A Story of a Madwoman - Nov 2021

A Story of a Madwoman, elsewhere titled “The Black Hole Journal”, is a biographical account of my experience of mental illness, written in 2021.

the original cover image using an original painting

Introduction

I am a human being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Life and reality takes twists and turns for me. So much so, that sometimes all I can say is that I don’t know what’s real. All I can do is live in the moment, and talk from experience. My experience is limited to only my own interpretation and recollection. Thus, although I write as honestly as I can, this is may be seen as fiction as much as fact. Many of the things I will say will come across as mad. I proclaim madness, but at the same times, I proclaim sanity. 

A Story of a Madwoman

When I was in my early twenties I went on a road trip with my Dad, just me and him. We talked of philosophies and spirituality in the car, and many other things. We listened to some beautiful classical piano music, which I have never been able to remember the name of or find again. It had bright and colourful melodies. I took photos on that trip, but I was too careless to keep them safe, and I have lost them. I remember one photo vividly. Of my Dad standing in front of the ocean, a calm smile on his face, his hands in his pockets and the wind blowing his silvery hair over his forehead. We travelled up beside the ocean from Sydney to the Sunshine Coast. We stayed at Seal Rocks, in a caravan park overnight. The overall theme of the conversation of that road trip was a discussion about the nature of reality. I, an atheist at the time, had been raging against religion after reading part of a book called ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins. I had denounced god and had, as I vaguely remember, rudely ridiculed spirituality on a few occasions. For him as a spiritual man, this needed to be talked about. This is what we did on the trip. He gently asked a lot of questions about my beliefs and feelings and discussed my answers with me. Toward the end of the trip, he asked ‘So, do you think you have any type of spirituality at all?’, and I said my love for animals and respect for the intelligence and mystery of ourselves and life around us could amount to a type of spirituality. He seemed satisfied with that response. 

He would meditate every morning and paint almost every day until nightfall. He described his paintings as ‘mindscapes’ or ‘inner landscapes’. They are epic compositions. When I was 16 I chose to leave my home with my Mum and other siblings to live with my Dad and his girlfriend at the time. I was a very defiant and lazy teenager. I didn’t do much to help around the place. There was a little while during that time in which he had me painting canvases to start him off. I never liked what I painted for him, but he always gave it the ok and told me it would change anyway. One day I was doodling on a scrap of paper in the living room and the paper was left there. He came to me with the drawing in his hand and said ‘You should be an artist’. I said to him the only reason he likes my paintings and doodles is because he is biased because he is my Dad. He was very offended. The idea was brought up a few more times but each time I was stubborn and rude. So, we stopped painting together, and he stopped encouraging me. 

I became a waitress and started playing some guitar and writing songs as an artistic outlet. One night at one of his art exhibitions, he introduced me to a woman and told her that I was a singer-songwriter. I said ‘No, I’m not.’ Again, quite rudely. I said this because I thought if I wasn’t performing, recording or essentially making money from this art form, then I was not worthy of the label ‘singer-songwriter’. I identified more as a waitress, because that was what made me money. For him, what we create is the most important things about us. For me, I didn’t place value on it. How sad that is. I’m afraid I hurt my father. But he was very patient and forgiving. 

I then went to university in my mid 20s to study Environmental Science. I was a very awkward and shy student. My grades were ok. I remember studying physics, in which I discovered the double slit experiment, which shows how the observer affects reality by simply observing. And maths in which I discovered calculus, the study of continuous change. All the subjects I studied in science changed my understanding of the nature of reality. But something happened very horrible. My Dad passed away suddenly. His heart was weak, and he had been overcome by a plume of smoke from a fire in the bush around his house. I remember going to see his dead body. He was placed just out of reach. He had scratches on his face. His feet were all cut up, as if he’d been running barefoot on broken glass. As if he’d been running and falling through the bush blindly. I was told he had a hose with him when he was found, but it was not connected to the water. I try not to imagine what happened too often. All I know is he was caught off guard by this fire, and was wanting to extinguish it. It was decided we would scatter his ashes by the tree in the bush where he fell. I later thought that was a terrible place to scatter them, the place where he had suffered and died. 

