My Mental Story

For about 15 years now I’ve been suffering from psychosis. I hear voices and experience delusions. Everywhere, all day and all night. For the most part I’ve done what I can to fight it and ignored the cacophony of noise and the calls to harm or kill myself. I’ve learned to meditate, clear my mind, focus my energy. However it’s not pleasant and I’m in constant struggle with it. This is something I’ve kept to myself because of the implications from work colleagues, friends and family. I’m terrified of their reactions and how they’d view me. To be quite honest, the voices already tell me what they’ll think or feel towards me. My best friend is the only one who knows, not even my wife knows, and I doubt that she ever will. That friend is the only one who has been able to ease the noise and whose voice an presence can overpower the consistent and constant abuse my own mind creates for me. It’s part of the reason she’s so important to me. I still live in fear of what she thinks of me since she is the only one who knows. I don’t think I could ever bring myself to risk losing her. Living like this is hell. A conversation with a friend goes from a favour being asked to lining up every possible outcome and ulterior motive and thought process that they may be having when really, they’re asking me for a favour. Someone telling me that my work is good, or that I matter becomes a battleground of voices within my head of why they’re wrong and how they lie to me when really, the person may just genuinely care for me. I wouldn’t know. The voices I hear are stronger than everyone I speak to. They know and understand me better than anyone else, because they are me. They know my weaknesses, my insecurities, what matters to me and what I believe in. And it’s coming to a point where it’s becoming extremely hard to differentiate between realities. I’m terrified of what could happen. Are my symptoms getting worse? Am I losing my grip? These are concerns that I don’t expect anyone else to understand or know. The need to be grounded and having a trusted voice that wasn’t one of my own mind is paramount so as to minimise risk to my already fragile mental health. The voices I hear are quiet, but sharp. They’re whispering, but loud. The voices in my head aren’t just in my head, They’re everywhere. They feel like they’re coming from all angles, from all around me. Whispering from the corner of the room, screaming from the other side of a closed door. Most of them are coherent, whilst others are impossible to focus on. They’re a myriad of voices and some of them aren’t even in languages that I know or understand. This creates an extremely claustrophobic personal experience that makes almost any situation uncomfortable. Not all the voices are bad. That’s one of the things that makes living with them, personally, so terrifying. The voices that I hear aren’t all trying to make me harm or kill myself. I think the scariest thing for me is, I don’t believe that I would have whatever skills and talents I posses whether creative, technical, personal, or professional, without the help of these voices. Some have guided me to success, whilst others have guided me down extremely dangerous and destructive paths. When in a difficult situation, my field of view becomes more narrow and constrained. My only indication of danger is that of my voices telling me to watch out. And right there, that is dangerous. Developing trust with a hallucination is the first step to everything going awry. I listen to the voice and it feeds me with information about a task, people, places, objects, the world, what people are really thinking, what they’re feeling. I begin to believe it more an more and become dependent on it. They’ve been right about everything so far, maybe they’re right now, at a dark place, maybe not believing what someone tells me is the right thing to do. Maybe pushing away my friends and family will be better for them, they don’t need to deal with my problems. Maybe cutting into my arm will help ease the pain by releasing endorphins. Maybe killing myself will stop me being a burden to the people I love, and they can be happier without me. Everything must serve a purpose and meaning to me. Seeing some patterns is something that can cause a lot of distress. I find great difficulty when I can’t find a pattern that works and it becomes almost obsessive and compulsive. I’m constantly trying to connect the dots of peoples thoughts and actions to try and find the reality of any given situation. Because everything needs to make sense, everything must line up. If it doesn’t it can’t be real. I’m not someone with a lot of purpose or reason for life. I don’t feel that I need to do anything further. But a unexpected and possibly traumatic event can change that. A change in the order of things can upset that. A request or demand from a loved one, can create that. In reality, maybe I should let go of what’s pulling me down and destroying me from the inside? But the idea, the construct, the delusion that this is something I must do is the only thing keeping me going, and giving me purpose. Because without it, what am I doing? This possible delusion that I live my life by is the only thing keeping me here and breathing. Nothing makes sense. My personal struggles of loss, pain, fear and self-worth are a constant up and down. When all seems okay for a period of time, suddenly a tsunami of anxiety will overcome me and I’m going through yet another mental breakdown and this struggle goes on every day. One of the many issues for someone like myself is obtaining empathy regarding my own situation. Telling someone that you hear voices and believe in something isn’t easy to begin with. Trying to explain that you’re still a human being with thoughts and feelings and that there are broken synapses in your brain that make you think and feel things you don’t even know you shouldn’t be, is terrifying. Feeling like a pariah for most of your life is tough, but something you get used to. No-one understands an do-one will, the voices will tell me. Or I tell myself. It’s hard to really know the difference at this point. Because the few times that I do try to express myself at the suggestion and request of loved ones or professionals, it doesn’t feel like it helps at all. I end up feeling more alone, now that some people know. They don’t know how to deal with me. They don’t know what any of this means, and we come to the epicentre of conflict of belief systems. I could be honest and tell my wife I’m tired of living, that I’m done with the whispers and the screaming and the constant battles every minute of the day and I want it to end. And the response I would get is “no, you’ve been through so much” or “think of your children that you’ll leave behind” or “you have so much to live for”. All of which become new voices in an already exhausted space. The very action of seeking help has now become a new weight added and nothing changes. The cycle continues, just this time people you love think of you as a time bomb. Living like this is exhausting. It shouldn’t be this hard, but the emotional, psychological and physical strain of just existing is just too exhausting. Living with psychosis and the false realities that my mind creates for me, is the only reality I know. These feelings of having no place or purpose in the world, of not belonging to anywhere or with anyone and constantly standing on the edge of wanting to take my own life is the only thing I know to be true. The constant voices, these hallucinations are always there. They have been there for me since as far back as I can remember and they guided me with every step. I don’t know if what I’m doing with my life is based on a delusion that my mind has created for me or if I should just end it all so I can get away from all the noise. I don’t know. I have no idea.