The incubi among us
A few months ago, an old friend of mine, Jenn, forwarded me the contact of a French exorcist who lives near the Spanish border and performs exorcisms on occasion for the Vatican. It was the recommendation of her boyfriend, Max. Max lives in a houseboat that he happened to build himself - a minor detail that I only found out recently because Jenn "doesn't approve of this lifestyle," which is just hilarious if you know my friend Jenn. Max received the recommendation from his Kundalini yoga teacher, who said, essentially, "This exorcist is the real deal." The Kundalini yoga teacher most likely received the contact from someone else, and this is how this exorcist makes a living: word of mouth, fate, and divine intervention.
Dominique is his name. Dominique was so booked that I had to wait a few weeks for our phone call - yes, a phone call. Our phone call, by sheer coincidence, ended up occurring the Tuesday after Mark's passing. Dominique and I spoke for 2 hours.
"Pourquoi tu me contactes Sarah ?"
"Je te contacte parce que je me sens coincée, j'ai l'mpression que je n'arrive pas avancer dans la vie."
...I feel stuck.
Earlier, in the bleakness of November 2020, I went in for a psychological evaluation at Sainte-Anne (the psychiatry hospital) because I started to have anxiety attacks about the "world returning to normal." I tried to explain the nature of my combined misanthropy and anxiety to these two perplexed psychologists, one of whom was a young intern who feverishly took notes.
"We will call you when we've decided if you're the right candidate for our program."
I left the hospital with my facial mask covered in snot.
Weeks later, they called me, requesting that I commute to the hospital every week... in person.
"Vous ne faites pas de Zoom?"
"Non."
"Hmmm."
Growing up, both doctors and my family diagnosed my introversion and hypersensitivity as depression. There have been moments where these characteristics felt less like a blessing and more like a curse. In my early twenties, I was prescribed antidepressants - something I regret to this day. I kept on taking "sabbaticals" during my undergrad years - I bounced from one institution to the other. I immediately saw all the politics and pretense in academia. Pretty soon, it just turned into a game where all I cared about was seducing my professors (I've always had authority issues but that's a separate topic). I dropped out of RISD, the best art school in the country (but so did David Byrne, so there).
When I started running on fumes at NYU, I remember writing a dissertation on Japanese architecture in Yasujiro Ozu's films. Or rather, I remember staring at the same sentence on my computer for hours. Despite my professor's patience and encouragement - "You're really onto something here" - I couldn't finish it because, on a cocktail of antidepressants, I slept through the weekends: I could no longer feel anything. When my father threatened to pull the plug on my financing, I dropped out of NYU, and I moved in with my parents, who recently relocated from Michigan to Florida.
At my parents', my body went into a state of remission: I wet the bed, I had menstrual periods so painful that I'd vomit. I had to separate myself from all the Diane Keaton-like clothes I had acquired in Rhode Island and New York - tweed jackets, silk scarves, wool skirts, knee-high boots... Florida was hot, humid, sloppy, and sticky.
While all my friends were on a clear path to adulthood, I could barely get out of bed. I saw a psychologist twice a week, Mary Beth Diamond, Ph.D. During our first consultation, she handed me her business card, "COUNSELING PSYCHOLOGY: SPECIALIZING IN GIFTED ADULTS." Something about the words "gifted adult" felt like an invitation, an embrace. Mary Beth was a practicing Buddhist, a rarity in North Florida. I'm sure, as you know, one of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism is "dukkha" - suffering and pain is an innate characteristic of human existence.
"If you want to sleep all day, Sarah, there's no shame." There was no right or wrong with Mary Beth - there was only the guilt I inflicted upon myself. From her giant bookshelf, she lent me a simple book, "Shambhala, the Sacred Path of the Warrior." Suddenly I connected with a spirituality that I never knew that I had. Years later, in France, I noticed that Mary Beth Diamond, Ph.D consulted my LinkedIn profile. Weeks after that, I learned that at age 60, she died of cancer.
I ended my academic career with a generic English degree from the University of Florida, a public institution more renowned for its football team than its academics. Immediately afterward, I moved to France (you already know what unraveled there). Just after landing, in a jetlag haze, I noticed that my father had slipped a cathartic letter into my suitcase. He expressed his innate understanding and adjacent sorrow that I'd never return to the United States: "Never forget that we will always love you." I tore up the letter and held back my tears.
Perhaps he understood that I wanted to live somewhere where I felt like an outsider because I was, in fact, a foreigner. It's far worse feeling like a foreigner among your own people, in the place where you were born.
