Tag: hallucinations

The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Narratives, Trauma, and My Childhood Dog

My wife told me that her version of the story starts here:

We’re sitting in the car, driving to my dad’s house. We’re passing the Walmart and the AC is fighting the Vegas heat, the stifling air quality two days after the Fourth of July. She takes my hand. “I’m sure it’s fine,” she says, then grimaces. This is a validating aha moment for me at the time—she has doubts. Later, she says she regretted the words the moment they were out of her mouth. But what if it’s not fine?

But for me, the story doesn’t start in the car.

As a writer, I like to start in the height of the action—I would open this story with me standing over the body.

But that’s not where my real version of the story starts. The one I tell myself on long walks and long nights like a lullaby.

No; the story starts with Ziva.

…

Ziva came to me as an awkward looking Dutch Shepherd puppy as I was finishing the fifth grade and embarking on the terrifying journey that is middle school.

She stayed with me through panic attacks and psychosis, self harm and delusion, lost chances and bad breakups, my parents’ divorce and leaving school several times over.

When I’d attempted suicide at seventeen, my best friend’s mom, a psychiatrist, told me I had to hang in there because Ziva would never understand why I left her.

So I hung in there.

Ziva, however, passed in the spring of 2019. I had a lot more, or understood I had a lot more, to hang in there for by then, and hadn’t felt like I’d been just hanging in there for years; no cutting, no attempts. I was in the relationship of my dreams and surrounded by people who loved me.

But one morning, a few months later, Ziva came back to me in a dream.

In the dream, I was in my childhood home. My dad’s house, at the time, in reality. Ziva entered through a burst of white light.

I understood in the dream that she was dead, but in the grips of sleep, believed that she had come back to visit me. She wagged her tail and spun around. I gave her lots of scritches and told her all of the things I could want to say.

But Ziva kept looking back at the white light she’d come from, antsy. Like she was trying to tell me something. Maybe that she had to go again. I let her run back into the light. I woke up.

That morning, it became clear no one had heard from my dad in some time.

That morning, we were in the car. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

That morning, I stood over the body, and wondered if something in me had already known.

…

I tell myself the story a lot.

Ziva. The messages with my mom. Why were heat sensitive packages piling up propped against Dad’s unopened front door for days? Why had he not put the trash bins down at the curb on trash day? Sitting in the car. Knocking. Using my spare key to open the door. Thinking that I am the only one with a spare key. Mom, now his next door neighbor, was thinking of checking on him when she got back from an errand. I have the key that was hers. Yelling for Dad in a house where I am the only thing living. “Hey, Dad! Anyone home? Daddy!” Walking back out, down the stairs, swearing I will not hand the key to anyone else who’s not a professional.

“It’s not fine,” I tell my then-girlfriend, now-wife through the passenger window of her car. She’s confused, not having gathered from my demeanor that it’s not fine, though I’m not making much sense verbally. “There’s this thing in my dad’s bed. It’s not my dad. But… I think it used to be.”

I had left the door open behind me, the key more about blessing than physical entry. The smell wafts out of the house. She gets it.

Calling my mom. How do I tell her? She is out at lunch with Grandma, on break from considering puppies at an adoption fair. Calling 911. “No rush, I guess.” Enough firefighters for a calendar, who just keep offering me water while I try not to puke on the lawn. Police, and a report hand written at my mom’s kitchen table. What can I say?

I call my best friend in the bathroom. “My dad’s, kinda… dead. I think he’s… been dead, for a while now.”

Grandma tells me, “Oh, Hannah, I just knew something wasn’t right. I just knew it wasn’t right when he didn’t put the trash bins out that week…”

The coroner. “You look really young,” she tells me over and over.

“Twenty-one,” I say, unable to think of anything else.

And a counselor who is so high empathy I think she might now be having a worse day than I am.

“First we have to identify him,” the coroner is explaining to my mom, as we fill in details.

“You can’t just…?”

“It’s not… really… a visual thing.“

“Well, what about fingerprints?” My mom loves crime shows. She knows how they ID a body at various stages.

“This isn’t really…” The coroner is trying to be gentle here. She looks at me, the known witness. “This isn’t really a ‘fingerprints’ kind of situation. Do you maybe know who his dentist was? For the records?“

My mom has a white knuckled grip on my hand. The volunteer counselor looks like she might cry.

After the coroner leaves, my mom examines a picture she took of my dad in his youth, in a collage frame in her room. He is victorious, standing on a rock at the end of a long hike, arms thrown to the sky. Yosemite at sunset is the backdrop, their favorite beautiful place, the place they met, lived, worked, and fell in love.

“Cheers,” my mom says to the sky, to the picture of Dad, holding up her gluten free beer. Some of Ziva’s toys still line her floor.

…

I think parts of the story have been compromised by time—my private game of telephone. Other parts, by flashbacks, by nightmares, by hallucinations—all blurring the narrative.

Sometimes I try to change it. I don’t start with Ziva. I go back to the day my father almost certainly actually died. Ten days earlier. We’re sitting on his couch. I’m in the neighborhood to bring in Mom’s mail and check on a few plants while she’s on a trip with Grandma, pick up a few items I left when I moved out.