I tried to continue with university, but after a few weeks couldn’t hold it together. I dropped out and decided to properly become a visual artist for the first time in my life. The act of making abstract art made me feel closer to my Dad. I would do sketches and paintings exploring colour and shape and in my mind, would have conversations with him about various things I was doing. It may have been the start of my mental illness. After a while of focusing on art like this, I felt aliens calling me to Wedderburn, the place he used to live and work. I had been thinking of the nature of the universe and of aliens a lot at that time. Aliens had always been an interest of mine. I have a memory as a child, after watching E.T, of promising to the sky if they ever presented themselves to me, I would love them and I would try to help them. I did this because something in me knew that life (even distant life) isn’t by nature aggressive. However, I had never felt contacted by them before this. It was like a sudden emotional attachment to entities I didn’t know. I didn’t know what they looked like or anything, except for the fact they are sweet creatures and they had something to show me in Wedderburn. 

Once I moved to Wedderburn, life became very strange. Because it is an isolated place in bushland, I was alone all the time, with my own thoughts, with my memories of my Dad. When I was born, he had started building this large house for us all to live in as a happy family. When he ended up alone he continued building. It was a life-long project and to this day of writing, the house still isn’t completely finished. It’s too large for one person. 

When I moved to Wedderburn as a 16 year old, because I was so lazy, my Dad suggested I do a training course in bush regeneration. It was a course called Green Corps led by the government, and I would be paid and trained at the same time. I agreed. In the course, I learnt to eliminate species of plants from a bush area so only native plants would remain. We used a poison call Round Up, which I have heard is a terrible poison lasting a long time in the soil and bad for all the ecosystem. The course ended in 6 months and I struggled to find work in the field afterward. 

Now in my mid-twenties, in Wedderburn and grieving, I looked around the bush and saw noxious weeds everywhere. Using what I’d learnt so long ago in the course, I set out on a mission to eliminate all the weeds around the garden and house. I wanted only native and ornamental plants in the garden. Particularly, I was focusing on eradicating the species Ahrharta Erecta, a grass, and Bidens Pilosa, a herb. I was pulling them out, making huge piles, then burning the plants in a large metal incinerator I had made. 

One day while on my knees pulling weeds, I heard a strong voice in my head. “You are the reincarnation of Hitler” I looked up and saw the trees moving in the wind. All the nature around me accusing me of wrong. I asked “why?”. I stopped what I was doing and sat quietly and listened. I was Hitler because I was discriminating against some types of plants, and seeking to eradicate them. I was mindlessly killing these plants. I felt very ashamed. Using the internet, I found that Bidens Pilosa is actually edible and medicinal. I also found that weeds serve the purpose to replenish soil and stop erosion. Thus, I let the weeds grow again untouched. 

Around that time, I became interested in photography of the stars. I had bought a new camera and was photographing stars using a tripod, then zooming in as much as my camera would allow to see a star up close. The results were these strange organic shapes, with interesting colours. I was fascinated by these images. 

One night while on the balcony photographing, I saw a bright yellow star getting bigger and bigger. I didn’t photograph it for some reason. Perhaps I thought it would be a rude introduction to myself. I thought of it as a conscious light.  I said “Hello” and it continued to get bigger, until it stopped. It’s hard for me to remember exactly how far away it was as it hung there in the sky silently. I got the feeling it was looking at me. I stared back at it and then tried to make conversation with it in my head, but then it zoomed off to the right and curved upward in the sky until I could no longer see it. 

The darkness at night in Wedderburn is profound. The place is defined by moonlight because there are no streetlights or outside lighting at all. At times I would stare out into the darkness and see shapes and glinting lights which I thought were aliens. I would look out at them and wait. I imagined them shooting information into my head. After doing this one night, I went to bed and tried to sleep. Soon I heard what I thought was something landing on the roof. A loud clumsy crash of something hard landing on the corrugated metal. I lay still, very quiet and listened. As I listened to all the noises of the bush from my bedroom I started to imagine something talking to me. “Would you be scared if I showed myself?”  

I said “yes”, so it said “Well I won’t”.  And so after a while I fell asleep and had a dream. There was a glowing light outside, so I went downstairs to the front door. I stood at the door and waited to be invited outside. Then my memory of the dream goes blank.

