(cont.) "For a long time I framed what I consider to be my differences -- the things about me that make me different than most people, speaking categorically -- in fairly obvious ways."
"My life was unremarkable to the extent that it passed in ways that we've all seen or read about or experienced a million times."
"I grew up in a small town. My father died before I could remember him and my mother was always just completely stressed out about money. I had two sisters -- twins -- who spent all of their time together. I didn't feel related to them at all, especially once they went to junior high and were obsessed with jeans and boys and going to parties. They dated the same guy at the same time, this loser who was like four years older than they were. I think he sold drugs. I don't like to judge, but the whole thing was weird."
"They thought I was weird because I liked to spend as much time as I could in the library. It was like the only place I knew that was quiet. I didn't read a lot of books, but I read the same ones over and over, mostly the ones by Madeleine L'Engle and Ursula Le Guin. And Watership Down. Because I always believed that animals could talk. And obviously I wanted to escape, even though I couldn't have really framed it in those terms at the time. That's how it is with kids, I think. You just know that there's another world out there because someone's written about it, and slowly it occurs to you that in order to get there, you have to leave where you are now."
"When I finally left home -- I was sixteen -- I thought that escape was more a question of geography, whereas now I would say it's more a question of psychology."
"Life in the city wasn't the fantasy I had imagined. It wasn't an escape. People still looked at me like I was a freak and animals still didn't talk. It began to dawn on me that the things I wanted most in life weren't ever going to happen."
"But I still went to the library as much as I could, like whenever I wasn't working, that's where I would go."
"One night as they were closing, I decided that I wanted to spend the night there, so that's what I did. I wasn't that hard. I just hid under one of the chairs as they were closing up, and a few minutes later, I was alone in the dark, except for a few lights they kept on in the hallway. And there were security guards, too, but they made the rounds in very predictable ways, so it was easy to avoid them. I don't know if you've ever spent a night in a library, but it's very different than during the day. There's no rustling or footsteps or coughs or whispered conversations, it's just you and all these books. There are so many words, and all of a sudden it was like I could hear them. It was like this explosion or cacophony of awareness, almost like that second when someone walks into a surprise birthday party and the lights go on and there's mayhem, except this mayhem was in my head."
"I couldn't stay in that room, so I ran down the hall and ended up going down some stairs into the basement, which was a maze. It was frightening but I felt like I needed to be there. It was the reason I had heard the books."
"I went into a small room and just sat in the dark next to some old cabinets. I wasn't scared anymore. I felt like I was waiting for something."
"And that's when I saw them. There were two of them. They opened the door, came into the room, took something out of the file cabinets, and left. I was watching through a crack in the closet, where I went when I heard the door start to open. And they weren't librarians or guards or any kind of person I had ever seen. They were wearing clothes, but their skin -- like what you could see of it -- was glowing."
"Did I tell anyone? No, I never told anyone, because I knew that nobody would believe me. But I never forgot, either, which I've come to think of as a gift and a burden, the thing that truly sets me apart. Maybe it will be different now that I know that there are others like me, but maybe not, if we're all living in places like this."
Pictures taken in Fort Tryon Park on June 4, 2016. Text excerpted from The #Gods Project: A Training Manual (Section 2, "Interviews with the Institutionalized.")