I visit with Dad. We sit on his couch. He says he has a headache. We talk about anything. He says he doesn’t think that anyone really kills themselves. Evolution wouldn’t allow it. Depression is what kills them. The parasite that pulls the trigger—that’s not you.

But that adds up to the beginning of a very different story.

My father didn’t kill himself. I shook the pill bottles on his nightstand, all as full as they come. I looked for a note and found nothing. I found his guns stowed safely in his closet.

No, my father had a heart attack.

And I cannot quite bring myself to tell the story that’s not so neat, that has false leads. I always come back to starting with Ziva, with the narratively neat omen.

But that’s not how life works.

…

In one of my writing projects, a character with PTSD seeks and gets a chance to watch video footage of one of the most traumatic events in her life.

It’s re-traumatizing to watch, but she’s obsessed with what details the following flashbacks, nightmares, time, retellings, and additional trauma have blurred.

When asked if seeing the “truth” made her feel better, she says it’s complicated.

I understand that. The sequence is definitely something born of my own emotions.

I wonder what I would do if I had the same opportunity.

Really, I know I could never resist. I know it would be traumatizing all over again. I know my final answer would be it’s complicated.

Still.

…

I have three basic PTSD nightmare templates that seem to cycle on a loop, though inconsistently.

In one, we’re moving, or buying a rental property. In any case, we’re touring a house, sometimes empty, sometimes model home. Either way, there’s always a bed in one room with a corpse in it. And it’s never addressed in the dream, really. A sigh of, “We’d have to get a biohazard team in again… the ozone machine…” as if we’re fixing a plumbing issue.

In another, someone dies, and it’s dramatic but often off screen. It’s emotion based, a montage of the trauma, grief, and logistics to follow. Pro se probate court and handling of possessions, telling people, paperwork, and the talking, talking, talking. I’ve been through the process enough. Dad. Later, Grandma, too, lies, lays, all too still in her bedroom, but it’s been minutes, not days, and family talks around her.

In the most common dream, though, I’m talking to my dad. Sometimes someone else, but most often him. Sometimes he prods me to remember something. Sometimes, it hits me all on its own. “You’re dead,” I’ll remember, often aloud, in the dream. And he’ll immediately decay, turning into the ten day old version of his corpse.

I can run down the templates easily. I’ve done it so often, my best friend had a nightmare identical to the third version, though they never met my father, dead or alive, just heard about a hundred versions of this dream. They woke from it once in the way I’ve woken from it a hundred times: bolting upright, in a cold sweat, panting, shaking, and desperately trying to scream.

…

Narrative therapy is supposed to address these stories we tell ourselves. And stories can be therapeutic. After that long, awful day, nausea fading to the realization I’d had only a smoothie that morning, when offered any choice I wanted—“You found your father’s ten day old corpse today. You can pick the restaurant.”—I chose Panera, because that’s where I used to go every Tuesday, for the local National Novel Writing Month meetup, to talk and write and eat and get lost in stories like the rest of the week hadn’t happened, which always made it feel safe.

And by editing those stories, we edit our outlook.

There’s a lot of potential I see here, as a mentally ill writer.

Change the narrator—cue empathy.

Change where it begins—add context.

Change the focus—change the moral of the story.

Change where it “ends”—add hope.

Changing your fate is a common theme in fiction.

I don’t feel like the story I tell myself really has an ending. It fades into other thoughts at various points. Probably for the best.

But soon enough, I always find myself back at the beginning: with Ziva.

Flash Memoirs From My Notebook in 2020

I started to worry about living today.

I was worried before about surviving.

Food.

When will it run out? Where will it come from? At what cost? At what risk? For how long? Who will it feed?

Water. Soap. Medicine. Toiletries.

Today… 

Will I pretend everything is okay enough that I can write? Read? Crochet? Make a font, make something fun to eat?

Even some of the worst apocalypse novels are told via diary.

What if I run out of yarn and electricity and paper and pens and books?

Before I run out of food?

… 

I dream about Dad a lot, dead or alive.

It’s not usually really him, if dead.

Sometimes it’s Mom.

Sometimes it’s Grandma.

I think about the email he sent my mom about fleeing, about the box in his garage with outdated first aid gear.

And he said, “It’s irresponsible not to be prepared,” about living and dying both but— 

Bold words from a man who died without a will. 

… 

Sometimes Dad’s alive in my dreams but I know he’s not; sometimes I dream about the grief itself. 

I fall asleep in my bed; I wake up standing next to the body again. 

I zone out in my room, snap out of it in a flashback, standing next to the body again.

Standing next to the body again.

And again.

… 

How do I tell Mom I’m finally starting to fall asleep with my eyes closed, that I jump just as much when startled but I’ve never screamed, that when I blink in daylight it’s usually okay, that white linens aren’t as frightening now, that I went into the bedroom while my girlfriend was sleeping without thinking, that I don’t sleep on the couch as much?

If I talk about getting better, she’ll say the same, “It should’ve been me,” and I’ll say:

“That’s a noble game,” or, “But it wasn’t,” or, “But I’m glad it wasn’t,” or, “No, Mom, it really shouldn’t have been you.” 

…

Mom’s never seen me cry over it and she’s not going to. 

… 

I’m still trying to think my way out of that room.

