February 14, 2017 (i.e. V Day)
So I’m going to tell you what happened. There I was, about a week ago, skipping along thinking I’m not doing so bad during my second term at Harvard. I’m certainly not as stressed out as “loose bags.” That’s my pet nickname for the collective group of Harvard Divinity students whom I don’t know intimately, but emanate a sour gray pall as they move through the halls of our school. They are full of book knowledge and rather than strut, stride, roll, ride or hop as they walk, they push the burden of their weight forward as though it were an oceanic blob of mucus.
Pardon my rhetoric. You see, I’m writing to you “post-hell.” Prior to my metaphysical trip, I would’ve spoken in normal “Vicky Lee” tones which are clear, concise, to-the-point with an occasional “Aha!” moment laced with aggression. But now, something has happened to me and I am worried (no, I’m not) that I will have no choice but to write all my academic papers in this happy, peppy and might I add—spicy—dialogue.
I’m changed. I am. Like green eggs and ham, Winnie the Pooh, and La-la Land, I will never go back to my un-enchanted life. Nope. Nah. Uh-uh. Nyet. Not going to happen, I declare with my paws facing forward as in, “I refuse to be your unhappy cushion. Go fart elsewhere.” My basic message to the world is this, “Don’t sit on me, unless you want to get tickled.”
I used to have a thin, sleek, metallic, glossy message which was something like, “Wait for it…” Then the sky would light up, you’d hear a crack, a sizzle. You’d be struck, electrocuted, fried into a frizzy. Because little did you know, as a lightening rod, when I pray or get you in the right spot at the right time, I can paint a psychic bull’s eye onto you and make you the target of a stormy sky.
But now, I am a koala bear. That is my big announcement. I am now a koala bear. This is what Harvard has done to me! It’s a huge transformation. It’s large and it’s not really in charge, but it’s certainly fun and it’s furry. You couldn’t have told me in a million and nine hundred thousand and fifty six years that after decades of sweat, blood and toil, I’d one day be re-birthed in this life, from a woman to a huggie or in the genus of the “huggables” along with baby penguins, bears of every phylum, and domestic pets.
But we never know where life will take us. Because life is a miracle.
On Valentine’s Day 2017, I received the biggest miracle of love in my life. I began to vibrate love through my cells and my biology. God was cohabitating within my body. I stopped eating. I have eaten bits and scraps of vegetables or seeds for the past six days, but I have no desire for food or drink of any kind. Not only that, but my body produces gobs and swells of heat like the sun. I can walk about in the snow in twenty degree weather with a light frock and some jeans and still sweat as I walk. The other thing is, I do not speak. I say nothing. Words are not my offering. Instead, I listen and if I must communicate, I write post-its and hand them to people like the grocery store clerk or the librarian. I also text. But I do not use my voice. My voice is unheard.
Here is an account of the living nightmare leading up to my big miracle and the gift that God gave to me on Valentine’s Day, which is that he is now my roomie inside this body of mine.
I began to feel a tinge of a sore throat. But alas, ‘I am a beast,’ I told myself. ‘Cold cannot scale my fortress.’ Well, well, I was right on course with my Plan A for Spring 2017 which was to ignore all of my school work and focus on writing my book. There I was. Picture me: long brown hair with ebony jet black roots, 5 foot 7, 132 pounds, a yellowish toffee color due to severe lack of sunlight, no makeup, dressed with almost every item of clothing I owned at the moment, waddling on the sidewalk between banks of piled up snow.
I was stuck again on my writing. My brilliant go-to muse is always my aunt Samantha.
At about 6 pm, I dialed her up. She answered sounding like a dying mammal of the mammoth breed such as a donkey, zebra, horse, rhinoceros or moose. Taken aback, realizing the source of most of my revelatory bursts of mental starlight was wasting away over the telephone line, I asked her a simple question, “Do you have ten minutes?” Well, certainly she had. It takes quite a while for something as wise as an elephant to die. She sat back and I took her through a guided meditation wherein she went from sobbing in grief and pain to breathlessly flying in freedom and vitality. It was a turnaround encrusted with rhinestones. All was well. We were both swimming—her in bubbles of joy and me in the snowflakey snow.
