SELF DELUSION?

The first time I ever experienced a higher state of consciousness—that I can remember, anyway—happened shortly after coming to terms with my own mortality. I wrote:

I was walking alone along Strawberry Creek on campus shortly before a therapy session with Dr. F when the knowledge—and I mean this in the deepest possible sense—came to me that I had the ability to realize all my aspirations, that is, to become a singer, a writer, and a visual artist.

For a brief moment, this realization lifted me above all the other feelings I’d been grappling with. In a rapt state, I told Dr. F about what I was experiencing. His response was a skeptical, “Well, maybe you can, maybe you can’t.” And in that moment I understood he was suggesting that my certainty was probably just grandiosity and self-delusion. I was so suggestible at the time that I was instantly deflated, plunged back into the depression I’d been feeling only an hour before. After the session I sank down in the grass in front of the hospital—though people were passing all around me—and sobbed without restraint.

Some time after this, Dr. F offered me sessions twice a week, so long as there was no one else needing to see him during his “free” hour. In the following days I felt so grateful—believing he made this offer because he cared about me. But the next time I saw him, he said he’d changed his mind. When I asked why, he said, “Because I don’t think you can handle it if I have to see someone else. And besides, I don’t want you to feel special.”

I was so angry I could hardly speak during the session, and when I left I knew that, though I’d been seeing him for ten months, I never would again. I was furious that he imagined he knew better than I did what I could and couldn’t handle—he didn’t—and given the pain I was in, his concern about my feeling special seemed ludicrously beside the point.