Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Tolentino describes the megachurch she attended growing up, which she jokingly refers to as the "Repentagon" because of its size. Tolentino explains her parents' history with the church. Though they'd grown up Catholic in the Philippines, they had become Baptists when they moved to Toronto. In Houston, they'd responded to the pastor's style, placing Tolentino in the school in first grade when she was four years old. She accepted the teachings easily, enjoying how easy she found it to tell what was good or bad according to doctrine. When she prayed, she felt blessed. However, by middle school, Tolentino had become more ambivalent towards her religion, which worried her. One day, she left church in the middle of a service to sit in the car and listen to the radio.

Tolentino contextualizes her religious experiences in 1980s and 1990s Houston. Houston, Tolentino writes, is an enormous city that lacks public activity. The megachurches feel like a town, which Tolentino believes is part of their appeal. In this context, a new kind of hip-hop movement emerged. This wave was characterized by a sound as belonging to DJ Screw in particular, with a slowed-down tempo. Famous for this style, DJ Screw insisted on selling tapes in person, rather than through a distributor, until 1998 when he set up his own shop: Screwed Up Records, based on the "chopped and screwed" style of the music. Tolentino characterizes this music as giving listeners a feeling of slowing down, as when one is addicted to codeine cough syrup ("lean"), which is also associated with rappers, who write songs about it.

Tolentino recollects the first time she heard this music, in her parents' car outside their church, and how simultaneously uneasy and comforted it made her. She then elaborates on other seeming incompatibilities in her teenage years: learning about twerking at when she was 13 at cheerleader camp, listening to Southern rap with friends while going to church twice a week. At the end of her teenage years, she writes, church started to feel corrupt. When she came home from college, she tried cough syrup for the first time at a party and felt blessed.

Now, Tolentino recognizes that her early religious experiences did benefit her. In the end, she writes, she left because she was tired of trying to make her worldview fit with what she learned in church. This was particularly true in the context of the time and place she grew up, when there was a focus on the prosperity gospel, or the idea that wealth comes from God and thus shows an individual's inherent worth. The combination of kindness and cruelty unsettled her, and recent events have borne out her unease, particularly a 2019 investigation into hundreds of sexual assault cases in Southern Baptist churches, with her church named in particular.

Tolentino then pivots to Christian writing, particularly C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, seeing her own path away from religion reflected in the book. She writes that she fully stopped believing in God when she first did ecstasy. Noting that they have a similar appeal, Tolentino describes how religion and drugs both allow for transcendence and a separation from the self. She continues by discussing ecstatic experiences recounted by both a religious ecstatic and the accounts of drug users.

Tolentino describes the history of the drug ecstasy, also known as Adam, MDMA, and molly. Working in stages, ecstasy turns the user's focus inward, making them better able to recognize other's emotions and connect to them. In doing so, it creates a feeling of unity while removing fear and confusion. By the 1990s, it was called ecstasy and being used in raves, which was the context in which Tolentino tried it in college. By 2011, she writes, it was known as molly and had become more mainstream.

Tolentino notes that the associated dangers ascribed to ecstasy are urban legends based on distorted information. However, she writes, dealers do change the drug's makeup, making risky; imprecise doses and lack of precautions can further increase risks. She became careful about using it herself, worried that the comedown after its use would become permanent. Despite these risks, Tolentino writes, using the drug still feels like a religious experience in terms of the sense of belonging and grace it produces. Researchers once thought that limited treatment with MDMA (a related substance) was all that was necessary to produce changes in the patient. Tolentino posits that the same could be said of religion.

Tolentino then turns back to writings on the state of ecstasy, particularly to Anne Carson's 2005 essay collection Decreation, in which the author connects the poet Sappho to both Marguerite Porete, a mystic burned at the stake in 1310, and Simone Weil, a French intellectual who collaborated with the Nazis and starved herself to death in 1943. Within all three writings, Tolentino notes the desire to disappear. Yet this is complicated by the fact that they are writing. On another note, she remarks, the erasure can only happen once, as in the Rapture.

Tolentino recalls her last time attending the megachurch, for her high school graduation. There, she gave a different speech than what had been approved by the administration. At the holiday service the next year, Tolentino found it overwhelming and had to leave. She questions whether she would still be religious in a different time or place. Is ecstasy a sign of relief or the cause of it, she asks. She connects her use of the drug to her religious feelings in childhood. Recounting a recent experience taking drugs in the desert, Tolentino wonders if she is chasing the truth now or clinging to scraps of it.

Finally, Tolentino writes, DJ Screw died in 2000, with codeine, valium, and PCP in his system. Many mourned him. That same year, Tolentino went on a trip to Alabama with a group from her church to conduct mass baptisms and services. Later, she did drugs with some of them. To conclude, Tolentino writes that she sees "drugs, church, and money" (155) as the institutions that connect Houston.