Читать книгу Unf*ck Yourself, Unf*ck the World - Kagiso Msimango - Страница 12

As I buckled down to solve my Adrenal Fatigue problem, I came across what seemed to be an insurmountable challenge. I discovered that there was nothing the medical fraternity could offer me as a cure. There were all sorts of pills and potions on offer to manage the symptoms, but apparently only my adrenals were in charge of deciding when to “switch” back on.

Adrenal Fatigue has various stages. In the beginning, your adrenal glands overproduce adrenaline, cortisol and other stress hormones. If this goes on for too long then they do the opposite and cut off production. I am not entirely sure if that is why it is called Adrenal Fatigue, but that helped me understand it. I imagined that my adrenal glands were fatigued, basically sick and tired of my constant demands, and so now, lacking the energy-boosting adrenaline, I was fatigued. So I was sick and tired, because my adrenals were sick and tired of me. Imagine that you had a dealer with a conscience – I am sure they exist – and you go to him to buy crack on special occasions. After a while you start showing up once a week, then you start coming every other day, and eventually you are knocking at his door several times a day. He realises that, based on your rate of consumption, you are liable to kill yourself so he cuts you off. Similar principle.

I have always fancied myself as a problem-solver and I was determined to get back on good terms with my adrenal dealer. So I asked Dr Dax and my other specialist, Dr Google, how I could get my adrenals to “switch” back on. The answer I gleaned from all sources did not please me. I needed to go through an extended period – described as anything between six months to two years – of low to moderate stress and then my adrenaline dealer would once again trust me to treat the crack with some respect and thus resume my supply. Now this was not the answer I wanted because how in the hell was I supposed to ensure that I only felt low to moderate stress for perhaps up to two years? I live on Planet Earth, where we are in the throes of global warming, and Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have the codes to nuclear weapons. I live in a country with supposedly five times the global rate of femicides, which is also the most unequal country in the world, where people are murdered for a cellphone. I live in a city teeming with homicidal drivers, one of whom wrote off my car last week while we were driving the kids to school. Oh, and the kids. I have kids I must keep alive and help with improper fractions and Afrikaans homework. At the time of my diagnosis I still worked in media, everyone’s favourite target for projecting their unowned rage. Then there are the other unpredictable everyday stressors such as deadlines, burst geysers, illnesses and so on.

I was screwed, I tell ya. Screwed.

Thank Goddess the Covid-19 adventure came after I’d gotten a handle on this issue! Friend, that would have ended me.

Around this time, my friend Gilda introduced me to the author Tosha Silver, who’d written a book by the name of Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead. Tosha’s whole thing was about offering absolutely everything that bothers you to God, or what she refers to as the Divine Beloved. The concept made sense. If I had access to an all-powerful, loving Being, who was the boss of everything, I really wouldn’t need to stress about half of what had turned me into a cortisol junkie. Except there was one problem … I didn’t trust God for shit.

It all started in 1984. An annus horribilis for my family. My cousin, who was also my best friend, died in a horrific accident. My four-year-old BFF, her mother – my heavily pregnant aunt – and her husband were all involved in a multiple car crash. My aunt survived, her husband died on the scene, and my cousin was admitted to ICU in critical condition. Two other events had occurred in the preceding weeks, and these three incidents together were to affect me profoundly. Two weekends before the accident, my cousin Thami had come over for a playdate as usual. He had been watching some superhero movie on TV. Like all boys between the ages of two and 82, when he watched superhero movies, he caught the Spirit. You know, the Spirit that has them thinking they are invincible. We were now in the kitchen. I was frying eggs, a skill I had recently acquired and was keen to employ at every opportunity. Thami was bouncing around all over the place like a deranged superhero, announcing his supernatural strength, rattling off all the things he was stronger than. I, like all girls between the ages of two and 82, was getting irritated with his imagined invincibility, and decided to burst his bubble. So I dared him: “I bet if I put this hot pan on your head you are going to burn. You are not that strong.” He let me place the still relatively hot pan – the one in which I had just fried the eggs – on his head. The heat didn’t seem to bother him much. So I decided to up the ante and said, “Well, if I poured this butter on your head you are definitely going to burn.” Crappy move, I know, but I was eight years old. It was like a scene from Dumb and Dumber because he actually agreed to it. So I poured the used butter from the pan onto his head. Predictably, he burned. He screamed. I panicked, picked him up and dunked him head first in dishwater. For the most part, I forgot about the incident, and apparently so did he, because I never got into trouble for it.