That first year in France, I wrote down a Diane Arbus quote in my agenda:
"The farther afield you go, the more you are going home ... as if the gods put us down with a certain arbitrary glee in the wrong place and what we seek is who we had really ought to be."
This spring, my colleague Ashley could not stop shouting from the top of a hill how excited she was to get a vaccine and for the world to open up again.
I wrote to her:
"I think the entire pandemic has made me realize to what extent I have had social anxiety for as long as I can remember. I don't think my breed of social anxiety is the textbook kind - which makes it deceptive in appearance.
I've tried to fix myself before. I've seen many a shrink. I've been on antidepressants. The pandemic felt like a period where I didn't have to fix myself. I could just be."
I had a moment with Mark where every time I reenact it in my head, especially now, I start to weep. Just before Covid, traveling to Malta with the entire company, I was in a complete state of panic (the year prior, I managed to avoid the company retreat to Sevilla thanks to my pancreatitis). In a private plane full of catty office people, I felt angry and alone. As we piled on the bus from the airport to the hotel, I sunk in my seat by the window, feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed by social anxiety. Suddenly Mark appeared and kindly asked, "Is this seat taken?" He understood that like a feral cat with spiked fur, I could have snapped at any moment; I think that's why he sat next to me in the first place. In his carefree way, he told me stories, but he didn't force the conversation. He didn't judge my silence. Mark held me on that bus ride, like a father or an old friend.
At the beginning of my conversation with Dominique, I naturally broke down in tears.
"Désolée, mes emotions sont très élévées aujourd'hui. Un colleague, l'un de mes favoris, est soudainement décédé. C'est récent. C'était hier."
My tears didn't phase him.
Dominique read me and my space from afar.
"You're an empath. And you're a medium. You can connect with the spiritual world. You probably see signs everywhere."
I said in tears, "That's funny that you say that because I have the impression that I foresaw my friend's death...weeks, even months before it happened."
He replied, "Because you did." Jenn told me about her exorcism with Dominique, so I had a bit of a preview. She said, for example, it was incredible that he could notice her problems with bruxism over the telephone, specifically in her left jaw. So I wasn't alarmed when Dominique asked me to sit still and began muttering mostly indecipherable incantations to the archangel Michael.
He paused.
"Sarah, this is going to sound very strange, and if you don't want to respond, if you want to stop, that's completely fine, I'm asking... I'm looking... and they keep on pointing me back to this one thing. Do you have problems - comment dire, au niveau de votre sexe ?"
"Uhhh... no, I don't think so."
"Genre, un MST, même une mycose ?"
"No."
"Do you ever wake up with bruises, and you don't know where they come from?"
"Not that I can think of..."
"Hmm. Do you have nightmares? Sexual nightmares?"
"Uhhh..."
"If you don't want to talk about this, we can stop."
"No, I don't have sexual nightmares. I don't dream at all."
"You don't dream. That's not normal. I keep on seeing and hearing the number seven. What happened to you seven years ago? Where were you then?"
"Well, that was when I moved from France to Sweden."
"Okay Sarah, I'm going to explain this as simply as I can..."
Okay here we go...
"An incubus has been raping you in your sleep every night for the past seven years...."
"Un incube ???"
And suddenly, it all came rolling back to me: my period started to disappear when I lived in Stockholm. In San Francisco, I'd miss my periods for three months, six months, and then I'd go without a period for an entire year, years even. I got all the tests, and the doctors couldn't find anything wrong: "Some women just stop menstruating," they added, "If you're trying to get pregnant, we'll give you hormones." I started seeing an acupuncturist who would help temporarily, but even that stopped working.
Incubi mythology has existed across civilizations for thousands of years. Part of the myth is that incubi impregnate their victims.
Suddenly, I had an explanation for these long menstrual droughts.
"These demons prey on people like you. They are attracted to your light. They suck away your energy to live, your energy to dream, your energy to love. But the incubus is gone now; he won't come back."
The incubus made total sense to me. But things got weird when Dominique tried to connect me to my guardian angel.
"Comment tu t'appelles ange guardien de Sarah ?"
"Henry!" I said. After the fact I realized Henry is the name of my friend's 19-year-old son who I visited only a few weekends earlier.
"Henry, est-ce que tu as améné Sarah vers moi ?"
"Uhh..."
I felt a quick flash, the presence of a little boy who wanted to show me his treehouse. A little boy who wanted to play.
Once again, I broke down in tears.
"You are on this planet to do God's work. Sarah, tu es un enfant du soleil. I'm confident you will find your way."
Dominique didn't ask me for money. He didn't even ask me to call him back.
Like clockwork, I'm now bleeding (profusely) every 28 days.