…

There’s a dead bird I’ve passed on my walk at the curb for a few days now and I keep thinking I’ll walk the other way or not look and then I don’t, and it’s decaying into liquid, decaying, decaying, and I think of Dad, and how I thought I wouldn’t sit with Grandma’s body, either. 

… 

Morning. It’s sun warmed, bright, sunlight patches on light carpet, sunbathing cats, warm fur, stretch, purr, yawn. Smells like sunlight on light dust. Sun, sun, sun.

… 

My walk—everyone else is in pairs—you can tell who dragged whom. It’s almost cold out. Crisp. Fresh. No hot pavement scent yet.

… 

Brunch. Clear glass bowls of chopped fruit still wet from washing. A few flowers remain alive in the vase. Stripes of sun through the blinds on the tablecloth. Sweet strawberries and Nutella, the crunch of toast. My best friend is bedheaded and in pajamas. My wife to be is dressed in black. We all talk and laugh too much and too loud. 

…

My fiancee and I cook dinner together. Evening slats of sun. The broiler, the frying, the oven, the stove—hum. It’s hot. Everything smells delicious. She is so beautiful. The potatoes are colorful, the pork chops shaping up to the right hue.

… 

Today’s the kind of mental health day where you listen to Evanescence and hope for the best. Time and space happen to me strangely.

…

It’s 9:30 AM and I’m nonverbal, and it feels like I shouldn’t be—it’s too early, too much of a problem. Nonverbal, like drunk, happens at more like dinner. But I woke up like this, and I don’t drink.

… 

My dearest fiancee,

It is May 2020.

The world is ending.

And you have asked me to marry you.

… 

It’s late afternoon, hot, dry, the sun just starting to cast long shadows. The pool water is cool and clear, has to be eased into, but refreshing. Mom is drinking white wine out of a Dixie coffee cup. All of the neighbors are in their pools too, cannonballs and voices carrying over. My mom and my best friend and my fiancee and I splash each other, blow water through pool noodles, throw a ball around. Everything smells a little like chlorine. My fiancee and I lay on the bed in the afternoon and cuddled and talked about the future earlier. Later, we all eat dinner still a little wet, but in dry clothes, and pick at desserts knowing we’ll sleep well. All the people I love are happy. We talk about the engagement. The AC isn’t too cold. The food is good and plentiful. I stepped out of the pool and started dinner wet and still in my underwear. And life is good. 

… 

I have started to hallucinate a golden retriever puppy regularly. Her name is Farrah. 

…

The smell of heat on pavement. Sweat. Water getting warm in bottles. Swings creaking. Gas station snacks eaten on the side of the parking lot in a patch of shade. Kids yell in the distance. My best friend’s voice. The chime of the gas station door opening and closing.

… 

I woke up from my first dream where people were just… wearing masks. How weird is it to adjust?

…

I wake trying to scream and batting at a corpse that isn’t there. 

… 

The Christmas tree with rainbow lights. Wrapping paper, stockings, pillows, blankets—everywhere. The fireplace is on. Games and snacks line the table, brunch abandoned. Instrumental Christmas music plays. I lie in the pile of wrapping paper and blankets wearing my Santa dress, head on a bathrobe gift, my wife next to me, my best friend next to her. We laugh. Mom is close by. I’m home. It’s Christmas morning.

“Are You Hallucinating?”

“Are you hallucinating?” 

It sounds like such a simple and important question. But there are several catches that people don’t realize when they want to hear yes or no.

First question: do I know I’m hallucinating? I usually have a pretty decent grasp on that for the big stuff, but not everyone does. Corpse, not there. Dog I don’t have, not there. Hallucinations. 

But is that flash of light in the corner of my eye from traffic out the window, or my own mind? Is it just a trick of the light? Is staring at a trick of the light unsurely for way too long a hallucination? 

What about changing real objects? Is that cup upside down on the counter, or right side up? Well, if I just confirm: is there a glass? That’s not useful. Sometimes it is Alice in Wonderland like distortions, larger, smaller, some more subtle than others until your fingers flit through the top of an object that doesn’t quite reach there. 

Is there a slight aura around that lamp, or just me? Is the cat messing around upstairs making hard to describe noises, or is it in my head? Neighbors talking indistinctly, or just me? 

Should I start describing everything in the room to you to make sure we see all the same things? Hear? Smell? 

What about the fact that my sensory processing issues mean I frequently hear very real sounds that other people don’t pick up on until they really listen for them? What then? 

I remember in a bad psychosis phase putting on noise canceling headphones and realizing how much noise I still heard. But it was just that: noise. Like a white noise machine. Like very steady running water. Like the sound of a crowded restaurant when no table is drawing attention in particular. Like the cats making a ruckus upstairs. It just kind of added mental decibels to what was really going on around me (which, as someone with sound sensitivity, is its own very real issue). But how to describe that? 

Also consider that my line between reality and hallucination, or even fantasy, is jagged and thin and I’m highly suggestible in that way. If you say, “Are you seeing Farrah right now?” Well, I wasn’t. Until you said her name. Now I kind of got a flash of her, my little recurring golden retriever, like a mental flashback. But is that the normal helpless visualization that comes from people talking? What if, three minutes after you said that, she hasn’t quite gone away yet, flickering in and out, under a real chair in the room? “Ah, now I am. Nope, not anymore—wait, there it is! Oh—nope. Hold on—ah, there—no.”

