Her Own Personal Jesus

content/trigger warning: discussion/depiction of psychosis, state violence, incarceration

The literature professor wrote her novel quietly. She didn’t tell anyone it was happening. She just started typing.

After a few weeks she asked an agent to take a look. The professor sent over pages. There was interest. But the agent wanted to see a manuscript right away — snake a copy through Hollywood, snag her some lucrative adaptation contract. The agent’s persistence reminded her of the pressure from colleagues to pursue tenure. She wasn’t having it. She wanted this to be something bigger than a Netflix original — she wanted a classic, something that would make her a writer for life. She wanted a Harry Potter, a Katniss Everdeen, a Clark Kent — a Jesus. She wanted to invent a timeless household name.

She told the agent no but thank you.

And she struck out on her own.

*

There were no reviews, good or bad, for the first four months her novel was available for purchase on Amazon. The novel had undone the entire spring semester — papers carelessly graded; rambling lectures; not a single scholarly article published — and so far she'd earned nothing in return.

The professor had ridden waves of euphoria as she’d finished the novel, then self-published it, but now depression was rapidly undoing her high.

Finally, the first review on Goodreads appeared, written and posted by username HaleyCat. It included the following praise: “Her writing treads subtly between insolence towards convention and a castigation of the avant-garde.” The professor wept. It felt as though she’d been gifted the cure for suffering.

She reached through the screen towards her first and only fan: a DM in HaleyCat’s inbox, inviting a correspondence.

A no-nonsense athletic trainer, Haley was willing to fill a best-friend-shaped hole in the professor’s life that she had never noticed until the conversation with Haley became freakishly honest and profound — and endless, seemingly endless.

Once, they debated whether there was a way to treat writing like fitness: high-intensity interval training, nutrient-rich literature-loading, intermittent fasting to keep the mind sharp.

There was only one way to find out.

*

Dawn meant ten rounds of flash fiction, capped at 500 words. Noon meant raw eggs followed by short stories of at least 5000 each. Haley installed a punching bag in the corner of the professor’s apartment, yellow leather wrapped snugly around sixty pounds of sawdust, ready for a beating whenever the professor’s keyboard was unable to match her intensity. Stiff fists into the damn bag and then she’d be back to creating tiny worlds in epic chapters, entire galaxies in 1000 words or less.

Notebooks peppered her apartment, first a shake’s worth, then a shaker’s. Dawn meant an unparalleled insight into the human condition. Noon meant three new chapters (sometimes four; sometimes more). The punching bag began to sag embarrassingly, which made her pummel it even harder.

Soon the professor didn’t even need to sleep anymore. There wasn’t enough time to get everything inside her head onto the screen.

There was only the all-consuming story, the thing had to be done if anything was going to mean anything anymore.

*

And then it was finished.

How many words?

Enough.

She looked through her phone for the agent’s number. Where was it?

In her e-mail: nothing. No communiqués.

There were no pages she had sent.

There was no story on her computer.

There weren’t even any DMs on Goodreads.

Where was the file? Where were her conversations with Haley?

What was happening to her?

There was writing, yes. And as she recognized it for what it was, she laid down slowly on the floor of her apartment and let herself be surrounded by pages upon pages of frenetic handwriting she did not recognize, unpretty sentences sprinting wildly about, paragraphs without sense or structure.

Now she understood the lack of reviews. There was no novel. No Amazon page, no Goodreads account. No Haley. No punching bag — only a hole in the wall and several bruised knuckles.

And in the space the professor used to inhabit: a brain, biochemically amok, incomprehensible, lost.

*

It was summer so it was a convenient time to have herself committed. Family came, friends came, even a few students came, each visit clouding her mind further. Like liquor, shame is cumulative, and equally incapacitating.

Her doctor explained that the medication can make you feel that way sometimes, but it’s perfectly normal, okay? And she nodded as though she believed there existed no emotions capable of matching the potency of a pharmaceutical drug.

[REDACTED] was the official diagnosis. Without medication, delusions of grandeur and breaks with reality would polka-dot her future like seizures for an epileptic. This is what she would mouth when it was time for her daily dose of sanity.

Then, after enough time, courage kicks in. She asks a nurse for a pencil and paper. The nurse obliges.

Could she write? Could she write about herself? Could she write about what had happened? Could this be the story she was meant to tell? Could she be her own personal Jesus?

But the medication didn’t allow for those kinds of questions anymore. She could no longer be the hero of the story, the asker of the questions. What was left was only the paper and the pencil, with nothing to will the two to touch.

The writer had to die for the sins of the story, but for us, here in the real world, at least the woman gets to live.

*

Our delusions are our gods, when we think ourselves heroes. It simply turns out even delusions can be commodified, bartered for, owned in perpetuity. The professor believed she was a writer because she wanted to stand on the edge of society that believes it can chart our futures as though some temporal cartographer. But there are, in any sage’s map, only delusions.