That evening it began. The clouds of Lucifer and I kid you not, they were fallen and they were angelic, tip-toed in on their Louboutin stiletto high heels into my bedroom. The manicured talons of this demon’s Shisheido-powdered claws wrapped themselves around my throat and squeezed. A shriek with a Halloween-style piercing quality rang into the starry snowbound night like a silk ribbon swirling from the delicate wrists of a thousand Chinese Wushu dancers.
Okay, at this point, I’m not exaggerating. I’m just gonna tell it straight cuz you won’t believe me unless I just clinically hand you information with the sterilized delivery of an E.R. surgeon. This is what happened in a nutshell: I had acute bronchitis. I went to the hospital the next morning and was examined by a young doctor from Africa who took a disgusting swab from the back of my throat to test me for—guess what? Ebola. Turns out I did not have it, nor did I have strep throat. She sent me home with antibiotics and later that evening, I was in the throes of pneumonia.
Many thoughts occurred to me. In fact, the first thing I realized was that the symptoms my aunt Samantha was experiencing in her recent illness were now my symptoms. The thought occurred to me that I was taking on her illness for her to spare her, her own pain. My throat seized up, swelling to the point where I could no longer swallow without grimacing. Every breath was torture. The entire skin on the inside of me was on fire, including my nostrils, my mouth, my throat. My lungs were full of mucus. I coughed up black bile. I had body shakes, a fever, sweating. I also had a migraine. My symptoms actually got worse over the next two days and two nights.
For two days and two nights, all I heard was people screaming. I also heard millions of those people thinking non-stop. Now, when I say “non-stop,” what I mean is that at turbo speed, their thoughts were assaulting me like being shot in my brain with tens of thousands of bullets and I felt and heard each one. It was this incessant thinking of millions of people who were—get this—all stuck in the hell inside their minds.
Let me correct myself, if I may: I was stuck inside the hell of millions of people. I was literally inside of their minds, where their hells reside. I was in millions of peoples’ hells, all at once, simultaneously, like I had special omniscience and could be in millions of places at the same time and all of those places were hell.
Let me stop myself and give kudos: the only one who came with me on this terrible sweaty-sock scented journey was Koala Bear. You may ask, “Well, where was God? Where was Jesus?” My answer is thus: I was screaming out for them (silently and violently of course, inside my mind because I had no voice due to my swollen throat) to help me for two days and two nights. I was pleading to them like this, “Jesus-help-me. God-help-me. God-help-get-me-out-of-hell. Jesus-help-me.” I was doing this without stopping. So I literally combatted the thoughts of millions of people in hell with my own prayer without ceasing. At a certain point, God shushed me as I was obviously a little pissed that it took him so long to respond. He let me know, both psychically and with a gentle, yet secure hush-mush soft padding calm-the-fuck-down palm on my racing beating heart—that he had something to show me. See me: curious and uplifted, touched by his care. He then went ahead and RESUMED MY TOUR OF HELL.
I swear that the thought that went through my brain was this: when I was four years old my older sister had a habit of sneaking around the corner to spy on me while I was peeing. I was very small so I would be perched upon the precarious ledge of the toilet seat with my naked behind trickling into its canyon of porcelain when she’d dash into the bathroom and shove me down its cavernous valley with all her might. She’d push and push and push while flushing furiously, trying to basically flush me down the toilet. Now, both of us thought I’d fit down the rabbit hole. And I might have, but I fought her, screaming for my mommy and daddy to help me. They’d rush in and survey the scene. “Oh, my saviors! My heroes!” I would reach for them. Quickly, my mother would gesture to my father. He’d run back into the hall. To retrieve a whipping tool to punish the bastard who did this to me? No. A camera. The whole thing turned into a photo shoot. This is parenthood, folks.
Lesson #1 of hell. God is not going to rescue you. He’s documenting your pain. And do you know why I, me in particular, was in hell? To help him document—yup, you guessed it—the pain of millions of people. I was a star reporter of a tabloid called, “We gotcha!” and it doesn’t refer to your back. When you are going through your worst moments in life, someone in heaven has been assigned to Instagram it.