The next day I walked out to the places where the lights glinted and found reflective surfaces of various kinds, where the moon must have reflected. But this didn’t convince me I was just imagining things. 

After this I believed I was an alien myself. I believed whoever they were, they seeded me with information, which my mind would reveal at different times, through my intuition. There was one night where I was absolutely sure that there was a meteorite or spaceship moving close to earth and if I wanted my soul to go back to my ancient Mother, I had a small window of time to kill myself to release my soul. I stayed in bed and didn’t move, afraid of what I would do. But I cried with such passion, missing my ancient Mother who I knew only by the feeling of divinity, perhaps a feeling I once experienced as a baby. 

I started to see Urine as a magical substance which communicates information. I reasoned it is because it comes from our blood, it is full of information we don’t even know of yet. But trees, animals and aliens know how to read urine, I thought. So, I would pee around trees to communicate with nature. Once I made a trip into the city to communicate with the dogs there by peeing on streets and places where dogs would be walked. I had listened to dogs barking intently and was quite sure they had very important things to say to each other. By this time I had also taken on the mission to save the world by starting a revolution. I believed Dogs would play an important part in this revolution somehow. My urine was signal to them that the revolution had started. Around this time, one of my sisters Gabby was openly worrying about me. She had called me a number of times during my trip to the city and asked me where I was. I had told her but then moved somewhere else. She eventually found me around the streets of Annandale and brought me back to her home, where her flatmate showed me a picture of a Buddha who is always frowning. “It’s because he is trying to figure out the nature of the universe and save the world at the same time.” We agreed. During this time, I was developing large wrinkles between my eyebrows, from my constant frowning and deep thought. It was evidence to me I was on the right path. 

I just wanted to be alone at this point, but people started hassling me. Out at Wedderburn, Gabby and my friend Alia would visit sometimes to check on me. I became quite annoyed at how uncomfortable they had become around me, and wished they would leave me alone. But one night they arrived to visit and I was at the peak of psychosis. I was preparing myself to die, because I had got a telepathic message that I would. I needed to be in pitch darkness so that my soul wouldn’t be taken by the electric lights or some reason like that. Gabby and Alia arrived and switched the lights on. I became hysterical. I told them I was going to die and they must leave me alone in the dark. Naturally they didn’t. Instead they called an ambulance without my knowledge. I ran outside with my blanket, them running behind me. I collapsed. I felt my breathing get faster, I was having a panic attack. I covered myself with the blanket so I was in darkness. Then, at the peak of my panic attack, I felt and saw what I understood to be a blackhole enveloping me and running me through it’s length. Then it was over and I had died, but I was alive. Soon after, the ambulance arrived and the paramedics questioned me. I said “I went into a black hole”. I was taken to a mental ward. 

Inside the mental ward, I felt like the woman with the orange hair from The Fifth Element. Recently awoken and everything alien to me. I was very suspicious of the medication they wanted to give me. I was of the opinion that these doctors had me captured because of my mission, and that they were trying to control what I was doing. I was very secretive inside the hospital, and I acted as an undercover agent, but constantly felt like I was being watched. There was a chess board inside the mental ward. Because I identified with the colour black so much, I took all the white pieces and lent them in my window, upside down with soap in them. I was then put into the high security area for observation. 

I saw myself as a type of Jesus. I also believed there were many other Jesuses out there, and that in this revolution, everyone would eventually become a Jesus. I see people with mental illness as often the people going through the heights of their spiritual journeys, people who need to be listened to. So, in hospital, I found some kin. Rebellious people, people who take risks, and have deep spiritual sides, people on the edges of their sanities. Even so, I was miserable in hospital. Eventually I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and let out. My Mum had arrived to care for me by then, so she took me back to Wedderburn and we stayed there together for some time. 

Eventually I was off the rails again, and felt pulled into a war of spirits. I had been taken over by the spirit of Yoko Ono and was talking in a strange way, which was scaring my mother. It was as if I were a baby again, or had only just learnt English. I was convinced there was a spirit which had overtaken the house. My mum had a friend over and they both watched terrified as I took a metal pole and threw it down the hallway and into the living room where they stood to spear the spirit in the guts. My mother was very patient, and didn’t call the ambulance. Instead she left the house and I was alone again. 

