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Who Needs a Therapist When (Pt. 19)

Reality is cracking apart.

By Haybitch AbersnatchyPublished 5 years ago 4 min read
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Image Courtesy of Ludomill CC

So, as some background here: I have an uncle who suffers from schizophrenia. His illness is well-treated, and he lives well enough, though he isn't able to live independently. My mother once told me that his provider was concerned that his schizophrenia was actually a particularly severe psychotic depression combined with a low IQ. After all, though he is paranoid about the government, he never really felt that he was receiving secret messages. Instead, his fixation was on how awful things are. On how garbage the government is, on how much they don't care about the wellbeing of people. On how awful life often is.

Psychotic depression has haunted me since. The idea that a severe depression could have not just a break from self and happiness, but a complete and total break from reality, is something that leaves me quivering and fearful. Because I've had my days where the world feels very far away.

Now, I'm not prone to visual hallucinations. I never actually see anything during my sleep paralysis, just ordinary roommates moving around while my body experiences plenty of physical hallucinations. Even when I took enough psilocybin to knock me off my rocker for several hours, I had experienced some fractaling and light distortions, but nothing that anyone would rightly consider a full-on hallucination.

And—though often I notice sounds that others easily dismiss and worry that I am hearing things—they never solidify into anything other than the strange refrigerator noise that everyone else ignored. My inner dialogue is often loud. Loud enough that it feels like I am yelling inside my own head. But it still feels different than audible sounds. It still feels like me, talking to me. No matter how dissociatey I get, it doesn't feel like another person, just me being an asshole to myself.

But there are plenty of other ways that I lose touch with reality when things are bad. Whether it is strange time dilations, retreating into my head, maladaptive daydreaming, or mini-fugue states, when the stress hits the fan, my brain freaks out. Overtime, everything starts to feel distant and unreal—including myself. I don't know if my memories are real, and I don't know if the thoughts I have are based in rational thought or not. Since I stopped the antidepressants, and maybe even a little before then, I've had this strange sensation of sudden, intense brief bouts of memory. Not specific memories, but a place—or time-sense. A slant of light that feels impossibly familiar, and a memory of the sidewalk outside my library when I was seven, or the feeling of laying in bed next to my best friend at a sleepover when I was 10. These memories aren't locked into real-world events or previous thoughts. It is like there is a layer of silt on my brain, drifting around and catching at the weirdest times. Maybe this is normal? Maybe everyone is haunted by intense, frequent pieces of memory. Maybe this is the start of some sort of nostalgia, or repressed memories rising up even though nothing is particularly traumatic, but rather good.

Or maybe my brain has forgotten how to be happy about my world right now, so it picks weird, abstract memory pieces to ground the sense of happiness in something real. The only real problem is that the pieces are so fragmented that I can hardly focus on anything beyond how strange the sensation is, and trying to tie down the memory to places like time, location, and meaning, they always resist and slip back out of mind.

The point is, the dissociation has been bad this week. Like, talk to my partner about what he should do if he thinks I've had a psychotic break kind of bad.

Because I don't know where that line is. Where is the point where I lose complete touch? Some days I wake up and I can't tell what was dream and what was real. I'm usually pretty good at telling whether or not I am awake or asleep at any given point—but that rule doesn't apply to memories. I can usually tell, if only because most of my dreams take place in the intersection between surrealism and pure fantasy, but sometimes, I can't.

Anyway, I don't think I've had a psychotic break. Probably not anyway.

But it would be really nice if I could talk to a professional and find out for sure.

Last Week's (Pt. 18, Technically)

Week 1

therapy
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About the Creator

Haybitch Abersnatchy

I'm just a poor girl, from a poor family; spare me this life of millennial absurdity. I also sometimes write steamy romances under the pen name Michaela Kay such as "To Wake A Walker."

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