Is my daydreaming over the line of hallucinating when it sometimes slips a few seconds ahead of my actual thoughts? When characters can do things unexpected? When I can’t snap back out of it?

Is seeing a blur out of the corner of my eye that’s never there when I turn a hallucination? Is it a hallucination if I sense something that isn’t there, but don’t strictly see it? 

What if the real issue is delusion—times I think I’m hallucinating something that’s very much there—like the person asking the question? 

“Are you hallucinating?” It’s not really a yes or no question. No is a simple, soothing answer, if temporary by nature. Yes means something definable has gone wrong without doubt. But it’s not really hallucinating or not hallucinating—or, for my Hunger Games fans—real or not real. 

The answer for me, sometimes, is pretty definitively yes. But I’m not sure I’d ever give a definitive no—because what do I know? Who am I, the schizophrenic one, to answer that? I don’t trust my perceptions any longer. And how long do you have to think you’re not hallucinating for before it counts? If Farrah was here three minutes ago and isn’t now, can I say no? An hour? A day? A week? Ah, gerunds.

I don’t really have a better question to propose. Just some things to keep in mind. It’s tricky in a lot of often overlooked ways. That’s the thing with schizophrenia—it’s not a real or not real game—even when it is mostly episodic, you are always questioning. Every flash of light, every distant conversation, every dog, every bump in the night. 

Real or not real? 

Might want to ask someone else. 

Sanity, or Writing?

I get an idea. 

A few minutes later, the very distinct thought: I need to stop thinking about this too hard. Or I need a pen.

My fingers twitch.  

Pen.

It can’t move fast enough on the page, chaos that will be a brief note in a dated, tagged table of contents. 

Tucked in the back pocket of that notebook that is rarely far from me is a sheet of paper with emergency information about me on it. 

In a previous draft, one of the notes, the sort that’s more for psych ward intake than found unconscious in a park, noted a few topics that tend to make my condition worse. Absurdist jokes about reality; things like The Matrix or Inception; general death and gore; certain corners of politics. 

The immediately following note said that I might bring these up first—some of them even extremely frequently; I spent years talking about nothing other than gory Hunger Games fanfiction—but to tread with caution. And that I especially bring them up in writing. 

It can be hard to find a balance between reality and fiction when you have a condition that heavily blurs those lines to begin with, and the mind and overactive imagination of a writer. I have never been one to write much fluff and happy endings; I write about apocalypses and dystopia, morally gray villain protagonists, death and torture, gore to disturb horror fans, extreme mind and power games, toxic and abusive relationships, manipulation and gaslighting. The note also recommended don’t look in the notebook. More so a you’re responsible for what you find. I’ve read that such dark obsessions can be common for people with PTSD, another factor here.

Yet in reality, the stray comment that is innocently just incorrect can send me into a frantic spiral of questioning what exists. 

So, yes, I need to stop thinking about this too hard. Or I need a pen.  

Frequently, when I question whether something I do, think, or feel, is normal, there are two people I ask. One, my fiancee, who works in STEM and barely even reads fiction, is usually at one extreme of the answer spectrum, while I am at the other. In the middle is my best friend, a writer and reader in much the same genres I am. The overactive imagination of a writer gets them halfway to my end of the spectrum, but psychosis takes me the rest of the way. 

Asking about daydreams, my end of the spectrum was, “The room disappears basically entirely. I am now seeing and hearing my characters like I’m exclusively in the room they’re in, in detail. I can experience things through their senses. It may or may not be ‘pleasant’. It’s all a little bit my doing and a little bit theirs. I’m dissociating. It is frequently hard to snap out of.”  

My fiancee’s end of the spectrum was, “I am thinking about an unrealistic idea with less logic and more fancifulness.” I understood that and did that myself sometimes, but it wasn’t what I meant by daydreaming, and her version never really went further than what she described. 

In the middle was, “I kind of see a picture in picture window of my characters doing things; I can hear it; they might be doing well or bad emotionally; I basically control it. Sometimes I’m a little spacey after.” I sometimes, but less frequently, experienced that version, but again, for them it never went further, and for me, it still wasn’t what I called a daydream. 

Since I have started taking meds again, I have had an easier time slipping out of daydreams, their grip on me less tight, less emotional. The rest is still true. But for a few days as the med levels stabled out in my body, the daydreams were almost hard to stay in when I wanted to—and I found that, deeply affected by psychosis or not, they’re a very important part of my writing process and I missed them. I felt, strangely, like losing that intensity to the daydreams was to lose touch with my characters, which felt like losing touch with not only writing goals but also good friends. (Now, whether or not most of my characters are good people is a very different question).

I was glad when I was again able to stay in them, but a little more at will.

I’ve written before—and God knows I’m not the only one—about the relations between writers and creativity and mental illness. Most talked about, though, are anxiety and mood disorders, and certainly substance abuse. Psychosis, and especially schizophrenia, seem, while frequently pondered, less well factually documented. 

It’s something I’d like to look into more in the future. 

Assorted Illnesses and Language (A Conlang Concept)

As someone into grammar and linguistics, who debates the requirements of a split infinitive and the correctness of implied antecedents and whether you can punctuate dialogue with semicolons, for fun, language is in my head a lot. 

As someone with schizophrenia, not to mention autism, language gets messy. 