The following weekend I attended Sunday School. In this particular lesson we were taught about God’s potency. The teacher told us authoritatively that there is nothing that God cannot do. If you need anything, you just need to ask Him sincerely, through prayer, and he will give it to you.

The car accident happened the following week. There was a lot of frantic but hushed activity at home. I could pick up from snippets of conversations that something horrible had happened. Malome Simmy had died. Thami was in a critical condition, and apparently it could go either way. Luckily for us, I’d just learned about the genie in the bottle called God that you released through prayer to grant your wishes. So I prayed for my cousin to get better, survive and thrive.

He didn’t. He died.

With the predictable self-centredness of an eight-year-old, I assumed that the hot butter I’d poured over his head had somehow weakened him and that that was the tipping point that caused his death. I had killed my best friend. Panic and guilt washed over me. This gave me extra vigour to continue praying fervently. After all, the Sunday School teacher had insisted that God could do anything. She hadn’t mentioned any Ts and Cs. I prayed several times a day, all the way until the day of the funeral. I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral for some reason, so I spent that time praying. I was convinced the adults would come back with Thami alive and well, if somewhat dusty – the Sunday School teacher had accompanied the lesson with a picture of a dusty, freshly resurrected Lazarus. When the adults did come back, without Thami, I stopped praying.

Fast forward to 2017. I was abruptly woken up by a blood-curdling scream. I sat up in bed, dazed, trying to figure out what the sound was, when another scream pierced through my daze. I recognised the voice of my daughter, Naima, three years old at the time. I bolted down the stairs in a panic, wondering what had happened to my child. My partner, Mufasa – that’s not his real name, but I keep hoping that if I call him Mufasa he will eventually get that tattoo of a lion that I think would look so good on him – was still up, and he had reached her bedroom before I did. When I got there he was holding her in the most curious manner, as though he was restraining her. I grabbed her out of his arms, and immediately understood why he was holding her like that, with her arms pressed against the sides of her body. As soon as her arms were freed she tried to attack me, clawed fingers raking at my eyes. Thankfully, since she was so tiny, extending my hands was enough to pull my face from her reach. She looked possessed. I turned her around and held her from the back, facing away from me. She started sobbing and asking me who she was, now scratching at her own face. “You are Naima. You are my baby.” I needed to repeat this many times throughout that long night. She kept on touching her face, wild-eyed, desperately demanding to know who she was. For whatever reason, I just knew not to take her to a mirror; instead I put my phone on selfie mode so she could see herself. I later learned that my intuition about not placing her in front of the mirror was spot on.

“See, you are Naima, my baby.”

“No, I am a monster!” she’d insist with conviction. It took hours to convince her that she wasn’t a monster and to stop her from alternating between trying to scratch her own skin off and clawing at my eyes. That night we all slept in the lounge, on the couches and floor – me, Naima, Mufasa, Lebone and Aunty Jojo, our kids’ nanny. Naima slept on top of me the entire night, shaking violently, like she had hypothermia even though she was hot to the touch.

