that lingered from my childhood were not of the abuse, and it’s only now after many years of deliberate, conscious recovery that I see how the abuse was related to what I do remember. What I remember are the panic attacks that seized me as I tried to sleep at night and my consciousness drifted into outer space, feeling like astral projection. As I arrived in the vast abyss of outer space, I would begin to hyperventilate and sit bolt upright in bed. I remember deep, sure disembodied voices talking over people, drowning them out. I listened as a voice described what the person in front of me was thinking and what was truly going on between and around us. I went into devotional each night, read my Bible, and held contemplative prayer, and I channeled the voices of the angels and prophets in the book who would very casually reveal to me the metaphysical truths encoded in the parable. Nonchalantly, they would send me visions of the journey and fate of the prophets, and I would be hurled into another panic attack, as I saw them become pariahs, burned, and hanged.
I used to see images, almost kaleidoscopic around the top of a person’s head and all down their sides, that would tell me the structure of their psyche, the lies they told themselves and where they hid the truth in the corridors of their mind. On the wall beside my bed, as I tried to drown out the intoxicated carrying on of my parents in the living room, I imagined a portal and stepped through it. On the other side there were these creatures, celestial beings they claimed. I asked if they were figments of my imagination, and they assured me that in the dimension in which they were real there was hardly any difference between what humans can imagine and what actually exists. I was about 8, I think, when they told me this.
In this realm, I was myself, but as a human who could cross this threshold I was treated as a princess, and they confirmed for me what I long suspected: that I had come to Earth with a mighty charge and a divine mission. I began to see these entities, which I eventually named The Eleven, as the gatekeepers and divine interpreters of this mission. They spoke only in riddles and answered questions with questions. Only in my adulthood, I realized they might have been simply reflections of the gaslighting and invalidation I experienced in my environment, where my sister and I languished in states of chronic toxic stress and soldiered on through atrocious neglect and abuse while zero of the adults in our lives acknowledged it all. All along, The Eleven might have been teasing and cajoling me into believing in myself, claiming my mission, declaring it to them instead of constantly begging them to reveal it. “What do you think it is?” they would say in saccharine tones with wry smiles. In my childhood, they were a source of great comfort and insight, but in my 20’s they became instead a source of endless torment, confusion, and shame.
It was at this time that I channeled, or perhaps hallucinated the channeling of a book, a manual, in a satirical way, for the answer it purports, and spoiler alert, is that one must trust ultimately in their own experience and the wisdom it provides. The Eleven gave me the theme and the structure of the book in my 20’s when I was strung out on drugs, in and out of psychosis, and couch-hopping or living in my van. I ravenously attempted at that time to write these pages, but sadly I was incoherent and unsuccessful. They told me that this story, this message, wouldn’t be for me to speak until I was ready. It’s now more than 15 years of recovery later that I’m trying to put it down on the page in some meaningful, cogent way. I still don’t feel up to the task, and I realize as I look back on the nights, in the apartment I shared with The Boyfriend, punk rock music blaring, surrounded by scrawled-on, strewn-about papers, filled ashtrays, empty pipes and beer bottles, nerves completely raw and sizzling, where I sat tensely, feverishly trying to transcribe a conversation with my many sadistic imaginary friends, as The Boyfriend sat in helpless disgust in the living room pretending not to overhear…
I realize that they might have just been fucking with me. I was begging for an assignment. And they gave me one. They said, you’re going to bring into the world What to Do About Crazy.
And they gave me the chapter titles and subheadings, worded like instructions, the themes all having to do with the blurry line between psychosis and real psychic ability, and marching orders to fill the chapters with my own haphazard narrative. They gave me a blueprint and a skeleton, upon which I could hang my pounds of flesh, out of which I could construct my own container. Now I think, even if they were fucking with me, it’s a great idea. I think it could be of value to others if I let it. If I don’t let my egotistical self-doubt and loathing completely sabotage it.
I still have that blueprint, gifted to me from harbingers of the Divine. When I speak with the Eleven in the stories, or any of the dozens of nonexistent beings I spoke with, dear reader, I will use italics in the writing to signal to you to take that grain of salt in hand. It is also necessary as I twist-tie muscle and flesh to the bones of this assignment, to write about non-events. These could be fantasies, hallucinations, flashbacks, or speculation about what could’ve happened during chunks of lost time. For that I will set the non-event apart with a double indentation. And again, you can know then to suspend belief if you want.
A final consideration is about the author herself: Am I a girl with trauma, mental health problems, and drug addiction? Am I a woman who is spiritually descended from a long line of prophets, born with psychic powers, who can and shall reveal the Reality behind that which we perceive? Am I some mocking satirist weaving complete fiction as a practical joke only to make you question your every assumption and leave you with no better philosophies or touchstones?
Why couldn’t I be all three? My identification with each of these states shifts routinely, where for a time I herald one as the ultimate truth and I vilify the others as delusion or fraud. None of them can be entirely expunged. But I certainly wouldn’t argue with you if you dispute that any one or all of them are real. And you won’t be wrong, no matter what you decide. Regardless, I will persist in my folly, and I will continue to tell the tales. And hopefully, you, dear reader, can find a bit of wisdom in it.