So imagine me, in fact, don’t imagine. Just take my word for it. I was writhing in hellish pain, screaming out for God, while at the same time, keeping up with the thoughts of millions of people in hell. It was liking running with a pack of demons at full speed. I could not stop, nor could I slow down the herd. I was being forced to run this marathon of terror and I was not allowed to rest. I heard every word. Let me try to describe it. Let’s say you have a thought such as, “Look at those almonds,” because you are sitting at a table with a container of almonds. That thought is immediately and viciously co-opted into your hell. It’s like the thought was a carefree Jewish child wearing her red spring dress carrying a basket of daffodils and suddenly she is kidnapped by the Nazi’s, thrown into a dirty van full of other prisoners and carted off to Auschwitz. I watched each and every thought that “these” people in hell had. Each and every thought was captured by the darkness and became fuel, energy for their hells to continue burning. The almonds? What happened to them, you ask? Well, that thought about almonds morphed instantaneously into, “Why didn’t you get them for me? Why don’t you ever think about me? Why am I sitting here with no one to give me almonds?” On and on it went until almonds themselves were pure evil.
At a certain point, perhaps hour seven or eight of a forty eight to fifty six hour journey, I realized that I was in the mental territory of serial murderers. No, I did not look around for Donald Trump. He’s in a different realm of hell. There is a world past hell where you literally do not suffer anymore. You are the suffering and thus have the power and wherewithal to inflict it. I can’t tell you too much about it. But I can say that it is very blonde. They have great caviar and champagne, but no water. So if you’re thirsty there or parched, which in these dominions of hell is very common, then you’re drunk. I was not in drunk hell. Nor was I in “high” hell where T-rump or Donny T, as I call him, usually is. He snorts coke late at night in his version of hell.
So when I realized that I knew and saw and understood that I was in the caves where serial murderers lived, what did I do? As a seasoned life coach with thousands of case studies, years of asking the most burning questions about why someone would commit such heinous crimes—did I ask those most pressing questions humanity longs to have answered? No. I backed out of there. I was so over it. But I did see the blackness, the facelessness, the void.
Lesson #2 about hell. It doesn’t end. That’s what hell is. It’s never-ending. It just doesn’t stop. Kinda like money and I know what you’re thinking. The answer is yes. I saw in that moment that people who are addicted to survival are all living inside the hell within their minds. Meaning, if every waking hour you are worried about or thinking about your survival—this includes rich and poor alike—then you are living in hell. Everyone on Wall Street is living in their hell. This is hell, here on earth and they’re living it. All they can think about is their next Ferrari, mutual fund investment, paycheck, commission, diamond, or relationship to conquer. I saw beautiful young men and women who were smart, talented, well-respected and living these great successful lives—who were living in the hell inside their minds. I saw our national heroes: Navy Seals who are given honors by the president of our country. They were living in constant hell, because they were living under constant threat, this need to protect and be strong—all in order to what? Bueller? Bueller? Ferris? You got it: to survive. No matter how many luxury villas you own, how muscled your body is, how many hot trophy wives you’ve had, how many exciting adventures you’ve gone on, hell for “these” people is that it’s never enough. Ever. It never ends. That’s hell.
At this point I hit mental-trick insanity. My mind was playing tricks on me and I started to go mentally insane. I repeatedly had the same thought over and over again, trying it out the same way each time with the same outcome. It was like turning the pages of a book that never ends and each page has the same thing written on it. No matter how many pages you read, the story never changes. That’s hell.
The sun went down. It came up again. Day Two and I was still in hell. I thought for sure this was just an overnight trip. But did God book us for the weeklong cruise? I was coughing up blood and green slime. I was hunched over wheezing and dry-heaving. I was crying out as I always do for biracial Jesus and picturing his gorgeous dark skinned face with wavy locks and turquoise green eyes. Then, I realized something. He was sitting next to me on this rollercoaster ride through hell and he wasn’t getting off the ride. He was holding the handle bar pressed firmly against our laps and I had no escape. I realized that he was my captor, not my rescuer. He was my jailor, not my savior. I clutched Koala Bear to my chest and whispered in his furry ear, “He’s with us, but he’s not with us.”
