It’s not a boring life I lead. I was invited to a deliverance prayer session with Monsignor Stephen Rossetti on the winter solstice. He wrote Diary of An American Exorcist and has a fascinating blog.

How could I pass that up?

After all, I was diagnosed by Irish exorcist Father Patrick Collins as being vexed. “There are spirits of possession and spirits of oppression. You have spirits of oppression,” said Fr. Collins.

This happened to me when the fallen priest Fr Miles Riley abused me in 1976 in Mission Dolores in the confessional area after Mass.

That sent me right into my first psychosis (which is living in unreality) and my first psychiatric hospitalization. I did crazy things like walk across a busy thoroughfare barefoot and was sure I was not going to get run over. It was the daredevil in me, or whatever dopamine surge made me think this was a good thing to do— the jaywalker immersed in her living, waking nightmare. I had surges of energy causing a meltdown in my overheated brain.

It was like Legion drove me to run off the proverbial cliff as it’s devilish spirits tried to make me their host, bequeathed to me by the ministrations of the priest from Hell.

I’d rather go mad then ever be his pet. That was my option, I guess. My parents wouldn’t have believed me and neither would anyone else. It’s better to be a madwoman than a priest’s sex object.

So while that wasn’t conscious, I did go into fight or flight mode and the way I flew was in a surge of dopamine and adrenaline that would keep me awake and able to run from the predator forever or die doing so.

I can’t sleep when in a manic psychosis without horse doses of antipsychotic. It makes sense. I don’t want to be asleep because I have to run from the devil. In my first hospitalization, the janitor in the psych ward molested me and I was repeatedly sexually assaulted in psych wards. In fact, I lost my virginity by rape in one from a fellow patient.

When I told my mother eventually, she said, “you sure were raped a lot” and left it at that. She was not a paragon of compassionate empathy, but c’est la vie.

I had an incestuous relationship with her as a young child, so perhaps her observation came from personal witness. I really was to be there for her—that was my reason for being. If I behaved and was a credit to the family, then I was rewarded.

I have way too much material to process for one deliverance session but I was grateful to be prayed for because just as Job had spirits of oppression, I do also but without his holiness. I just have a new Job description: reporter on the devil’s beat.

To be continued…