Giraffey
Your Orange Crush
- Mar 7, 2020
- 439
Way back when I was just a teen, I suffered from the most bizarre hallucinations and delusions. I was convinced that I was being followed, at one point I thought there had been a failed assassination attempt on my life, and that led eventually to me believing that MI5 were using circuits implanted in my brain during a daring field operation in my bedroom, unbeknownst to my parents sleeping soundly nextdoor, and that they were now using these to elepathically control me and induce seizures (I actually suffered psychogenic seizures during their supposed experiments).
It sounds mad thinking back, but I had evolved an entire mythology and system of logic around these ridiculous beliefs. Why would the government intelligence service target me? Because I had been involved in computer hacking as a teenager and my father had recently done some work for a government contractor.
How could circuits be implanted in my brain communicate thoughts wirelessly into my brain? Bone conduction is a very real technology and transcranial magnetic stimulation and implanted electrodes exist - it stands to reason that the government has secret advanced versions of such technology capable of advanced capabilities...
For every question I had an answer that contained enough buzzwords to sound perfectly rational to an observer and that satisfied my own rather distorted logical reasoning.
I was also hearing voices and following their instructions to the letter. Thankfully they never told me to hurt anyone else, it was just a daily inconvenience, like randomly being forced to take a detour because I'd been told that "bad things would happen" if I didn't turn left right now...
Then came the moment of reckoning, I was almost committed to a psychiatric hospital indefinitely. Were it not for an intervention from an old psychologist who argued against sectioning me, my life would have been over at that point, I'd have lost my place at university and become institutionalised.
It was a wake-up call, I knew that I wasn't well, I just couldn't figure out what to do about it.
I spent the next six months or more intensively working on recovering and curing myself. I had no psychiatrist, no therapy and no medication, I was all alone, using my brain to fix my mind.
I began to talk back to my voices, to question their instructions, to ask them what they represented and to disobey them. They could never be specific when I asked about what the "bad things" they foresaw actually were, and when bad things did happen, I made a conscious effort to pause and deconstruct the situation.
For every event and belief in my life I found a rational alternative that I could empirically and evidentially verify. If I couldn't prove something, I simply stopped believing it. I learned to self-reflect and identify logical inconsistencies and bizarreness in my thinking in exactly the same way as I had been doing in my dreams.
Dreams have tell-tale signs that differentiate them from reality. Objects appear in impossible configurations, people do things that are extremely unlikely to be witnessed in real life, such as flying unassisted, or metamorphosing. I learned to identify such patterns in my own thinking and to consciously filter them - it took months of work, but eventually my thinking became clearer and I felt the bite of reality again.
I was so bad that I had been diagnosed with schizophrenia back then, today I have not suffered any psychotic symptoms for about eight years.
This positivity however, is a double edged sword. Perhaps it may inspire somebody out there who is suffering that it is possible to recover, and yet by virtue of me being here, it surely cannot.
I beat a very nasty psychosis that had lasted for years, but I seemingly can't beat 'this' - the curse my current existence. Or perhaps I can, provided I don't run out of energy and give up before I ever taste hope again.
Anyway, so sorry, my thoughts are a mess this evening. Just wanted to share that and get it off my chest.
It sounds mad thinking back, but I had evolved an entire mythology and system of logic around these ridiculous beliefs. Why would the government intelligence service target me? Because I had been involved in computer hacking as a teenager and my father had recently done some work for a government contractor.
How could circuits be implanted in my brain communicate thoughts wirelessly into my brain? Bone conduction is a very real technology and transcranial magnetic stimulation and implanted electrodes exist - it stands to reason that the government has secret advanced versions of such technology capable of advanced capabilities...
For every question I had an answer that contained enough buzzwords to sound perfectly rational to an observer and that satisfied my own rather distorted logical reasoning.
I was also hearing voices and following their instructions to the letter. Thankfully they never told me to hurt anyone else, it was just a daily inconvenience, like randomly being forced to take a detour because I'd been told that "bad things would happen" if I didn't turn left right now...
Then came the moment of reckoning, I was almost committed to a psychiatric hospital indefinitely. Were it not for an intervention from an old psychologist who argued against sectioning me, my life would have been over at that point, I'd have lost my place at university and become institutionalised.
It was a wake-up call, I knew that I wasn't well, I just couldn't figure out what to do about it.
I spent the next six months or more intensively working on recovering and curing myself. I had no psychiatrist, no therapy and no medication, I was all alone, using my brain to fix my mind.
I began to talk back to my voices, to question their instructions, to ask them what they represented and to disobey them. They could never be specific when I asked about what the "bad things" they foresaw actually were, and when bad things did happen, I made a conscious effort to pause and deconstruct the situation.
For every event and belief in my life I found a rational alternative that I could empirically and evidentially verify. If I couldn't prove something, I simply stopped believing it. I learned to self-reflect and identify logical inconsistencies and bizarreness in my thinking in exactly the same way as I had been doing in my dreams.
Dreams have tell-tale signs that differentiate them from reality. Objects appear in impossible configurations, people do things that are extremely unlikely to be witnessed in real life, such as flying unassisted, or metamorphosing. I learned to identify such patterns in my own thinking and to consciously filter them - it took months of work, but eventually my thinking became clearer and I felt the bite of reality again.
I was so bad that I had been diagnosed with schizophrenia back then, today I have not suffered any psychotic symptoms for about eight years.
This positivity however, is a double edged sword. Perhaps it may inspire somebody out there who is suffering that it is possible to recover, and yet by virtue of me being here, it surely cannot.
I beat a very nasty psychosis that had lasted for years, but I seemingly can't beat 'this' - the curse my current existence. Or perhaps I can, provided I don't run out of energy and give up before I ever taste hope again.
Anyway, so sorry, my thoughts are a mess this evening. Just wanted to share that and get it off my chest.
