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At meetings I’ve heard people say proudly that they have no original thoughts, that everything they say they learned in meetings or from reading the Big Book. Wouldn’t that be nice? I have so many original thoughts I have to take medication for it.

Somewhere in there my psychiatrist made a house call. He was very comforting and reassuring. I told him that I was very afraid and didn’t know if I could make it through the night. He said everything was going to be okay and left me with a roll of one-milligram Ativan pills and told me to take one if I got nervous. I think there were forty pills in the roll. I called him again in the morning and told him I was nervous again. He seemed surprised when I told him that all the little white pills were gone, and he thought maybe I shouldn’t go to work.

“Maybe I should go to another one of those meetings?”

I went in and out of being okay and would try to reassure everyone. Don’t worry, I get it now. I’m really going to be all right. But people were less and less reassured.

I was utterly cooked. I prayed a very simple prayer: “God help me.”

And something answered: “Okay.”

Which I took as divine reassurance that things would work themselves out. I didn’t take my cousin Jim’s suggestion that maybe I should go to a hospital all that seriously. I had God’s word that everything was going to be just fine. Maybe I’d go to a hospital once I had things figured out a little better—I didn’t want to confuse people. I didn’t want to be overdramatizing my situation and taking up a space in a hospital that might be needed by someone who really had a problem.

Miracles are no one’s fault, I’d think, and I’d be unable to stop laughing.

When the voices came back it was like they’d never gone. Fourteen and a half years, and it was like we picked up in the middle of a conversation that had been interrupted just a few minutes earlier.

Having music and art speak to you and move you to your core is a beautiful, beautiful thing, but whenever it happens I can’t help worrying that the voices and too much meaning are lurking around this bend or the next or the next.

“Testing testing testing. Mark, can you hear me? Mark, come in. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, I can hear you.”

“Thank God, we were afraid we had lost you. Don’t worry, everything is going to be okay now.”

“Could you please get someone else? I’ve served my time and am much too old for this crap. Can’t you let me be sort of normal for a while? Fifteen years ago I did a hell of a job standing up for righteousness, but it damn near killed me and took me a long time to get over. I just think you could find someone else.”

“You’re the best, Mark.”

I always assume that if I’m hearing voices, everyone is hearing voices. It’s not hearing voices that’s the problem. The problems come when you try to do something about the voices or mention them to others.

What made the police wrap me up in a straightjacket and sheet and take me to the hospital was an utterly sincere, full-force attempt to dive through a closed third-floor window. Without a moment to waste doubting, I had to run as hard as I could and do my very best to jump through the glass, or I would know forever that I had failed and at least one of my sons would die. I tried to jump through the closed window to prove that I was capable of faith and worth saving and not just a selfish little shit. Luckily most of the glass and sash went out and down into the bushes and I bounced back into the room.

God Himself had told me everything was going to be all right. My version of “all right” did not include chatting with the voices and being chucked back into a psych hospital. I was so quickly in tatters, what was the good of all that overachievement? It should have taken longer for my proud crust of wellness to be so utterly gone.

I had no argument with the police wrapping me up in a straightjacket and taking me to the hospital. I had tried to jump through a window and was acting in an