That night after my mum had left, I felt that I must make signal fires for the spirits and as portals for souls yet to die. These fires were to start the revolution. It was also a marriage, but I won’t go into that. I lit five fires. One by the dam for the frog spirits, and the spirit of my Ex-boyfriend Ollie in which I burnt both of our artworks. One fire on top of the huge cement water tank for the Pleadians in which I burn a lot of rusty metal and a lot of my posessions such as fine clothes and shoes. One fire inside the house to draw out a spirit hiding in there. One fire on the roof next to the balcony for my sister Mirabai, in which I burnt a diary of hers. One fire beside the house on the driveway for the art world, and all my fathers friends, in which I burnt my artworks, art magazines, postcards, a chessboard, and jewellery. I remember putting the chessboard in the fire. As it burnt, the checkered paper top peeled off and went floating through the air and I watched it, the sky as its backdrop, ascending.  “Aah yes,” I thought to myself “A game. A duel of the arts!” 

At this time I was also on the internet constantly as well. Facebook in particular. I was posting images such as memes and diagrams with song titles or comments on the feed every few minutes for hours at a time. I believed it was part of the signalling of the revolution. I posted so much so that someone told me that I ‘broke facebook’ and many people messaged me to ask if I was ok. I was telling people it was performance art when they asked what I was doing. I think a lot of people unfollowed me at that point. But I don’t believe my posts were particularly offensive. It was all very playful, subtle and noncerebral kind of stuff. Such as an image of a blind mole coming out of the ground and my comment saying “The all-seeing thing is here”. Or an image of mathematical diagrams of heart shapes, and my comment saying “which direction is the line in the heart travelling, or is it both directions at once?”. These were intending to try to make people think. But the idea was more than that. I perceived my chain of posts on my wall as genetic material. And that the sequence I would post in would be like a magical key to unlocking minds and algorithms. I was aiming for the other Jesuses. All the fallen angels. Because I believed it was time for the Js to be awakened. I call them Js because they are hooks of the divine. Attached to string like puppets. It’s not for me to say who they are. All are undercover agents. All good is mixed with some bad. The revolution was to be a peaceful one, in which all people slowly become enlightened. I believed I myself was becoming enlightened and I wanted it for everyone else. But I wasn’t able to really make any sense. 

I was put back into the mental ward after my mum arrived home and found the fires still smouldering. I remember waiting in the emergency ward for a room in the mental ward. I waited overnight in a bed there. There were women in labour and other people audibly in pain around me who I couldn’t see, only hear. I felt as if I was in a type of hell. There was a man who sat at the foot of my bed who was tapping a pen. He was on his computer facing me. I believed he was an important spiritual leader there to test me for something. He was putting ideas in my head, then measuring how I emotionally reacted to them. This went on all night. There was no talking, it was all telepathic. Eventually I began to protest in a very strange way. I got naked while still under the blankets and started tucking the blanket underneath me while in the child’s pose of yoga.  I stayed like this, just a lump of blanket for a long time. Then finally I jumped out of the blanket, naked, and stood before the man. It was to show him my true self and to show him I don’t hide. Immediately, many people circled me and someone covered me with a blanket. 

This time I was forced to take medication. When I had refused for the last time, a number of nurses held me down and injected me with sedatives. After that I realised there was no fighting these people. I was in the hospital for a lot longer this time. I occupied myself by drawing and writing poetry in a book my Mum had brought me and talking to other patients. 

Some patients were lovely. I met one man who was really like a boy. He talked almost like in rap, with a rhythm, and was very sweet and gentle. Sometimes he would give me hugs. One woman had scratches on her face. I asked “what happened?” She said she had a fight with herself. I brought her cigarettes a few times, hidden in a gum packet. Cigarettes was what everyone wanted while in the ward. Almost all the patients are smokers. Hospital is just life in waiting for your next smoke. Sometimes we were allowed to step outside the ward and smoke. I would go to the drains and exhale my smoke down into the darkness. I believed smoke had some magical properties, and that I could communicate with creatures and spirits in the drain. The smoke was to report my movements and correspondences with other Jesuses in the ward to the spirits, who waited for word. 