Can I mention something? Hell has no background music. Just basic screaming, nonstop tormented chatter, flickering of flames and an assault of labored breathing. I would think there would be heavy metal bands, suicide death rattle electric guitars, emaciated pale teenagers serenading the suffering, but no. None of that. It’s like they have to really focus on what they’re doing, which is the intense strife for meaninglessness. It’s remarkable that the lack of vibrational sound filled in with the noise of pain is a marked and scarring characteristic of hell. But if I had to put a soundtrack to hell, it would be the most annoying sound I could think of like the beeps of a hospital life support machine combined with gobs of pork lard splattering in boiling caldrons of oil and supermodels promising to deliver world peace once they’re crowned bikini princess of the planet (I guess that’s still not music).
Day Two combined with Night Two of hell went thus: negativity. Lesson #3 about hell. It consists 99% of one thing, which is negative thoughts. Everything was negative. Beyonce? Yuck. Private jets? OMG, really? They suck. Husky puppy dogs? Bleh. I felt like I was on a reality TV program of the Real Housewives, but then soon, I realized that it snowballed. One negative thought gained momentum and then it was uncontrollable. It moved at the speed of light hitting everything around it. Like a spear, it shattered all the lights of loving thoughts around it as though they were fragile lamps. Soon, the blackness covered everything. I could see nothing and hear everything. Whispers of the most negative opinions about everything echoed like a metallic ping pong in a cave made of metal. It was Anne Coultier, Sean Spicer, plus millions of others like them. Rolling boulders of negative thoughts plowing down all who dared to venture in their path. It sounded like this, “You-suck-you-suck-you-suck-you-suck-you-suck-you-suck-you-suck!” The feeling was of virgin stress. Ridiculous Nazi style stress. Raw and ragged. Pure. Stress. Of all the experiences of hell, this was the worst.
On Day Three, I lay there with Koala Bear suctioned to my chest. I sobbed. This was hard. In the middle of February for God to take me on a field trip to hell, right when I had plans to not do any school work but to focus on writing my book—it was for sure a surprise. That’s the way hell is though. It comes like a thief in the night! I reminisced that if God had told me, I would have Jonah’ed it, meaning ran for the hills and got swallowed by a whale, which makes a u-turn in the firey pit and spits me back up on the arid shores of hell.
I was not on speaking terms with God. Me and Koala Bear were traumatized. I felt my pneumonia break and knew that the tour of hell was practically complete. But I laid low just to make sure. At a certain point, I was going to have to go to class. So after thirty hours of laying under my covers and telling Koala Bear how f—ed up this all was, I got dressed in seventeen layers of clothing and waddled outside.
Stark. Raving. Beauty. The sun was shining on all the snow and the world was full of light!
Wait. Let me pause. I forgot. It took me six hours to get out of the house. After all those days and nights, namely four of them, I finally fell asleep. When I awoke, I was in bliss, euphoria. The air was like cool mink fur against my teeth and my tongue. My skin glittered with sparkles of light. In fact the cells of my entire body were filled with soft globules of light as though they were lava lamps, each one of them. They smiled. Each of my cells smiled.
The thought occurred to me that during my ranting and raving in hell, I asked God to remove the conditioning or programs in my brain that made me addicted to survival. I saw a ripping out of eighty percent of my flesh from my bones and what was left, was me in the form I was then, writhing in pain on my bed. My emotional and physical addictions to both food and alpha men were gone. I was left with the bloody shreds of myself to move on with life. All my sexiness was destroyed and therefore, I was free to go. I looked like a shark had taken a bite out of me. I was the shape of a crescent with the majority of my body and insides removed.
At this point, I realized that the gaping hole had been filled in by something that was not me. It was God. I slithered in my bed and the covers felt like liquid silk. They glided over my body. Me and Koala Bear luxuriated and felt this fabric gorgeously swirling about us like it were the colors of the wind and we were both Pocahontas. I was twirling and dancing as though my body were a waltz. This took about ninety minutes.
Then, I got up. For some reason, I was naked. I had this brilliant thought. “Let’s try to brush our teeth.” Who was I speaking to? God, of course. He was in my body, after all, so let’s feel what it feels like to brush God’s teeth! I was so excited. I put on my robe and got myself into the bathroom. Oh, it felt good. The water in my mouth felt delicious. My teeth were pearls and my lips were branches of honey with cinnamon. Normally, I’d do my hair but God said, “I don’t want to do my hair.” So I said, “Ok, you don’t want your hair done. Let’s go!”