I’ve pondered making a mini conlang based on superlatives. 

Tired, tireder, tiredest. 

The thing is that the difference between “tired” or “very tired” or “sleepy” or “exhausted” can mean very different things to lots of people. 

To me, “exhausted” clearly meant, “I am about to fall asleep on my feet and it is hazardous for me to stand up.” I found out that apparently, other people use exhausted to mean what I call pretty sleepy—a strong urge towards going to bed as things got hazy. 

Additionally, I separated mental and physical energy in a way a lot of people apparently do not. I can be ready for a long, productive writing session while barely able to sit up. Much less frequently, on the other side, I can be nonverbal and ready to run a mile. Their correlation is low if not nonexistent. 

Plus, it can be hard to describe things that are incredibly subjective or an uncommon experience. How dissociated are you? How intrusive are the hallucinations? How bad is the sensory overload? This isn’t a new problem—say, pain—if you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office, you’ve seen a chart of smiley faces and numbers desperately trying to solve it.

So I pondered a sort of mini loglang that would use some extremely simple ways to describe certain spectrums, to be used between me and people its relevant to. I faced the reality that they would go “which one was that word again?” and I would tell them the definition, which meant I should just start with that definition. It still might be useful for journaling or something, and it’s still in my mind. 

Say, tired, tireder, tiredest, sleepy, exhausted, mental and physical energy. 

It could be given a rating system, maybe 1-5. 

MentalTired1—messing up a few words now and then, a bit slow to catch hidden meaning or jokes, not coming up with brilliant ideas. 

to

MentalTired5—nonverbal, and non responsive to language input.

or 

PhysicalTired1—notable muscle fatigue, depending on cause, might be slightly short of breath/sweating. 

to 

PhysicalTired5—it is hazardous for me to be sitting up unsupported; will be unconscious shortly. 

Etc. 

There’s also the kinds of overlap—mental distress that creates physical symptoms. Anxiety and muscle tension, nausea, chest pain. Depression and lethargy. Hallucinating and dizziness. Sensory overload and headache. Things that can be hard to explain in English if you have only ever experienced the symptoms independently, or only the physical side. 

When tested for diagnosis, I took an IQ test, which I don’t find to be the one true measure of intelligence or all of what it’s sometimes made out to be, but it was interesting, and an example here— 

My verbal reasoning? 130. 

My spatial reasoning? 92. 

I’ve written millions of words of fiction in my life, never gotten a B in English, but I both miss doorways for walls and still have to do the L thing with my hands to find left and right on a daily basis. 

The difference between skills like that also influences how some days I can write a book but not sit up. 

When those physical and mental lines get blurry and when adjectives don’t describe symptoms, language gets tricky. At least English—I may have to look into others. 

What seems like a long time ago, I pondered going into a very specific form of being a therapist as a career based on what I would call conlang therapy—like art therapy, but creating with language. While being a mental health professional is not for me, and I have no idea if that as a therapy type would’ve been really feasible, it was an interesting concept. 

Words make people feel powerful. It’s why we reclaim slurs, cling to favorite quotes and lyrics, wear some labels with pride. 

Surely there’s something to a therapy practice of building yourself up by making language that has failed you, work for you. 

Just a thought. 

Functionality Thresholds and Medication

So I saw a psychiatrist through an online urgent care service after remembering that it was an option, and started on a new antipsychotic. 

I had a lot of mixed feelings about going back on meds. At first, I felt like it was a cynical move—the action that confirmed the thought that I wouldn’t get better without meds, that I was dependent on them again, that I was worse now than I was back when I got off of them or at any point in between. 

Then I started to look at it a little differently. 

When I got off the meds, I wasn’t working, in school, volunteering, being a great housewife, or honestly being productive at much of anything. My standards for functional were a lot lower.

I think what’s happening now is more that I’ve hit a threshold. I have a lot more things I want to do now.

I’m deep into multiple writing and other creative projects (I recently won Camp NaNoWriMo with writing over 50,000 words in July), I read several times as much, I happily handle nearly all of the domestic responsibilities, I take classes now and then, I do property management and investing, I go on walks, and when there’s not a pandemic, I volunteer at the library once a week. 

I think that if I wanted to do what I was doing when I got off of meds, I absolutely still wouldn’t need the meds. 

But I want to be doing a lot more—and I’ve hit a ceiling. I can’t do all the things I want to do now without the assistance of meds. 

It is less that my abilities are that much worse and more that they are being pushed for so much more. 

So I’ve had almost a week on the new med. It knocks me out at night; I sleep like the dead for now. I had thought my sleep had been largely okay for a while, but it seems the quality was lacking in a way I couldn’t measure, because during the day, I comparatively have so much energy now I find myself confused on what to do with it. I dissociate much less and less strongly, and haven’t had a super noticeable hallucination since I started. 

So I finished Camp NaNoWriMo, then wrote some more. I started reading several new books, including some on AirBnB management. I got back to crocheting; I socialized; I got the house in shape; I experimented with my new instant camera. 

I feel much better about the med decision. 