In the morning I got up really early and started doing an energy clearing on the house. I used every single trick I had learned, and some that I intuited as I was going along. I chanted a Latin phrase I had learned during my adventures as a student of a certain mystery school: “In nomini Padre, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancte. Abbe Male Spiritus. Abbe Male Spiritus. Abbe Male Spiritus. In nomini Padre, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancte. In Nomini Jesu Christi.” The energy clearing was a little more effective than I would’ve liked, because the following night as we slept, a pipe in one of the bathrooms burst and I woke to ankle-deep water. Now I had to contend with demons and an insurance company. Friend, none of this was helping with the quest for low-moderate stress levels. I have since learned to be more specific with my clearing intentions.

I chucked Naima’s possession incident in the “WTF?” bucket and we moved on with our lives. She was never possessed again, but a few weeks later she started seeing things that no one else could, and not fairies or gnomes causing mischief at the bottom of the garden. These terrified her. She would scream, run to an adult and literally start climbing like a little monkey seeking higher ground. You could tell from tracking the movements of her eyes that she was definitely seeing something. She referred to these as “lightning things”. Initially, these incidents only happened at night and infrequently, perhaps once every three to four weeks. Then, out of nowhere the frequency increased to about twice a week, then one day it happened during the day. Then it started happening while she was at school, as well. Before then, the lightning things were only tormenting her at home.

Lebone’s birthday was coming up. We had booked a spa day for her and a group of friends. I didn’t stay long because I was exhausted from the ongoing night vigils. One of the mothers who’d dropped off her child for the party was a friend, Melinda. She noticed that something was not right. It wasn’t really hard to tell – both Naima and I looked like death warmed up. She came over to my house, and I reluctantly told her what was going on. Her husband was a Christian who attended a nearby church. She offered to find out whether he knew of anyone who could help. Lo and behold, there was a woman at his church who helped people with such. I think he referred to her as a prayer warrior or something along those lines. I didn’t know the terminology, as I hadn’t been a Christian in decades. The Prayer Warrior called me. I related our situation to her. She was unfortunately not in town, but she offered to pray for us over the phone. I wanted to end the call, but I didn’t want to be rude so I let her pray. Naima was on my lap during our conversation. She’d become like an extra appendage, permanently attached to me. As the woman prayed for us over the phone, Naima released a huge fart then dozed off. By the time the Prayer Warrior was done, Naima was sleeping peacefully on my lap. I carried her to bed, but she woke up shortly afterwards and for a few hours she was back to her old, happy, adventurous self. We even managed to go out and do some shopping. Unfortunately, the respite only lasted a few hours. However, Melinda’s husband Mark had organised another group of prayer warriors, who came to my house that evening. They said loads of things that offended me. They especially took umbrage with the Buddha and Foo dog statues at the front door, as well as the creepy baby dragon one in the lounge. They interrogated Lebone about the red string on her wrist; it was an infantile friendship bracelet of sorts, nothing occultic about it. Then, of course, asked about my relationship with Jesus the Saviour. I breathed through all of that, thinking what a huge waste of my time this was; eventually, they decided to pray. As they got into it, Naima let out another enormous fart and passed out right there in my arms. They invited me to church, left their contact details, and went on their warrior way.

All was peaceful until around midnight when Naima had another episode. I was home alone with the kids, and did what all kids do when they are at a loss. I bundled my kids into the car and we drove to my mother’s house. My mother managed to calm us all down and we slept. In the morning I noticed a smell, rancid and sharp, like roadkill on a hot day. This was curious, because a few weeks before the possession I had detected the same smell in my own house. We had just adopted two kittens, Bubbles and Loki. I decided that they must have dragged something behind a piece of furniture that was now rotting. So Aunty Jojo and I went about shifting furniture, looking for the source of the smell. I was not entirely convinced by my own explanation, because the kittens were still too young to hunt anything and they hardly left the house, but I had no other explanation for it. We looked for the source of this smell for almost two weeks before finally giving up. What made it more complicated was that I appeared to be the only one who could smell it. Even though Aunty Jojo and Mufasa helped me look, they couldn’t smell anything. So I learned to live with it, vile as it was. Now, here I was, in my mother’s house and so was that smell.