This time in Wedderburn I hardly interacted with the real world. I spent most of my time playing computer games. I was also following the Julian Assange story in the news. I didn’t think it was right for him to be bullied by the governments of U.S and U.K. I thought he was a hero for exposing war crimes. I began to think Julian Assange was behind the game Cicada 3301, a strange game on the internet. While attempting to play this game I found messages which I thought were from him to me. I don’t particularly remember what they said, but they made me feel a longing for home, the way I felt when the meteorite was close. I was of the opinion he and I were entangled somehow. At this time, he was under house arrest so was still able to access the internet. I felt it was plausible that he was trying to contact me and other Js through this game. 

I started putting more posts up on facebook, thinking perhaps Js were seeking me, or that other Js need to find eachother, or something like that. Eventually someone found me through facebook and said “I found you, what do I do now? My girlfriend is jealous.” I said “I don’t know, go back to your girlfriend.”. Some other person found me, who I thought of as multiple people sharing a computer. They asked what I wanted. I said “We need the union between C and D”. I was aware it had multiple meanings but knew it would mean the right things to them. It was like telling them to tune a guitar properly. I believed my contact with these people were a crucial part of the revolution. By this time, my family and people around me had become aware I was going through an episode. As I was having this conversation, I was pulled off the computer and given a talking to. 

Around this time I had stayed up all night working out some maths to do with a pyramid. 

 The next day I went to my Dad’s tree with some of my family. I said I could see aliens in the tree bark. I was then sent back to the mental ward. 

My goal in hospital each time I entered was to convince the doctors and nurses I was sane. But I always saw myself as a spy within the hospital. I didn’t speak of my beliefs nor my ambitions to anyone. Sometimes I would drop clues. But now I had become very secretive. It was clear to me that being a J, you risk ill treatment and prosecution. People are scared of Js. 

When I got out of hospital, I searched for the history of the messages sent between me and these people, but found they weren’t there. I figured they had been deleted. The Cicada 3301 game was over. I felt as if I had been on a really long slippery slide, and had experienced that peak excitement point where I had reached the last of the slide and was propelled through the air, made to fly, just before plopping on the ground and hurting my bum. By now my diagnoses had changed from schizophrenia to schizoaffective disorder. I experience mania, depression and psychosis. Each time I have psychosis, it is manic. It feels like flying. As if I’m invincible. Often when I have been brought down, I swing low into a depression. It is just how it goes. I was put on a community treatment order with forced medication.

Eventually I decided to study at the National Art School in Darlinghurst. I particularly loved a course called ‘a history of the ecology of Sydney’. For this course I read a book called Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. It impacted my thinking greatly. Its about the cultivation techniques and land management of First Nation cultures of Australia. This was around the time of the BLM protests. I felt there was an explosion of power from First Nations of Australia. I dreamed of a world where we listened to First Nations ways of land management and community.

 All was going well at NAS up until the end of second year. In my work coming up to assessment, I had become obsessed with ‘getting out of the rectangle or grid’. There was a while where I would only paint on shapes which were not rectangle. All the rectangle painting supports, I was mutilating. I was cutting their corners off and then sticking them together into non-rectangular forms. Many of these works looked like stars. To me the rectangle symbolised a cage of regularity and normality. We seemed to me to all be pushed into this shape. Through screens, through buildings, through windows, even art. The rectangle was too much of a polite, space-efficient shape. 

Then I painted the walls of my NAS studio black and created the left and right hemisphere of the universe on two lazy suzans. I made two intersections of severed stone snakes (Inspired by Xu Zhen’s hello), and a large ring attached to the wall, inside of which were drawings of floating brains. This was all to create an atmosphere of creepiness. I wanted to send shivers down the spines of people who saw it. It was also a declaration that the dark spirits had arrived. But I didn’t get to finish this collection of artworks for final assessment. I became too busy doing what I thought was negotiating with spirits and saving a copy of planet earth.

