messylady

Messy
2023-01-27 06:29:00 (UTC)

Psychosis?

I had a psychotic episode back in 2020. I couldn't tell you exactly how long it lasted, it felt months, it could've been weeks, it could've been the entire two years it took for quarantine to end. I remember being so genuinely afraid of "the person living in my house and stalking me" that I would take a kitchen knife and search every nook and cranny in our house; every nook and cranny except for the garage. I was scared of the garage, there were bugs and shadows and dozens of places to hide. I locked it every day and night, and checked the locks to our houses and windows repeatedly, hourly. Sometimes my grandma would unlock the garage door, sometimes the wind would seep into the garage and blow the door open, the creaking sound of it opening was enough to make my heart drop and skin go pale. I'd sneak through one end of the kitchen, grab a knife, and hurriedly lock and close the garage, then do my routine check of the house and rooms. I'd search each room, under every bed, check every lock, check the bathroom cabinets, behind the shower curtains, in the food pantry, in the backyard. Nights were the worst, I swore I could see figures standing outside my window, watching me. Bright, yellow eyes. I remember the sound of our lemon tree scraping against my window, it'd keep me up at night. I remember seeing someone's eyes peering at me through the curtains. I remember the red light blinking in our vents, a camera? I remember the fear every single time I'd take a shower, peaking through the shower curtain every half-minute to make sure no one else was in there with me. I remember the creaks of the house keeping me up, someone tiptoeing through the hallways? I remember seeing a shadowy figure at the end of the hallway, right next to my room.

And now I'm better, right? Sometimes it feels like reality is slipping away from me. I get so overwhelmed by existing, by being real, it's like my head is tearing itself apart. It's like life is flowing through my blood and my brain. Life, existence, is something special. Our atoms never die, we never die. Consciousness is a gift, our hearts and our eyes and our eyes and our tongues and our fingertips and toes and genitalia and organs and brain is a gift, but existing is a baseline which we will never escape, even in death. We may never experience consciousness in this form and in this era again, we may never experience what it means to be human again. We are apart of a bigger ecosystem, we are the big brothers and sisters to the little things in life. I saw a lone ant a couple of days ago and I let it crawl about, I usually kill them. But I realized, it is just existing like I do, like we all do, the circle of life deems death inevitable, I might set down a few ant traps soon. I saw a ladybug drowning in our lemon tree the other day, I grabbed the wilted roses my ex gave me for Valentines day last year and used the stem to lift it out of the water. I tried to let it crawl on my finger but sadly, it didn't want to. Like the ladybug, I can't trust after trauma, what if I put it back in the water after saving it?

As the older sibling to the ants and the ladybugs and the cats, and all of the little and big things, I want to protect them. I want to do bigger things, make an eco-friendly product line--as well as eco-friendly clothes. I want to study until my eyes go blind from blue light (maybe I can go to my local library and save my eyes the strain). I hate fracking, and plastic, and the microplastics in our blood and lungs, the plastic at the bottom of the Marianna trench, the plastic in the bellies and around the necks of our little siblings, the plastic islands floating in the ocean.

I am the smallest part native, about 20-23%. My great great grandmother migrated to the US from Puerto Rico, and she has direct lineage to the Caribbean Taino tribes. I don't consider myself native, but I feel the rage. I feel the fucking rage. The Taino were raped, and colonized, and enslaved, and starved, and abused, and killed, and diseased by Spaniards--as were many, many other native tribes. What the fuck would the world be now had they not mass murdered them? Why the fuck is that history being erased and forgotten? I'd kill to go back and change history, because the future we're creating is not it.

I have hope in my generation and the generation after us, Gen Alpha. I have hope in the generation Gen Z and Gen Alpha will raise. The world is a fucked up, racist, sexist, homophobic, polluted, angry place. I got distracted when I was talking about my psychosis.

Sometimes the creaking in the house keeps me up at night still. The later into the night it gets, the more everything begins to deconstruct itself. I don't like to say it, I don't like to be so dependent on a person, but I live for my boyfriend. I haven't had a single suicidal thought since we got together. I'm not better, by god, I am NOT better. My room's a mess, and I barely brush my teeth, I have to force myself to shower and to eat, I've been stuck inside my room every single day. I feel so much rage towards my grandma, towards my aunt, towards my cousin, towards my mom and my brothers, towards the kids at my school, that I stay locked in my room with my cat. But, I live for him. He makes my days easier, he makes my smile bigger, he makes my laugh louder. When reality stops and time stands still and suicide seems like reincarnation, I stop. And I take a breath. And with my exhale, I remember that I live for him. I had things to breathe about before we started dating, but I cried every day before we started dating. I still self-harmed and did drugs before we started dating.

