Some background and context for why I am writing

The last post on the Brother of Jared was a good example of the types of things I really enjoyed looking into and making connections around as I was exploring the potential connections between Joseph Smith/ Mormonism and Tolkien/ Middle Earth during that 2018 - 2020 time period.

As mentioned, when I first stumbled across the possibility I didn't know what to think.  At that time, I had never read any of Tolkien's works outside the Lord of the Rings, and so was very unfamiliar with the overall Legendarium.  So, I read the Silmarillion.  I was also fortunate enough that the local library carried the entire set of History of Middle Earth books, and over that period I believe I had at least one of those books checked out and at my house at any given time.  I learned a lot, and it was fun and interesting to me to make these type of connections.  I felt very strongly that there was something to this, and these stories and connections seemed to reinforce that belief.

It was in the middle of this that I started my first blog:  A Good Seed.  I named it this because I sort of felt like I was trying to do what Alma taught the Zoramites they needed to do, in planting a seed that you believe is good and seeing if/ how it grows as you take care of it.  I really felt like I was living that process, and my blog was a way for me to communicate some of the things I felt I was learning and exploring.  There isn't a wide audience for this type of material, as you can imagine, so it was more about writing ideas down - similar to now, I guess.

Around July 2019, however, I decided to step back and take a break.  I was tired, frankly.  I had put a lot of energy into this, and I felt I was sort of at the end of what I could do.  I was looking forward to looking into other things again.  I remember it being a pretty good feeling to think about letting some of this stuff go for a bit.

That break didn't last long, though, as within a week of deciding to focus on other things, some strange things started to happen to me.  Words - mostly in a language I couldn't understand - began to come into my mind in various ways.  It's hard to describe, I guess, but it started out in dreams, and then also in early morning waking hours, words would be 'delivered' in way that was almost like the exchange of thought.  Again, its hard to to explain - not like voices or anything like that, but just these thoughts or words would come into my mind (in dreams this would happen many times visually), and then I would feel like I should write them down.  I began keeping a notebook at my bedside so that I could write down these words as they came, which started happening at all hours of the night and early morning, sometimes several times in one night (which would get pretty tiring).

The most not-normal thing about this (looking back on it) is that it seemed so normal at the time!  Its actually kind of unbelievable to me that this was so.  But, the tale that first introduced me to this idea (the one that I referenced in my post on Deseret) was written by an author who claimed to have similar things happen to him, at least with respect to having words in other languages given to him.  With that as both an example and pattern, I assumed something similar was happening to me, and I was pretty diligent in paying attention to and taking down all these various words.  I would then spend a good deal of time (during meetings at work, at evenings after the kids were in bed, etc.) going over these words and trying to interpret them.  This is when I became acquainted with Eldamo.org, which must have every elvish word ever mentioned in Tolkien's words along with either confirmed or suggested definitions, etymologies, histories, word development - you name it.

I am not anything close to a linguist, so going through Eldamo and finding meaning in my words was most definitely a hack job, but it was a hack job that yielded things that seemed to make sense.  Words and phrases in a language that I was not familiar with actually meant things when I looked them up.  Something of meaning was being communicated, I felt, though I wasn't sure as to who was communicating them, why I was involved, and even whether I was understanding things correctly.

This went on through the remainder of 2019 and into 2020.  My family understandably was a little concerned about my overall mental health based on what was going on.  My wife actually arranged for me to meet with the head of the psychiatry department at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Sophia Vinogradov, in early 2020 (I believe early February).  I didn't have any problem going in to talk with her - I was fairly convinced at the time that what was happening was both real and good, and I didn't feel like there was anything to hide.  

During that initial meeting, I actually brought in a document with all of the various words and phrases typed up.  Looking back on it, I think I assumed that she might be really interested in the words and look into them more, or perhaps connect with a university colleague who specializes in languages and have them check things out (its kind of funny to think that was how natural I thought things were at the time, and how much I thought others might be interested in this).

That didn't happen, but I found her to be a very spiritual and thoughtful person.  While supportive of the notion that there are likely things that can't be easily explained, including the reality of spiritual influences, it was clear based on her training and what I described as going on with me, that she suspected some underlying, less-than-supernatural factors at work in my brain.

We left off with an agreement to keep monitoring the situation, as well as do some tests, lab work, etc. in the near future to rule out any underlying medical/ physiological causes to what was happening.

Only a few months later, I would be back at the hospital, though under much different circumstances.  

Up to that point and into much of March 2020, I continued to view things as going largely 'well', though there were plenty of indications that something was beginning to go off the rails.  

2020 was a challenging year for everybody given the COVID situation that really ramped up at this exact time.  My own mind began deteriorating at a fairly accelerating pace for reasons I couldn't place, and what I had once viewed as good became something very bad for me.  I was much more anxious, started having severe panic attacks, and imagined all sorts of negative things associated with the words, dialogues, etc. that continued to come.  I won't go through all of the details, but by the end of April I was in a very bad state mentally and emotionally, trying to keep things together.

On May 7, the bottom fell out, and I would spend the day in the emergency room psych ward after asking my wife to drive me there as quickly as she could.  Not a fun day, or the days following.

I would spend the next 2+ years under psychiatric care.  Dr. Vinogradov became my psychiatrist.  It turned out to be a very good thing that I had met with her just a few months before - I am not sure how things would have turned out if I hadn't been working with her on my recovery.  I would probably be a vegetable somewhere.  The critical thing in the beginning was to try and stabilize my condition, which was fairly acute.  As I was told, my brain had analogously been through a severe car crash and I was in need of some significant help.  I had developed a phobia of sleeping (I hadn't slept for a couple days when I first arrived in the psych ward) and so I was given anti-psychotic medication to take at night to help me sleep.  I was given anti-anxiety medication, as well as other medication to try and help stabilize my mood.