Knowing Your Mind Is Vulnerable, and What You Do About It

I’m writing. It’s going really well. Pages and pages of ink in my beloved dot grid Moleskine. So many pages, I think to comment to friends about my comparatively unpretentious but equally beloved Bic pen that has somehow lasted me almost sixty total pages, plus about half of my previous Moleskine, and months of Word of the Day Post It notes, mailed letters, and other miscellany. I included a picture of the inside of the front cover of my notebook, a gift from my fiancee, with that inside cover inscribed by her at the spot we met on the second anniversary of it, a callback to our first conversation—notebooks. 

I write; I take a break to clean a few things when my back complains about sitting. I end up sitting on the bed and reading Writers on Writing, a New York Times essay compilation recommended from a workshop class. I go back to writing at my desk. It flows. Something else I can’t place my finger on keeps catching my attention. I put noise canceling headphones on that I’m borrowing from my fiancee, with a bit of Harry Potter themed ASMR with splashing water and bubbles. I remember putting them on and realizing how much white noise was in my brain for the first time as hallucinations worsened. Something keeps drawing my eyes. I think it’s black—a prominent color in my most terrifying recurring hallucination, but it’s not that—yet, at least.  

Maybe it’s the cat. Our fanged black cat naps on the bed. But every time my eyes dart to her, she’s still, not eye catching. The legs of my desk, the fabric drawers, my space heater, my knee socks, my desk chair, my computer screen fully dimmed since I’m just using the device for the ASMR—something black. It keeps coming in the corner of my eye. I turn on my task lamp, also black, but hoping the light will dispel some shadows. The other cat, a tortoiseshell, naps in the rope hammock swing, encased in my white canopy and starry string lights. 

My fiancee comes and asks if I want anything downstairs while she’s going. More black in the corner of my eye at first—her usual attire. I do a double take. No, she’s there. Water, I say.  

I get the words down a little faster, not sure how much longer they’re coming for. I’m behind on words for Camp NaNoWriMo, hoping for my tenth win of 50,000 words or more in a month—one past win being the 100 pages for the sister event for scripts—and I’m not sure yet how many words are actually on the page without the convenience of a computer’s word counter, having not typed them up. There are plenty of words crossed out for better ones, and random notes about the story or about things to add to the shopping list, places my handwriting ceases to know what a space is. If I don’t write now, with the first signs of my mind fading for a while, I’m probably not going to anymore today. 

She comes back with the water and leaves. The cat goes off to explore. 

I wish my hands moved faster or my characters got to the point faster. “I’m rambling,” one of the characters confesses. Yes, you are, I think at her, hands twitching. The black cloud seems to be flashing in and out faster. I should just write down a summary of the rest of this scene in case I don’t get to it. The chapter outline lives on my computer, a picture of my whiteboard and some added notes, but it’s missing snippets of dialogue and action that have just come to me as I approach them. I add more notes; I can’t seem to hold them in my head well anyway. I sense humanoid movement, which means it’s probably heading down the PTSD road; I keep seeing it in the mirrored closet doors next to my desk; I have that distinct sense of something behind me and turning around clears it for only a moment. 

It’s strange to worry about not being able to think. Day to day, it means not holding where this scene is going only in my head, just in case my mind goes mostly out for a few hours and comes back without those ideas. It means a bit of an obsession with certain paperwork. 

To be fair, reading Five Days at Memorial would give anyone an obsession with living wills, and I’ve gone and succeeded pro se in probate court with no will recently enough to have it in mind. Those aren’t really the papers I’m worried about yet. 

Right now, it’s mostly a piece of paper in the back of my notebook, my little “SHTF” paper. The sort of things I wish I had written down before the blur of my one abrupt psych ward stay, when I’d abandoned having such a note for a while. Emergency contacts. Basics.

Cat—a black blob in the bed—no, she’s on the carpet now—the blob flickers out. I glare at where it was, mostly over knowing I can’t see my psychiatrist for over three weeks to keep it flickered out. 

I called my psychiatrist first thing Monday morning after I committed to calling, because I’m psychotic but not irresponsible—fear of irresponsibility due to my mind fading out perhaps fueling those papers and other things. 

I put the appointment on one of my multiple Google Calendars. My fiancee once said I run my life like I’m a startup CEO rather than a housewife writer with some real estate. I might just be paranoid. She agrees to drive me to the appointment, if it’s not on Zoom. I don’t drive and while I keep tossing the idea around, I don’t want to one day swerve around a dog that isn’t there, like the one that accompanied me on my walk the other day, holding an also hallucinated leash in her mouth as she trotted next to me like it was helpful, flickering and then fading entirely by the time I got halfway to my destination. 

My therapist has had no luck finding me someone who knows more about psychosis on the therapy side, while I wait on meds, and neither have I. She says the laws apparently changed, according to a coworker of hers, and she’s allowed to treat it now, but no more knowledge qualified than she was before. I’m waiting on some books, library and mail order, my finds and my therapist’s, and enjoying JSTOR’s pandemic discounts, if research is only a grab in the dark for that responsibility and control. One book I’m waiting on is My Month of Madness—a paranoid long shot for usefulness, but autoimmune has definitely been thrown around before, and after months of pain turned out to be a rare manifestation of toxic black mold poisoning once, I try to not dismiss rare diagnoses out of hand. Yet I don’t want to fall into the “letting WebMD convince you that you have a brain tumor” trap.  