My skin was incredible. It was spiritually soft and its aura extended out about three feet, meaning everything within three feet of me, I could feel touching the energy of my skin. It felt so good. It felt so sensual. It felt so minky furry juicy cuddly lovey dovey pinky splinky heapy peepy sippy pippy kissy lah lah. Then, I thought, “Was it the teaspoon of Nyquil I took four days ago? Am I on some kind of delayed chemical high?” God shouted loud and proud, “No! This is me.”
I’m like, “Duh! Only God can do this,” which sparked the “only God can do this” dance. That lasted a while. An hour went by where I got partially dressed but mostly distracted by sheer joy. For one thing, I hadn’t eaten in about five days at this point. Food was not even a thought. Also, me and Koala Bear wanted to look out the window. We were mesmerized. The world was lovely. Then, we pivoted and for some reason, God wanted to watch Winnie the Pooh video’s before we went outside.
This took me about two hours. It was the most marvelous material I have ever witnessed. At one point, Winnie has to exercise so he does a dance where he sings, “I am stout and round.” He holds out his arms and turns in a circle and then he bounces his round butt and sings, “I am short and fat and proud of that!” I watched that video about fifty times. I realized that Pooh was me and God was Christopher Robin. Christopher Robin is not like the little kids in movies today who are smart-alecy, sarcastic and have voices that sound like they smoke cigarettes. He’s kind and sings well and whenever Pooh gets in trouble, Christopher has nothing to do but rescue him and off they go! Plus, Christopher Robin is always giving Pooh a party, rewarding him for sitting in a chair floating in a river or something like that because he loves Pooh oh-so-much.
But now this Christopher Robin-like God was inside of me and I decided to take him out for a spin. When we got outside, the world was bright and it looked like heaven. God and I waddled across town, staring at the brightness of everything. The light in the world reflected the light within me. That’s when it began.
As much and as often as I heard negative thoughts during my stay in hell, is how much and how often I heard positive thoughts when I was sprung free from the prison of hell. Everything was funny! Like “stomach-hurting giggling fits” funny. Every thought was a joke of some kind. I couldn’t keep a straight face about anything. I saw funniness everywhere. Nothing bothered me. The most offensive people were funny. I could joke to their face about how ugly they were and laugh my ass off. The world was intensely bright.
Over the next two days, I still had headaches, but I didn’t want to take Excedrin. Lesson #4 about hell is that anything that separates me from God is a sin. That includes white flour, drugs of any kind including aspirin, caffeine, deep fried food and excuses to eat sugar. The greatest sin ever is the belief that, “I can do this on my own,” without God. That’s how I got sick in the first place! I took some Nyquil thinking that I could cure my “cold” on my own, instead of relying on God. That turned into pneumonia. Those two days off that I took from consulting God cost me my health. All the pain and suffering I was feeling in hell was the culmination of my years where I chose to be separated from God. This is what being separated God felt like: hell.
I also went to the gym with my friend the Buddhist nun, Chang Shen, and felt what it felt like to have God doing yoga inside of me. Honestly, I got to experience being four years old again, to be a child, to play. I kept trying to convince the Buddhist nun to build a snow man with me and she just looked at me and said that we had more important things to do. She reminded me that we attended Harvard.
“Harvard?” Now at this point, I still was not talking so I would text the Buddhist nun or use sign language. It was amazing how easy it was for us to communicate with me not speaking or even texting.
I looked within me and there were no traces of the radioactive fallout of having attended Harvard, the number one most stressful, demanding and prestigious academy in the world. I had none of what my classmates have—that pressure to succeed. I only had this soft gray fur. I was a koala bear. I pointed again to the snow and stomped my foot! “Snow man!” I told Chang Shen. “No,” she shook her head and pulled on my elbow towards the YMCA. We were scheduled to lift weights and do yoga. So off we went to yoga-land.