I had never been on any medications before, and I unfortunately proved to be very sensitive to meds.  Thus, it was a few months before we found a combination that seemed to work and, as Sophia put it, we were left with using pediatric doses because anything over that I wasn't tolerating very well.

I also underwent all sorts of tests to try and determine an underlying cause for what happened to me: lab work, brain imaging, physical and psychological exams - pretty much any test you could get, it seemed.  I remember being really concerned about the brain scans, thinking that these words that had been coming to me were likely the result of massive brain tumors that were about to kill me off.  As it turned out, the good and bad news was that physically I was great - no underlying physiological things going on.  My brain was just broken.

By July, I began working with a cognitive therapist, a colleague of Sophia's at the U of M, to try and learn to think again.  Piper was and is world-class, and together we started to try and rebuild my mind. One of her specialties is psychosis and psychotic episodes, and utilizing cognitive behaviors to manage these.  My thoughts had gotten me into a very dark place, and I slowly learned thinking skills that would begin to pull me out of it.  It was a not easy and that first year was scary, exhausting, and confusing.  I didn't know what was real or not real anymore, and many times I felt like I wasn't getting better.  Sophia's prediction was that it was going to take around 2 years for my brain to heal and for some kind of normalcy to return, and she ended up being about right.  That first year felt like an eternity, though, and even looking back on it now it seems like an endless and weird period.

The second year of my recovery was better and I started gaining momentum.  During the latter part of 2021, Piper started to wean me off our regular discussions as I started to get show real signs of improvement, and ultimately by the end of that year I was no longer having visits with her or any other therapist.

Sophia wanted to keep me on medication for a bit longer in an effort to not threaten the progress I had made.  In the first part of last year (2022), she began to also slowly wean me off the medications a little at a time.  I have to say one of the times I have been most proud of myself was in the late spring of last year when I was able to go to sleep for the first time in over 2 years without the help of any medication.  Just a year earlier I wouldn't have thought that possible.  By summer of 2022, I was completely off medications and was feeling much better about where things were going in my life (though perhaps some who stumble across some of these posts might wonder if I should perhaps go back to taking them...)

I was successfully treated, I suppose, from a medical standpoint, and I am grateful for a lot of support and love I got along the way.  When the panic and hopelessness of my situation became too much for me to see a way past, I had patient family, friends, and good professional help that were able to pick me up.  Without that, I would have been lost, and it is a sobering thought to know that there are people for whom that love and help is not available.

In one of my darkest times, I remember telling Sophia that I felt my life was past redemption - that there was no way out of this mess.  She and Piper remained confident that not only would I get better, even if it would take longer than I wanted, but that I would come away with more understanding and compassion for others who face similar crosses to bear.  Again, I think they were right.

Spiritually, though, it is hard to say where I stand, not only because of this experience but in the years leading up to it.  I was not whole spiritually before this.  One of the reasons I had looked so hard at this possible connection between Mormonism and Tolkien's world is because the modern Mormon church had become something I could not pretend to be fully supportive of anymore.  In 2016, we decided not to bless our youngest son in the church when he was born.  We did not baptize our oldest son when he turned 8 years old a year later in 2017.  During the subsequent period of 2018 - 2020, I was a bit lost spiritually, and feeling quite a bit alone.  

Even though I felt that these were the right decisions that we made, it still hurt.  I grew up in the church, and honestly growing up as a Mormon was the best thing that could have happened to me.  I was very blessed.  I felt like perhaps I was taking something like this away from my kids, and I didn't have anything to replace it with.  I was searching for answers, and this stuff seemed to come across my life just when I needed some kind of reason or excuse to believe.  I found hope in it.

This then made what happened to me in early 2020 even more confusing and demoralizing.  The thing I had looked to for some kind of hope seemed to turn against me, and leave me even worse off than when it found me.

I wished many times as I was trying to recover that I had never heard of any of these things, and that I could rewind the clock and do things differently.  I deleted the blog and everything I wrote.  During one particularly bad day, in some effort to exorcise demons from my mind, I burned all of the notes, notebooks, books, reference materials, etc. that I had used not only in my research but also to capture all of these words and experiences.  A few years worth of stuff went up in flames.  There is a digital file of the words that I did keep up through April that still exists, however, which is the point where I stopped entering them as my mind failed me.  That is the only thing that is left of that time.

But that isn't to say that these experiences and words stopped.  Far from it.  Even as I was trying to recover, I still needed to deal with the fact that these experiences wouldn't just go away.  Though they would change over time.  Today, very rarely are there Elvish languages anymore.  I actually can't remember the exact last time for that.

So, I am not sure, and I won't pretend to be sure about any of this.  The fact that I am now blogging again over these last couple months has me somewhat concerned, if I am honest, but at the same time cautiously optimistic that I won't repeat what happened before.  The ideas and stories don't leave me regardless - throughout all that happened over the past several years, that constant remained.  Neither a descent into madness nor the journey back from it completely removed them.  I believe there is some truth here, or at least that there is some truth or reality to be found along this path, though I am not completely sure as to what shape that reality will take.  So, as long as these stories and ideas remain, I figure why not write about them.

In any case, I thought it might be important to provide this context.  I've alluded to things vaguely enough in some of my posts, and the things I write about are strange enough that to understand a bit more of where I am coming might be additional context someone would find helpful to know.