So honestly, I am mostly still at waiting, which is a lot of what treatment is. You’d think I’d be better at it by now. Waiting for the black blobs to get too consuming, waiting for my appointment, waiting for books.

I have many virtues, but patience and sanity are not among them. 

On Farrah and Treatment

I swore when my shoulder cramped, which was interesting, because I’d kind of assumed I was nonverbal at the moment, based on the way my thoughts flowed, or didn’t, and a familiar feeling somewhere in my throat, though I hadn’t tested it. 

I couldn’t blame my shoulder for cramping; my disorientation at speaking came with the realization that I’d been lying on my office floor staring at the very bottom of my bookshelves again. 

Against my back, I felt Farrah, my recurring puppy hallucination, slump, and heard her whimper for attention, wet nose near my neck. The theme of the morning’s tactile hallucinations seemed to be—weight. Farrah’s dense little body in my hands, slumping against my back in the same manner the cats did, cold paws pressing at spots on my lap.  

Just to spite my saying to my therapist yesterday that the tactile and visual hallucinations didn’t line up and Farrah teleported away if I tried to get close, the hallucinations started to line up, and she started wanting to cuddle.  

She’d been clingy all morning, and while she didn’t talk, I felt or knew her thoughts in a way that was hard to explain—the way you knew the facts in dreams that were never presented in a sensory manner. She was disheartened by my therapy video chat yesterday that came to the conclusion—I might need to go back on meds. Probably, in fact. 

I’m not trying to get rid of you, was what I thought at Farrah, because this was stupid. She wasn’t real, and so wasn’t sad that I was trying to stop seeing her—and honestly, she was the least of my issues I was trying to stop seeing. Her behavior was just the manifestation of my own mixed feelings about likely going back on meds. 

My old psychiatrist’s office wasn’t open on weekends, though, and there were no calls to be made just yet. So Farrah—claws pattering on the hardwood and somersaulting clumsily down the stairs and getting stuck in the legs of my desk and trying to eat the real cats’ food—kept me company all morning and into the afternoon.  

I found myself editing a picture I’d found online that kind of looked like her, to get the image closer to right, as if trying to appease her—see, you’re not going away, you can live in a picture, I can still know what you look like, even if it’s in a healthier format. 

I also have developed a bit of an obsession with where Farrah came from. I only have two specific recurring hallucinations currently; one is straight out of a PTSD flashback; I’m very aware of where it came from. The other is Farrah. Any others are not coherent enough to be called recurring. Those little imaginary flashes of light, flips of still objects, white noise I can’t pin down. 

The only real dog I see regularly looks, sounds, feels, and acts nothing like Farrah. I can’t figure out if Farrah is my mental manifestation of dog or puppy or golden retriever or… what word my brain might have decided to attach to, that conjured this particular image. I’m not much of a dog person; that’s why my two real pets are cats. Google told me what Farrah meant—I know no real Farrahs and have no personal associations with the name, its origin in a language I don’t speak. I keep staring her down, thinking: Why are you here? 

I get at most a wag of the tail or a yip back. 

It’s a big question for a little puppy that’s not even real. 

Talking about it in therapy was strangely disheartening to me, too, because those closest to me are very used to the quirks of my physical and mental health, or at least know reacting strongly isn’t going to change it. I forget how concerning certain things sound to the average person, and I’d been out of touch with my therapist for a bit there, when I’d been doing well. 

Also disheartening was the fact that, as my psychosis spikes up again, my therapist, an MFT, is not really qualified to treat it. Therapy is not the front line treatment for schizophrenia as it is—medication is. It’s an issue we’ve discussed before. I used to have a second therapist, the psychologist who initially diagnosed me, who my therapist referred me to shortly after I started seeing her in 2015, but the psychologist sadly passed on less than a year later, and I haven’t had that second person to treat that side of my illness since. 

I can write up new medical files and go back to meditation and read more psychology books and call my psychiatrist and go to my current therapist and do some therapy workbook activities and all, and I have—but having a qualified professional to talk to is a good resource.

But, hard to find. The only name my therapist came up with off the top of her head to bring in didn’t take my insurance. I’ve had many nightmare therapists and I’ve had many who were good people who admitted they were in over their heads. The web told me that my old psychologist, the one who passed four years ago, is currently accepting new patients. 

The only real thing to do is maintain routines and wait, and wonder if it would work if I carried clumsy Farrah down the stairs. 

The Protection of a Facade

There are ups and downs to trying hard to appear normal (whatever that may mean). One downside is that it’s easy to convince even yourself that nothing is wrong, if you look in the mirror and all looks well. Especially if the facade thoroughly convinces others, who voice that very thought. It’s easy to think you’re exaggerating or lying even to yourself, especially when you have a real disorder that skews reality just like that. 

A thing about schizophrenia is that it sets you in the frame of mind of questioning things. Reality gets tricky easily. Maybe one hallucination is obvious, but you know there are others that aren’t. When something is real, and you do think it’s real, but in any way off, you still give it a close examination in skepticism. One thing out of place sets off a spiral of—well, if that’s maybe not real, what else am I missing? Knowing you see things that aren’t there means you question the things that are—always.

I’ve speculated that the reason I have so many lucid dreams compared to many people I know is because the key to lucid dreaming, according to most how tos, is reality checking. Looking for something out of place enough you realize you’re in a dream, and that you can control dreams. You have to set that habit in the waking hours for it to occur to you in a dream, though. And I’m used to doing that in my life so much that it slips into my dreams.