This does not make them meaningless. It makes them, in fact, exactly what keep us going.

Her Own Personal Jesus

The literature professor wrote her novel quietly at first. She didn’t tell anyone it was happening. She just started typing.

After a few weeks she asked an agent to take a look. The professor sent over pages. There was interest. But the agent wanted to see a manuscript right away — snake a copy through Hollywood, snag her some lucrative adaptation contract. The agent’s persistence reminded her of the pressure from colleagues to pursue tenure. She wasn’t having it. She wanted this to be something bigger than some Netflix original series. She wanted a classic, a full-fledged franchise — something that would make her a writer for life. She wanted a Harry Potter, a Katniss Everdeen, a Clark Kent — a Jesus.

She wanted to invent a timeless household name.

So she told the agent no but thank you.

And she struck out on her own.

*

There were no reviews, good or bad, for the first four months her self-published novel was available for purchase on Amazon. The novel had undone her spring semester — papers carelessly graded; rambling lectures; not a single scholarly article published — and so far she had earned nothing in return.

But the professor was too smart to surrender.

Someone would come.

*

Finally, the first review on Goodreads appeared, written and posted by username HaleyCat. It included the following praise: “Her writing treads subtly between playful inventiveness and serious realism.” The professor wept. It felt as though she’d been gifted the cure for suffering.

She reached through the screen towards her first and only fan: a DM in HaleyCat’s inbox, inviting a correspondence.

A no-nonsense athletic trainer, Haley was willing to fill a small, best-friend-shaped hole in the professor’s life that she had never noticed until the conversation with Haley became freakishly honest and profound — and endless, seemingly endless.

Once, they debated whether there was a way to treat writing like fitness: high-intensity interval training, nutrient-rich literature-loading, intermittent fasting to keep the mind sharp.

It seemed there was only one way to find out.

*

Dawn meant ten rounds of flash fiction, capped at 500 words. Noon meant raw eggs followed by short stories of at least 5000 each. Haley installed a punching bag in the corner of the professor’s apartment, yellow leather wrapped snugly around sixty pounds of sawdust, ready for a beating whenever the professor’s keyboard was unable to match her intensity. Stiff fists into the damn bag and then she’d be back to creating tiny worlds in epic chapters, entire galaxies in a handful of stanzas.

Notebooks peppered her apartment, first a shake’s worth, then a shaker’s. Dawn meant an unparalleled insight into the human condition. Noon meant three new chapters (sometimes four; sometimes more). The punching bag began to sag embarrassingly, which made her pummel it even harder.

On one Tuesday, she self-published two separate poetry chapbooks; by the next, she’d released a 20,000-word novella.

She released a newsletter documenting her writing process. She started an Instagram account and filled it with sepia screenshots of passages from working drafts. She hauled half her weight in sawdust up two flights of stairs to her apartment — and was, by this point, strong enough to do so without Haley’s help.

I didn’t know that this is what I was like with a quest set before me, she thought. I didn’t know that this is who I could be.

She'd almost said this out loud, first to Haley — once when she’d had a little too much wine — and then to the agent, when he’d called on the phone because she’d, by then, stopped responding to his desperate e-mails.

You have incredible potential, we see all the work you’re putting out, we want you to know you are one of fiction’s rising stars — and then the professor assumed he was going to say something like, and that’s why we have to represent you, you deserve only the best, so she interrupted him and said simply:

I know.

*

It was a hot summer Tuesday the day the second novel was finished. The professor was sweating and Haley wasn’t at home to take care of the things the professor forgot while she wrote, like turning on the A/C. The sweat dripped down her face and onto the keyboard as she feverishly proofread, before finally, as always, publishing the work online herself. She snapped a picture of herself for Instagram and uploaded it with the caption, Don’t mind me putting my actual sweat and tears into this book! #Crying #ThisHeat #HeatWave #Novel #AlmostToTheFinishLine

Almost to the finish line. Haley had promised to be honest about the new novel and, upon reading its final draft, alternately burst into tears and nearly died laughing. It was perfect, it was unforgettable, it had all the hallmarks of a true classic, Haley had told her. The professor had birthed her own personal Jesus.

The heat tightened its embrace of the professor as she fixed the final typo on the final page. She embraced it back. She wiped her brow and collapsed onto her bed with her laptop in hand. With a click, her dreams became realities. Off went what she had birthed into the rest of the world, to become what it might become, if there was any justice in the world at all for our brave and determined professor.

You see, in the stories we tell ourselves most the hero must sacrifice everything and still maybe lose — because we want to know that we can live through it all, through hell, and come out on the other side, resurrected. But out here in the real world, the honest truth is that every once in a while, we get to win. We get to live. We get to have it all go right, for once, for once, let us have it all go right.