It was now Uni holidays and I believed I came from a black hole and that my sole purpose was to aid negotiation. I had an interest in arranging objects together in certain ways, as if I were about to draw or paint them, but I would never. They would be objects like watering cans, stationary, shoes or clothes, bowls. I would choose them for their colours, shapes and meanings and would arrange them so my spirits were happy. Usually they were somewhere outside in the bush. I would just leave them for days. This was how things were negotiated with the spirits. I imagined random animals and people would come across them who would be important parts of the negotiation. After a time of leaving the arrangements, I would feel a shift in energy and so new stages of negotiation would open. But I don’t remember the details of exactly what I was negotiating. I remember there was a particular struggle between spirits about whether humans should want guns.

The arrangements of objects were also used as energy filters for the colour spirits. When I made arrangements like these, I would take photos on my phone with an app called ‘1998 Cam’, which would sometimes show coloured light flares. I took these photos as evidence of the colour spirits moving through the objects.  

I thought the colour spirits came from the rainbow serpent. They had exploded to life in my Wedderburn studio as I squirted ink and hand painted over the walls. It was as if the colours were spiritual characters who had been waiting to have paths drawn for them. With each splash I would see something symbolic. Each gesture of my hand would make something like a figure. Each line I made would intersect with another line and it would be a meeting between two colours. For me these were important meetings that would shape the world. On my studio walls there ended up being a multi-verse worm, Shiva, a genie-portal, a praying mantis god, a portal to the art god, and hell as a filter of souls. But to the regular person, it looked more like a bunch of splashes and smears.

I became very interested in insects, particularly the ant-lion, which makes little craters in the sand. I imagined that as well as using these structures to catch ants, they are probably little satellites, picking up on cosmic information. There was a colony of ant-lions living next to my greenhouse. One day I found a little arrangement, which I thought they had made for me to find. It was a black bead, a white bead, a white feather, a piece of fly screen and a small pc of paper with the letter G all sitting as if they’d been placed intentionally amongst the ant-lion craters. I believed this was communication. I interpreted the black and white bead as symbolising the dark and light extremes, or the players of the chessboard. The feather was a peace symbol. The flyscreen symbolised the grid, related to the rectangle. And G meant the Gods. I believed the meaning of this arrangement was to tell me the gods of light and the gods of darkness were now engaged in a friendly duel. I took this as confirmation my efforts to negotiate were working. I took an old pc of flyscreen and poked a large hole through it and placed it next to the ant-lions. It was to symbolise a hole in space time, so they may escape the grid and become multidimensional. 

I was hardly sleeping or eating at this time, but my mind was racing a hundred miles an hour and I had a lot of energy. At the end of these negotiations, it was decided by all the spirits and aliens involved that earth was too over run by greed and mistrust to be fully safe. A copy of earth had to be saved and sent to the black hole. So, I made more fires. In the fires I burnt more artworks as well as some electronic devices, such as my bluetooth speakers. While the fires blazed, I chanted ‘White queen go to black hell’ over and over again. It was to declare my move in the imagined game. As I chanted this louder and louder, one of my sisters tried to stop me. She had someone from the mental health unit on the phone and was trying to give me the phone to talk. I responded by smashing some ceramic mugs of the ground and continuing to chant. But I knew my time was running out. An ambulance would come soon to take me. I had to act fast. I went to the fire and lent over it, feeling its warmth. From the fire came an entity, which clung to me like a koala. It was the copied Earth. I ran into the bush, with the entity draped over me. In the bush I searched for the correct tree. I then hugged the tree and imagined the entity climbing upwards into the branches. Then I imagined the entity being shot from the tree with great force, into space. The tree knew where to shoot. The earth was now saved. Eventually I heard the ambulance arriving on the track to the house. Since my work was done, I went to meet them and willingly left to go to hospital. 

Sometimes I still have thoughts and experiences like this. They come and go. All these events I have recounted are no more real to me than dreams, like any memory. I believe it all happened, but of course it was all in my mind. That doesn’t make it any less or more real than the rest of life. For me all life is like a dream. I want to sum this story up with a grand insight, but I have none. All I wanted from writing this was to try to understand myself and my illness. And to be understood to whatever degree people are able to understand. The real revolution of this story was that of my mind. But it’s not the end. Revolutions of the mind and world continue now and always will, whether we like it or not.