Noah Brownlee
Stories (4/0)
Doodling Against Depression
When I was twenty years old, I was diagnosed with Schizoaffective disorder. It is a smaller subset of psychotic disorder that is a mixture between Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia. I was at the time an active duty Marine who knew my career was over. I was ashamed of my actions that had come about during my psychotic episodes. I was barely human, I couldn't put together coherent sentence together to explain how I was feeling and what I was seeing. I had auditory hallucinations that told me to kill myself or other people I would see. I was in and out of inpatient care and I did not want to live anymore. I was put into a program that helped military personel who had developed psychiatric problems while in service to help us with the transition into civilian life. One piece of the program was we had mandatory classes we were sent to try to find hobbies to help with stress and depression. I chose to take a meditation class as well as an art class. My meditation teacher was a very sweet lady from Brazil. She would teach us many breathing methods and at the end of class she would lead us in a guided meditation. This class was very helpful in giving me a chance to gain my bearings for the day. Shortly after the meditation group I went to an art class. In this class I got to play around with many different forms of art and fell in love with abstract art. I felt as if I could explain to people how I felt in that moment, even if I was suicidal I could express it. After many months of being in this program I was addmitted once again to the inpatient wing. I had expressed to the Marine on Duty that weekend that I had no will to live another day and I wanted real help or I would follow through with my own demise. He sat with me in the emergency room for hours. I was feeling awkward and vulnerable and he asked if I had any hobbies. I told him I had played football in high school and liked to go hiking but I was not able to do these things anymore due to being involved in the program for so long. He expressed to me that he loved photography. It was something I never expected from such a big strong man, who until this day had always been mean to me. He showed me his social media posts from all of his photoshoots. He would go on long walks in nature and take shots of the scenes he came across. He had many pictures from the San Diego Zoo as well. I could tell that he was truly in love with his hobby he had found and was jealous of his luck to find his passion. He was interested in my visual hallucinations and asked me if I could draw. I told him that I liked to paint a little bit but it was very abstract and looked horrible to be completely honest. He told me that I should try my hardest to paint or draw what I see on a weekly basis and that I would get better with practice. I took him up on that offer and I have found my strange doodles to be very helpful in showing people in my life what I see without feeling ashamed of my inability to convey those hallucinations orally. I have sold several of these doodles not enough to make a living, but enough to feel as if a few people out there understand what I go through just a tiny bit without having my flavor of mental illness. Whenever I am down in the dumps, my doodles have helped me through it. I am now married with three children, even though my depression, paranoia, and PTSD are still present in my life. There is hope that I can make the dark days a little bit brighter and keep pushing on one day at a time for my family and for myself. Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings.
By Noah Brownlee3 years ago in Psyche
WardLord
After my first psychotic episode, I chalked it up to being drunk as fuck and getting no sleep. It made sense at the time, I mean it is what happened but unfortunately it became the new normal for me. I had my own barracks room to myself because the roomate I was assigned lived with his girlfriend out in town and only kept some of his gear in the room. So I did whatever the hell I wanted without bothering anybody. I would stay up and drink until the early morning watching episodes of Dexter. I didnt think I was causing much harm to my body. I was only twenty years old and I would bounce back with two or three hours of sleep and perform fairly well at work for the most part. I was a rifleman by trade but I had been sent to an office job because they needed a warm body who could do computer shit and field shit. I am still terrible with technology but learned a bunch on the fly to keep from being screamed at. So I am learning a completely new job while getting two hours of sleep during the week all while very quickly becoming a bonifide boozer. My sweat smelled like PBR or vodka depending but not too many people noticed unless I had a rough night. In the military people try really hard to cover for their friends and subordinates because it keeps everybody out of trouble. Most safety briefs comprised of the Sergeant Major telling us that if he didn't have good friends around him he would have been arrested many times, that is the reality for almost everybody in the Marines. We take care of each other, and the way almost all of us grew up, we don't talk about what happened. The next psychotic rampage I went on involved LSD and tequila and my friends took as good of care of me as they could. I went to a rave in Balboa Park in San Diego at the World Beat Center. It was a blast and I had taken some acid for the first time. I did not really tell anybody I did it I just took it and had a wonderful time while I was there. I did not really know what to expect of the trip except that I would see some cool shit. I really enjoyed it while the lights and the music were hitting my system. We got back to the hotel and I started drinking, nobody knew that I had taken the acid until I started getting pretty drunk and wobbly while peaking from the gel tab I had ingested. Everyone looked like a goblin to me, their eyes were droopy and skin cracked and I felt like I was in danger so I kept drinking thinking some how that it would fix it. I ended up blacking out and starting several fights at the party and throwing plates in the hotel and smashing glasses and dancing in the glass with my bare feet. It cut me up pretty good and my friends threw me in the shower while I was screaming at them that I was going to kill them. There is a video of me getting choked unconcious by someone at the party and throwing up all over the place after I had already taken a shower. Everyone was mad as fuck at me and rightfully so, I should have never taken the acid in the state of mind I was in, I should have never drank while tripping and frying my system even further. My friends took care of me instead of throwing me out on the street or calling the cops. They fought the guy that choked me out and stood up for me. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if they had kicked me out of the hotel. They took care of me many other nights but none were that bad until later in 2016 on Labor Day weekend. I felt horrible about the anger I was causing my friends by being such a liability anywhere we went. They set up an intervention of sorts where they told me they were going to have to tell the higher ups to send me to rehab if I didn't chill the fuck out. I hated that I had caused so many problems when I was just trying to have a good time. I hated myself and treated the people around me like garbage. So I decided to turn it down a few pegs and it worked for a few months. Then I got a DUI, everyone was asleep at a bonfire that I had went to and I decided I needed to go get something to eat around 6am. I almost made it to Denny's before I got blue lighted. It was my first time being arrested and it wouldn't be my last. The arresting officer asked me if I wanted to do the field sobriety test and I told him I was going to fail but might as well try it out. I did okay with the test but everybody involved knew I was going to jail because I was still only twenty years old. I am so grateful that I was arrested instead of running somebody over trying to get a breakfast burrito. I had a few years of not driving ahead of me to think about how shitty those kinds of choices were and how I could have hurt many people my whole life. I had always driven drunk. I never thought twice about it at all. Now every time I got in an uber or had to walk a few miles to go get something to eat I was cursing my poor judgement. I have just recently been taking off of probation in the state of California and can now cross the border into Canada without being turned away. Five years later I have a new appreciation for some rules being there for a good reason at the time of this arrest I was made at the world and embarrased that I had gotten caught. I was reduced in rank, pay, and was put on thirty days restriction and thirty days labor by my unit. In the civilian world, I had to get a lawyer, my truck out of impound, and pay over five thousand dolars in fines and court fees that I did not have. I was broke, I was a scared little boy in a big boy world. I tried to play it off like I didn't care, like I was tough and owning up to mistakes. I felt like a fraud and I wanted to go home. While on restriction I started doing a cough and cold medicine called Tripple Cs by those of us who abused the OTC medication. If you take the whole pack of sixteen pills you will trip pretty fucking hard. I didn't know that it could cause liver and kidney failure or I would have taken more. I wanted to die but didn't really have words for it. I would take tripple cs a few times a week and drink budlight until the wee hours. I wasn't supposed to be drinking, I wasn't supposed to be doing anything. It didn't really affect my ability to listen to the people in charge of me that day or to carry out the tasks. So I started doing it more and more often during the day and just giggling to myself because I was high as fuck and functioning okay at work. Our batallion Sergeant Major held a safety brief the Friday that I was going to be let off of restriction with no incident. I was pretty excited to just get out of the barracks and had no plans of getting into trouble, and then he asked if any Marine was aware of a drug called tripple c's. Of course nobody raised their hand because even if you knew you didn't want to be the one to have to explain in front of seven hundred of your peers and superiors. He explained that one of his childhood friend's daughter had overdosed and passed away after taking eight tripple c's one night that week and that he would be making them take the medicine out of the Post Exchange because he noticed the shelf was bare and he didn't want any of us to die from being a dumbass and trying to get high. Little did he or anyone else know that I had taken three packs by myself the night before. I felt disapointed that I wasn't dead. Its a hard feeling to explain, finding out you probably should have crossed over Jordan the night before yet there I was at 5pm the next day getting ready for the weekend feeling fine. I decided I probably shouldn't kill myself on purpose but the riding it til the wheels fell off approach seemed like fun. I didn't want to die in that moment, I just did not want to keep going on, so I decided I would party within the limits of acceptable with my friends and in my own company push those limits to death's doorstep as often as possible. I didn't want people to be mad at me when I was gone. I wanted them to think of me as I wanted to view myself, a normal dude just trying to have fun. The more I stayed up alone in my room, drugs or no drugs, beer or otherwise I was seeing weird things in the corners of the room. My laptop would appear to float in the air as if I was using the force. I would brush my teeth and in my bathroom mirror I would see goblins perched in my shower. I would hear voices that sounded Demonic that would laugh and tell me I was going to meet them soon. I didn't want to tell anybody because they would either laugh it off that I saw gobblins or they would make me go to rehab. I was doing outpatient rehab refferals and getting ready to go to classes and I was ready to either get cleaned up or kill myself. I was starting to see more shit during the day and I wasn't using anything that day, but its a hard thing to explain to anybody. One way or the other I was going to make it stop. and I couldn't decide if death or sober living and getting help was worse.
By Noah Brownlee3 years ago in Psyche
Drugs to stop other Drugs
I grew up in South Mississippi, the view of psychedelics in my area have been taboo for as long as they have been in the public eye. My first experiences with psychedelics were effected by the perception I naturally had from growing up here. My first handful of trips were horrible at the time but taught me many character flaws that I was refusing to address or even aware of. I was no longer afraid to do soul searching and look into the way I treated my body, mind and the people around me. During this phase of my life I was doing high doses of MDMA as well as drinking absurd amounts of beer and vodka. I was pushing myself towards death and I could not have cared less. I smoked two packs a day, I used a can of dip a day, and washed it all down with Monster and Hot Pockets. I was not taking care of any aspect of my life. I worked hard and partied hard, it worked for about six months before my mind completely snapped. I was in psychosis for months. I was in and out of inpatient psych care and substance abuse rehab centers. I was mostly sober, except for the LSD I could sneak. So not sober at all, but it was slowly changing the way I viewed myself and the habits that I had stacked up that had nearly killed me. I kept this use a secret for as long as possible and I was never actually caught, somehow it helped me more than the therapy sessions and the classes. I have not done any of the hard drugs that I was involved with since 2016 because of this. It seems like it would not work and that I was just fucking off but it helped me heal from the damage that my abuse of speed, coke and ketamine had done. I finally moved home from San Diego to Mississippi and refused to go to any 12 Step meetings for a while. I eventually got depressed and lonely enough to go to a local meeting and I dove head first into the whole AA thing. It helped me very much and gave me the break from my own thoughts that I needed. I made it one year completely sober which I had not done since I was fourteen years old. Everybody was proud of me again and it felt good to be recongized for some positive change instead of wrecking my life and forcing people to help me. I lasted about six more months before I decided I wanted to eat shrooms again for the first time since 2016. So I ordred a grow kit and grew about 8 grams in my first try. At the time, I was not doing any drugs besides smoking Marlboro Smooths and taking CBD gummies to help with knee pain and for sleep. I had smoked since I was fourteen and I felt horrible pain in my chest from when I woke up until I went to sleep. I was still attending local meetings and keeping up appearences while growing mushrooms next to my bed. I felt like a total piece of shit, and I wish that I had owned up to it sooner but I wanted to change my state of mind more than I wanted to be truthful. I ate the shrooms after drying them out for a few days and it was off to the races. I did not really have a goal other than trying to stop smoking because I had saw an article about how it might work. So I lit up a square and tried to take a drag and almost threw up from the awful taste in my mouth. It felt as if I was trying to swallow bleach with my lungs. I threw it in my coffee can ash tray on my porch and went inside to lay on my bed. It took a while to get comfortable but once I did I closed my eyes and I saw visions of cancer growing in lungs and myself in a casket. I saw my friends and family looking down on me crying, I tried to open my eyes to make it go away but my room when I looked around was still a funeral proceeding. After a few minutes the visions subsided and I had a warm feeling in my stomach, it was pleasurable while also being extremely painful. When that pleasure/pain went away, I started thinking about how my past choices were going to be the death of me if I did not start taking care of myself. That trip started a few months of me trying to smoke weed and dabbling again with LSD. During these trips I was able to look from a different angle at why I needed to be high to be okay. It was never about what drug it was, anything was better than my own mind to me at the time. Since then, I have taken a few more trips and changed my relationship with booze. I am able to have a single beer and enjoy a football game without completely going off the rails. This has been going on for over two years, I can be inside my mind without smoking, without destroying my brain or my body with the many substances that almost killed me. I learned to be okay with being single and not be a codependent asshole. Now I am married with kids and have a peaceful self employed life. I found my groove. It took me twenty three years but I sure as hell am where I am supposed to be, with who I am suppossed to be with. I know myself and have learned to love me for me. I still have my bad days, some come in frequent waves but I am still here and Im okay. Magic shroomies and LSD helped me fix myself, it gave me a chance to really look at how I was fucking up and I am a far better human being because of these experiences. This isn't a promotion of doing drugs that can land you in prison, but if you are stuck in a rut and are very desperate for some positive changes, do some research and make your own choice.
By Noah Brownlee3 years ago in Psyche
Wardlord
I am a Marine Corps veteran with scizoaffective disorder and this is my story. I enlisted into the Marines at age seventeen with the consent of my parents who decided it was better than me living in the low income housing myself and a good friend had moved into. I had been kicked out of the house shortly after my 17th birthday because I was partying too much and had started smoking Newport 100s. I had also been involved in a hit and run and since my vehicle was in my fathers name, he now had a warrant out for his arrest. After paying the fines and clearing his name I was out bouncing from couch to couch. I had been homeschooled the majority of my life but had attended a Christian school in Kansas City, MO named The Daniel Academy. This school was horrible, we didnt learn anything other than how to fake a seizure when being prayed for. We were taught that there were Angels visiting us during praise and worship sessions in the morning time and if the spirit of God moved the staff we didnt have class all day. I had grown up in Mississippi until I was 13 years old when my parents had been layed off within days of each other and we had to move up to Missouri. I do not fully understand or remember why this school was selective but I find it and the Church that sponsored this school if you would like to call it that to be the single most damaging time period in my life over any drug addiction or erratic behavior that was soon to follow. I learned almost everything I knew about how the world works from first hand experience or finding the information my own goddamn self. I was not a believer myself so trying to find friends who hadnt drank the kool aid was very hard to do. I was an outcast and a troubled teeanger with a demonic cloud over my head as the dean of the school said. I would have demons cast out of me damn near every week I was there. Its hard to convince yourself that something is not wrong with you when shit like that kept happening. I fucking hated it and I still carry resentments toward some of the people there. Mostly I have forgiven the kids I went to school with and I am working on healing from that as I move foward in life and now have kiddos of my own. Needless to say I did not want to participate in anything going on at the school and the staff knew it too. They kicked me out when I was in the 10th grade. So a year and a half later I am getting ready to go to bootcamp after being kicked out everywhere I have been. I got my diploma from a local Community college and was starting to patch things up with my family. I had a girlfriend who I thought was going to be there forever and I thought I was hot shit. After arriving at bootcamp I realized that I had most likely made a huge error in going but I wouldnt be able to live with myself if I went home. I hated it for the first month or so and then I started kind of digging the whole idea again. I would imagine myself in far off places doing some hood rat shit with my buddies I had yet to meet while hiking to keep my mind off of how dumb it felt to walk up and down some fucking hill in the dark. I graduated bootcamp and went home on leave. The gap between me and my family closed a little more and I thought things were going good with the lady friend. After leave was over it was back to the basics but this time I was at the school of infantry on Camp Pendleton, California. I hated that shit too for a while. I wanted to go home and I was tired of the shitty food and the shitty hikes and getting up in the middle of the night to watch gear that nobody was going to fucking steal. This was in March 2014. Russia and the Ukraine were getting into a pretty big confrontation and we were gearing up for war with Russia. The shit never happened and my motivation went completely away for a while. I graduated from there and went to my first actual unit. There, it was back to the new basics. I hated that shit too but soon found my little homeboi clique and it wasnt so bad. We did alot of cool training and I was in the helicopter company so I didnt have to hike as much, so things could have been worse. Then I started partying again after being pretty chill in that department for quite a while. I was really starting to fit in with America's finest pieces of shit that She had to offer. I was one of the pack. I started to love it, and I was finally accepted somewhere. I was still a fucking boot and still am for that matter cause I never went to combat and never really got to do my job, but it still felt important at the time and gave me a sense of belonging. Things were going to shit with the ole lady and I didnt give a fuck, I had been using MDMA and going to some 18 and up clubs and raves in San Diego and was feeling like I belonged into two groups. Myself and a few close buddies viewed ourselves as warrior hippies and it was kind of fun to shoot guns all week and then go drug it up from Friday to Sunday morning. We got really into that scene but it was time to deploy. For some dumbass reason I proposed to my lady friend and got on a damn slow boat to China, partied it up in Hong Kong and went to Disneyland over there 50 shades of puke drunk. It was fun and I also had my first experience with a prositiute there. I knew it was a piece of shit move but she was back home fucking anything that moved from gas station clerks to people at church. Fair is fair. I still feel bad but here I am. We went a bunch of places on that deployment including Kenya where I pulled security for then president Barrack Obama, not to name drop or anything. I was on the damn night shift at the airport over there I did not get to meet him but that would have been pretty fucking rad. I got to go to Dubai, Kuwait, and Bahrain twice. After getting back on the boat leaving Dubai my fiance told me she had to decided to pursue her life long dream of becoming a lesbian and that she couldnt pretend anymore. So I wanted to blow my brains out right then and there. I hated her but I needed her for some strange reason that I wasnt able to explain other than now knowing I was a "simp". We pulled into Hawaii on the way home and I got to visit my favorite titty bar in all of the land, Hawaii by Night. Im pretty sure they are still open but I loved the trashiness of the pool table with a pole in it. It was a blast. I had been sober from drugs this whole deployment cause how the fuck am I gunna bring em with me. I was drinking enough to fill the gap so it didn't matter at all. When I got home to Camp Pendleton all my friends went to go raving but my mom had come to see me and we hung out for about a week before I got to go on leave to home. The fam bam had moved back to the Sip and it was pretty cool to be back for more than a couple days since I was 13. My best friend came to visit and I picked her up from The Nola airport and we made a day of that and she stayed for about a week and a half. I bought a truck from my dad with some of that deployment tax free money and drove her back to the aiport and kept on heading west down the I10. I had like four days left to drive about thirty five hours but I decided to drive it in one go because my friends were having a hotel party and going to a rave. So after driving all that with no sleep I arrived in San Diego. This was my first time having full blown psychosis. I drank a bottle of vodka after arriving by myself and nobody thought much of it. They didnt know I didn't sleep and I even drove the car to somebody elses house to pick up more people. Then we went to some warehouse and I completely lost it. I blacked out but have faint pictures in my head of slapping some poor womans ass as hard as I could and then she climbed up on my back punching me so hard that I was fully awake but not aware of why I though I was in Mississippi with all my buddies there and this chick rightfully so beating my head in. I deserved it but I was confused as fuck. We got back to the hotel and I started shit with people I did not know and was getting into stupid arguements about what zip code we were in and I couldn't really comprehend what was going down. Luckily my friend decided to take my drunk, psychosis riddled ass back to the barracks and gave me some of his doritos and let me sleep in his room so I didn't cause any trouble. I am thankful to him for many reasons but this is one of the biggest. People never realize how a small act of sharing your last bag of doritos can affect a sucidal person. I finally went to sleep and was bright eyed and bushy tailed the next day. I went and got some real food and I had hope for the future in almost every aspect. My fingers about to fucking fall off cause I am doing this like I just took some benzedrine or however the fuck you spell that shit Kerouac was taking, but alas I have no such cheat code. So I will do this in episodes or chapters or however you want to think of it. Peace be upon you the good reader if you indeed exist.
By Noah Brownlee3 years ago in Psyche