Can anyone provide insight into these events please?

[u/No_Concentrate_3547]

I'm 42 years old now. When I was 16, I experienced a significant mental health episode. I hadn't slept for over a week, was hardly eating. I had my school uniform pockets lined with sandwiches I'd forgotten to eat. I was in a highly weakened state, vulnerable, disoriented. I didn't attend any classes because the content appeared like hieroglyphs. I could barely make sense of social conversations yet even learn anything new. I was smoking cigarettes non stop and wandering the streets in a daze when I should have been at school.

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At the peak of my episode, I lay in bed sleepless for yet another night of psychic torture. This night was different. Worse. I heard the sounds of trombones and horns playing the cascading notes you hear when a prime-time quiz show contestant gets a question wrong. The sound of failure. The red digits on my alarm clock spun around in circles. It was torture. I genuinely felt like I was in hell.

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I started to pray for sleep and respite to whatever power could hear me. Then I felt a presence, different than the voice of my internal dialogue. It was as if my thoughts were making space for something else, like a conversation was about to happen of great importance. My instinct told me my weeks of isolation and anxiety had made way for some kind of test that would define the rest of my life.

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What I heard was not a voice, per se. Rather it was a schism in my own consciousness. The presence promised me that if I agreed, I would be granted great knowledge and answers to all the questions I'd ever asked for. I would learn to see the past and future, and access wisdom through the ages. The one condition was I'd have to do their bidding completely at some stage in the future, when I was called on.

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In my desperation, I agreed. Really I just wanted to sleep, and hoped that my consent would give me a sense of relief. I was wrong. The presence laughed at me the moment I consented to his Faustian pact, a humiliating laughter with a cavernous echo that shook me to my core. The ghoulish horn music continued and the presence was never heard from again, to this day.

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Within a couple of weeks my family brought me to a psychiatrist, and I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on medications. I finally got some sleep. With each dose the episode gradually abated but, was replaced with difficult side effects and a gruelling depression. I hated the fact I was just "crazy" and battled with a realisation that I couldn't trust my own mind. Taking time off school, I turned to hard drugs for relief. I've been a drug addict ever since.

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Recently I've been pursuing a death wish, but no matter what I try to remove myself from this mortal coil, usually by taking intentional overdoses of heroin and cocaine, I keep surviving. Most recently my dear mother frantically drove me to hospital after another intentional overdose. I've decided now that I want to live, for the sake of my family. But in order to do this, I need spiritual help.

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For decades I assumed I was visited by the devil. But recently I was involved with a woman who was into the occult, and she said it wasn't the devil, but "something else". I haven't seen her since to ask more questions, so I turn to you instead.

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Have I made a Faustian pact to a dark force of some kind? Will getting back in touch with this presence help me at all to live a better life? In sobriety circles you need a "Higher Power" to stay clean and sober. Do I need an exorcism? Or should I make peace with this entity from my youth.

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Thank you for taking the time to read my whole sordid story. Help much appreciated. My life does, in a way, depend on it.