Soon enough, Naima woke up and the lightning things came for her once again. So my mom did what all kids do when they are at a loss. She piled us in the car, her kid and her kid’s kids, and drove to her mom’s house in Ga-Rankuwa. By the time we reached Ga-Rankuwa, Naima clinging to me for dear life, we were physically and emotionally exhausted. My grandmother, a devout Catholic, insisted that we pray. I was more open to prayer now, as it seemed to buy us a few hours of peace. We all gathered around in the sitting room; my cousins were also at my gran’s house and they reluctantly obliged as my grandmother led us through the rosary and some freestyle prayer. As she prayed – you guessed it – Naima let out the biggest fart ever, then calmed down and fell asleep. She slept peacefully by our new standards, and I was in a relatively good mood when I woke the following morning. A young part of me believed that if anyone could talk God into sorting this mess out it would be my grandmother. I had seen this woman kneel down to pray every single morning and night for as long as I’d known her. She was surely in God’s good books. I was basking in my childish optimism in the sitting room, chatting to my mom. Naima was in the kitchen with my cousin, Phenyo, making breakfast. My grandmother’s house is very big and spread out, the kitchen a significant distance from the sitting room. Then the roadkill smell snaked its way up my nostrils, and within seconds of me registering the odour, I heard Naima screaming in the kitchen about the lightning things. In that moment it dawned on me that her attacks were preceded by the smell. She could see them. I could smell them. I later found that distance did not seem to have an impact on this relationship. I could be many kilometres away, at work or a mall, and I would pick up the smell and, within minutes, my phone would ring, and the caller would inform me that Naima was having another attack.

My grandmother handed me a list of prayers to recite daily. We started praying every single morning and night, all of us, including Aunty Jojo, who turned out to be very talented when it came to praying. The prayers didn’t stop the attacks, but they eased up a lot. I was eventually helped by a woman in Cape Town by the name of Shivani De Sousa, to whom I had been referred by a friend. I wasn’t really telling people about what was going on. I mean, where would you even start? However, on this particular day, I was in Cape Town for work. Lindsay called and asked why I’d been so quiet. To my own surprise, I told her. Perhaps it was the good rest from sleeping alone in a five-star hotel away from the drama of the lightning things, or perhaps it was the sea air. Lindsay said she knew someone in Cape Town who may be able to help. I made all the right noises but had no intention of calling her. By then I’d had all sorts of people traipsing through my house, chanting, burning and rattling things, who hadn’t managed to do much more than what we’d achieved from our twice-daily prayers. Lindsay then texted me Shivani’s number, along with a message that she had already told Shivani to expect my call. And so, reluctantly, I called. She was using the term “entities”, which I was hearing frequently from all the ghostbusters I’d been in contact with. She mentioned that she’d been dealing with more entity attacks on children in the last few months and believed she could help. I booked a session with her, mainly so as not to offend Lindsay. But her waiting list was over a month long, so I promptly forgot about the booking.

When the time came, Shivani did her thing, remotely. All she asked for was a picture of Naima. After she had done the clearing, she emailed me her feedback. And this is the part that blew my mind, as if all this weren’t crazy enough as it was. When she reported back on the clearing, she described the entities to me: they had no eyes. We had since started seeing a child psychologist, and Naima had described them similarly; brown, no eyes, just mouths and nostrils. The psychologist thought we were crazy, but to her credit she played along. When Lebone was younger, she had been scared of spiders, and whenever she came across anything new that scared her, but that she didn’t have a name for, she’d call it a spider. Naima, on the other hand, had always been afraid of lightning, so when she referred to the entities that harassed her as lightning things, I assumed it was a similar kind of logic – that is until Shivani said the entities had what seemed like lightning bolts sparking around them.

After Shivani’s clearing, we never had another visit from the lightning things again, but my view of life was forever changed. Which was probably a good thing, because most of that which helped me not only regain my health but retain my sanity, was far from ordinary.