Soon, I'll clean my room. Soon, I'll get a job. I might drop out of high-school, so soon I'll get a GED and pay for my own drivers license. The worst part about being mentally unwell and self-aware, is that I am fucking self-aware. Painfully, self-aware. I feel like an ape, an ape in front of a screen, with a brain fried from drugs, with severe trauma and mental illness, an ape who wants to beat the shit out of her legs, who wants to bash her head against a wall until her brains spill, who wants to rip her hair out, who wants to scream until her vocal chords bleed, who wants so painfully to stop existing.

My cousin got home, and I stopped, and I stared at my door. She made a loud sound, and I flinched. And I feel so, fucking, angry. I don't know where this rage came from, it feels inhumane, it feels scary and intrusive. The thoughts I have, I know they're my worst fears, not a desire. I never know if I'm faking, or if I'm severely mentally unwell. And when I think about if I may be severely unwell, I think, so what? What does it matter if I exist in a different perspective than what's thought to be normal. What does it matter if my brain is wired in a way that's different than yours? I think, I'm in a different reality that you don't understand, I live in a world inside my head that's better than the reality of the situation.

The reality? I'm a mentally unwell teenage girl whose overdosed twice, made one trip to the psych ward, who had a drug addiction, an addiction to self-mutilating, severe anorexia / bulimia, who has severe trauma, who has had a psychotic episode, who may have bipolar depression.

The world inside my head? I'm trapped inside a fucking town which I will never escape, I mean never. They are trapping me here, and I'm scared that I can never leave. I'm scared that my boyfriend never actually moved out of town, and he made a joke after I told him that I still have psychotic thoughts, a harmless harmful joke. One which came long after my delusion that he still leaves here; "if you were (in a Truman Show situation) I'm the extra that you weren't supposed to fall in love with. Fuckers kicked me off the set."

My dad once said with a laugh and a smile that it would "suck people could read thoughts, right?" What are you saying, dad?

I remember being trapped in the bathroom, convinced I was in a psych ward or a rehab or a governmental institution. Convinced that dad isn't dad, mouthing to the man on the other side of the mirror; "I'm not fucking stupid, I know he's not my dad. I know you fucking replaced him."

The good parts of this world? I don't really know. Maybe the float-y detached feeling, the bubble I'm in which lets no one except my boyfriend and my close friends (2) in. The fact that I don't care about anyone else, and so I can't be hurt by anyone anymore.

I love being his girlfriend, he brings me down to Earth, back to reality. He knows I'm unwell, not to the extent which I am unwell, but he's seen my episodes. He's experienced me through the years which I was truly detached, all eyes closed. And now, this is the best I've been since I started declining. Sad, isn't it? That this is my best? That my rock bottom is levels below this, that I could be far worse.

The worst thing about being self-aware is I can look you straight in the face while telling you all of my delusions and paranoia, and tell you "I know it's fake, I know none of it is real" because it isn't, right? But still believe in my heart that it is. It feels like psychosis is reality, and reality is psychosis. Like this world we're living in is completely fucking made up, and nothing matters at all, so what does it matter? Really, what does it matter? I can't find a single reason why anything matters. All I know is what I'm made of. I have no idea If I'm "crazy", if any of this sounds crazy (it's simply what I'm made of), and whether or not I'll get better. Whether or not I'll read back on this and sob for the me who may have been balls-deep in psychosis without realizing--and at the same time realizing but not believing--or if I'll still believe. If everything I believe is true. If I have reason to mistrust as deeply as I do, mistrust my family and the government and the idea that one day, I'll be able to read thoughts like they so fucking obviously read mine. But no, ofc my thoughts aren't being read, I'm just crazy and psychotic, right? I'm not trapped here right? I'll leave and I'll live with my boyfriend and I'll start therapy and meds and I'll be a functioning adult who isn't caged by her trauma, right..

The day after my grandma picked me up from my last faint-and-vomit-fest, I was thinking about how deeply I hated her and how I hated my intrusive thoughts. I looked at her through the rear-view mirror, she was staring at me and said "thank you for sharing that," and I looked at my friend who was in the car, she was staring at me; I never opened my mouth? Unless it was a hallucination? (Same night I cussed my reflection out). Grandma responds to my inside thoughts a LOT. I mean a LOT. Make it make sense.

I need a cig, and I need it desperately.




Ad: