It's Okay to Not Be Okay

Trigger warning for mental illness and psychosis

People who are “going crazy” often have no idea they’re losing their grip on reality. Television and movies have a tendency to dramatize mental breakdowns, but they’re much more like a roller coaster, with upward turns and drastic downfalls, rather than a bomb exploding. When you think of someone “losing it.” you probably imagine a person who just “snaps.” And then bad things happen. The police get called. There may be casualties. Someone might be led away to sit in the back of a cop car before going to jail (or an asylum-like place, as we’re led to believe in a film like 2019’s Joker).

But that’s not how it happens. Or, at least, that’s not how it happened for me.

Every story may be different, but my battle with mental illness (which I rarely speak about in real life) was not a story made for Hollywood pitches and dramatic spins of filmmaking. If anything, it was like crashing and burning—but, unlike the phoenix, I did not emerge from the ashes all shiny and new.

My journey began on a chilly April day. My mother had just been taken off life support after suffering a series of strokes, and the only time I had cried was the moment I was about to leave her behind, alone, in the hospital room in the ICU. When I got home with my dad, I stripped away the bedsheets, comforter, and pillows from her bed and threw them all away. My dad barely spoke to me that day as he tried to handle his own grief over losing a wife who had only been 52 years old. Yet in the weeks that followed, after my giving a eulogy on a windy and cold April afternoon to only six mourners, something began to go wrong.

In July, I was home alone and thought someone was breaking into the house. I called my dad to come home from work as I locked myself in an upstairs room, and I huddled down, certain every creak and moan of the house was the first step of a madman coming to kill me. When my dad did arrive, he found no evidence of any break-in; the noise had been coming from construction down the street. Yet I still didn’t feel safe. Only later would I realize that I was experiencing paranoia to a high degree, but right then I didn’t get involved with a hospital team who could have ascertained I was slowly crashing into a psychotic episode.

Too afraid to be in the house alone while my dad was at work, I ended up staying with an aunt and uncle who had opened their home to me ever since my mother had passed. When I finally took them up on their offer, I don’t think they realized what trouble I would bring them in the coming weeks. But it was a relief in the moment to know I would be safe with them. It just didn’t last.

I started slipping into moments where I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t. I believed I could hear other people’s thoughts, I was certain someone was trying to contact me through things on television, and I even thought someone was stalking me through my social media accounts. All of these things built up and built up, until I confessed to my aunt and uncle that I was certain someone I knew online was trying to harm me. They, not knowing the full extent to which I was having delusions, called the police to see if there really was any threat. The cop seemed bewildered by the situation when he arrived, and his suggestion was that I delete all my social media accounts. But still I was frantic and on edge.

Barely a week later, my aunt and uncle took me out with some of their friends to a local flea market. I kept glancing over my shoulder, certain someone was watching me and following me, and I eventually broke away from the group and took off running to the next door shopping complex. I was so riddled with fear and adrenaline that I easily outran my uncle, who took off after me, and all I wanted to do was find somewhere to get away from the threats I was sure were after me.

It didn’t get better. My uncle caught up with me, and I screamed out for help, certain he was just another person who was trying to do me harm. I flailed and kicked as I fell to the ground. Someone called the police. Yet I kept trying to get away even as I started to drift in and out of conscious thought.

The next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed. A paramedic had given me a sedative so that I would calm down. And, for the first time in weeks, I didn’t have a sense that someone was trying to track me down and kill me.

But even here the memories grow fuzzy. I remember being in a quad unit and playing cards with two other women. I remember being escorted by wheelchair to a room to shower. I remember my aunt visiting me and seeming so at a loss as I scribbled nonsense thoughts in a notebook she had brought me. The grand delusion I came up with at that time was that this hospital stay was a place for me to be “protected” from the outside world. I was so certain that someone would walk out from behind a curtain and reveal that I was a chosen one among all the rest, that each moment in my life had been leading up to a time when I would find out I was a lost princess or someone who had figured a way out of the Matrix. So many theories came to mind that I grew giddy with the thought of finding out which path was mine. I even wrote a letter for one of the visiting doctors that hinted at the “secret” of myself.

But no “big reveal” ever came. I was transferred to a closed-off unit to be given medication for psychosis, and I had to attend group therapy sessions throughout the day. I was assigned a psychiatrist who tried to peel things out of me with her questions, and I was all too willing to oblige with the worldview I had concocted. To me, she was like Glinda from The Wizard of Oz: if I told her my problems, then surely she would be able to have the magic to try and help me out.

This wasn’t a movie, though. Slowly, as the medication began to take effect, I grew mortified by what my delusions had made me believe. I wasn’t someone special who needed to be rescued out of a false reality. I wasn’t a heroine-in-the-making who was being shielded for her own good. I was just a girl who received the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder.

When it came time to go home, I felt the crushing weight of reality every second. None of what I had thought was true was actual truth. My mind had lied to me and led me astray. All I got out of the deal was a medication the psychiatrist told me I would need to take for the rest of my life.

The delusions were the monsters, and those pills? They were my safeguard. They were the only thing that would tether me to the real world.

My psychiatrist told me that the grief that came from my mother’s death had likely been the trigger for my mental illness to show itself. Now I would have to live with that imprint all my life. There’s no escaping or denying it. It just is.

Mental illnesses don’t always show up in everyday life events and experiences, so in this way my mental illness is my secret from the world. You would look at me and think I’m “normal.” This is a confession that I’m not exactly normal. But that’s okay. I’m in a good place now, far from those terrifying weeks when I felt like I had a target on my back. And sharing this story? It’s my power to wield. Mental illness is not my life; it’s just a part of the package of who I am. If that helps to open your eyes, then I’m glad to be the messenger.