Everything changed. Nothing was “yoga” anymore. It was yoga-land. It’s not Harvard. It’s Harvard Marvard Park. I’m not going to class. I’m gonna check out how God likes my classy wassy. Every person, every human, every action is a universe. And that’s what we all are, universes colliding. Galaxies breaking apart and reforming. We are worlds unto worlds. Stars begetting stars. Meteors dying. Suns shining. Moons hymning.
God is in me. Like really inside of me and he doesn’t like greasy food. I have to ask him about every fifteen seconds if he’s doing okay and what he wants to do now. I have to ask him if it’s okay if we do homework now or read a book or if he wants to go to the gym? I have to make sure our day goes well because I want to make sure that he is doing well and that he is okay and that Harvard isn’t crushing the life out of him and that he is still here, having fun, with me. This is me, now. I’m no longer Vicky Chia-lin Lee, rain on dry wood. I am Vicky, plus one, plus God. I am God with a Vicky lemon-lime twist and a dash of deep belly giggles. It’s weird to be in school where no one laughs or giggles or plays with God. They just study and think and forge forward, intellectually. They are plain like unsweetened yogurt with no promise. But sometimes, I see Sophia with her orange hair or see Lisa with her vibrating brain cells, pupils dilating if I mention Derrida (or rather, point to it on a book cover since I no longer talk) and then the world becomes again, a universe, like an aquarium where I can place the energy of God and watch it shine and we can both laugh and laugh and laugh because they are a shiny beacon, a God-head, if you will! A laughing Godhead. So I go around school and if I see an aquarium, I can light it like a torch and be on my way. But if not, for mostly there are drones here, gray-hued automatons injecting knowledge into their gray matter past its saturation point, I just observe quietly and stay by myself.
Lesson #5 about hell. Christ died for our sins. Yolky, hokey, pokey, yeah? What happened was I tried to sleep the first night in hell. It didn’t really work out for me. It’s not a tranquil lambswool cozy wozy environment. Do you wanna know why? Because every thirty minutes, I’d be choked with blood gurgling in my throat. A demon was strangling me to death. Then, I’d look up crying for Jesus and there was a reason why he couldn’t help me! He was right beside me with a crown of thorns and he was also being choked by a demon with blood gurgling in his throat and blood pouring from his eyes, mouth, nose and ears. So basically, I was being crucified with Jesus.
Apparently, I mean, this is my understanding from the whole ordeal—after being choked every thirty minutes for several hours—I kinda got the hang of it and realized that the reason God could not help Jesus on the cross was because Jesus had—get this—”chosen” to be separated from God. He had chosen to take on the sin of the whole world and sin is what? Bueller? Bueller? Ferris? Yup, you got it. Sin is separation from God. It’s a big middle finger pointing to the sky saying, “Hey dude. Chillax! I got this one! I can do it on my own. So no bother. Just stay put. I’m going to handle this by myself.”
So not only had Jesus chosen to take on this experience, but apparently, I was doing like a “ride along” which is the colloquial term for what you do when you go with a police officer on his beat to catch bad guys and hopefully experience a lot of “action,” i.e. violence. So I kind of casually turned to my Lord in between chokings, both of us hanging there, and while blood was pouring out of his eyes, literally like waterfalls, I asked, “Hey. How long are we going to do this?” Because as I recall, he was like hung at 6 pm and by 9 am the next morning he was dead. So I’m thinking around eight hours? You may think me crass but when you are hanging on a cross, do YOU want to know how long you will be up there?
And so I was hanging there, being choked and I had time to think, you know, especially since sleep was a no-no. So I thought, “I’m being crucified with Jesus.” Somehow, oddly, that made me feel better. It was a sort of Crossfit athletic mentality that said, “Hey, if you’re gonna do this W.O.D. (workout of the day), then, I might as well do it with you. But it sucks.” And then the words of a Navy Seal, David Goggins, came into my mind, “If it doesn’t suck, I don’t do it.” I personally don’t agree with this philosophy, but technically I was the sidekick, not the captain. I was not the one calling the shots. I was the one being shot at! “Hello!” with a big “hell” and a bigger ass “OH!”
That’s my story Morning Glory and now God is tired from writing it, so I need to take him somewhere where he can rest now and watch Winnie the Pooh videos.