The same goes for mental constructs. You know that you get on the wrong thought trains, delusions, and if you’re thinking about having schizophrenia itself, you question that thought train, too, especially when the evidence you’re more sure of looks so… normal.

On the upside, it means that unless I’m having a really bad day, when I want to play it down, I can, and when I want to not talk about it, I don’t have to. I’m very open about my schizophrenia and pretty much everything else in my life, very out about all of my identities, but I also feel lucky to frequently be able to pass as neurotypical, because the stigma around psychosis and mental illness is very real.

Sometimes I want people to look at me and wonder, but not pin me down as psychotic immediately. To be somewhere on the spectrum where I am validated in my illness, but not obvious and discriminated against or worried about. Sometimes I want people to be able to look at me and maybe see the psychosis—but see the rest of me, too. And being known as having a psychotic disorder frequently overshadows everything else.

This does mean a bit of an obsession with maintaining those appearances, in various forms. Physical presentation standards—and the ability to keep that up even when there are hard days. I wear only one outfit, the same thing every day, carefully chosen. When I fear I’m slipping mentally, I develop another cycle of particular obsession with making sure my clothes are clean, in good repair, sized appropriately, not too eye catching. The same ideas extend to all parts of my appearance, to my online presence, and to my small mannerisms. And I’m not always able to keep the appearance up—though I’ve improved with time.

Recently, before a video chat with my therapist, I asked my fiancee to help me trim my bangs so I could actually see my therapist and not the backside of my own hair, and an observing friend said something like, “So, ‘I had a psychotic break, but not so much I couldn’t get my bangs trimmed.’”

And on the one hand, I wanted to be able to see, and on the other hand… well, yes.

In some ways, I talk about my mental illnesses very openly. There are few cases where I won’t mention the diagnosis itself. There are a lot more cases where I play down how troubling it is, or laugh it off. Most of my friends know I hallucinate, but they hear about the flashes of light and the white noise and the echoes and the objects that get flipped in my vision, and less about the corpses and voices. More still hearing random things while wearing noise cancelling headphones, and less sleeping on the couch because beds are a trigger. 

It’s been a hell of a year (tomorrow) since the PTSD began and brought a fresh wave of psychosis with it. It had been fairly easy for quite a while, before, to live with and ignore the odd white noise or flash of light, and easy to sink into the comfort of maladaptive style daydreaming. After, there were the night terrors that we mistook as seizures, the waking hours’ blurred line between flashback and hallucination that eventually leant far towards the latter. 

Those are the pieces I try to keep to discussing only within the right context for it, and those are the pieces I can tuck away when I’m able to look normal.

If I didn’t keep up those appearances—the question of the full extent of illness would come up a lot more, whether I wanted it to or not—something that’s hard, mixed with my own trauma, and external stigma and worry—more for the psychosis than for any other condition I have.

So I understand the idea of the facade protecting you.

It’s a little wall between you and the possibility of never being able to have a (seemingly) normal moment.

My Schizophrenia Tamagotchi

“Farrah’s back,” I said at brunch. “She seems to like mornings.”

It was a morning just days ago, near the one year anniversary of my father’s death, when Farrah appeared for the first time. A puppy hiding between the edge of a desk and the wall. She never got too close, but when I paid particular attention to her, I could, unbidden, feel her warm fur in my fingers. The tactile hallucinations were relatively new, too. I wasn’t complaining about this one in particular, though; it was much less terrifying and consuming than the others as recent as last night, almost soothing except for the nature of hallucinating and knowing it.

The name Farrah was printed on the silver dog bone shaped tag on her red leather collar, the kind of bright red that made more sense for the ribbon you put on the puppy on Christmas morning than the stiff material the hue appeared on. The color appeared almost scribbled over the texture rather than a part of it. I could read the name only when it came as a zoomed in flash of an image, and I think I felt it more than read it. I didn’t know why Farrah. Google later revealed an Arabic origin, a girl’s name meaning joy.

Rather benign for a manifestation of mental illness.

After first noting Farrah’s appearance, I noted that sometimes when I changed rooms—she was highly reactive to the real environment, a trend for my hallucinations lately, pawing at the unknowing actual cats curiously, hiding in real nooks—she vanished from the real environment, but came to me in flashes of moments when I started to dissociate. Trying to describe where she was in those flashes, I told my fiancee that it was like a computer game I’d played as a kid—there was a dog in an unexciting space without much to do but pet its head and throw a ball and give it a treat and have it look cute and do tricks. Having not played the game I had in mind, she, more of a nineties kid than me, came up with something similar enough:

“Oh, like a tamagotchi.”

This set me off in a long giggling fit I couldn’t stop. “Oh my god, I have a schizophrenia tamagotchi.”

In keeping with that nineties kid theme (though a friend did recall the game I’d mentioned, on a different platform), I later described Farrrah with a comparison to the golden retriever puppies in Lisa Frank products. She wasn’t very cartoony, if a little poorly rendered, but it gave a quick image translated to a more realistic looking hallucination, the chubby, fluffy golden retriever puppy.

Unlike the tamagotchi, I couldn’t really decide what Farrah did when she was in that void. She didn’t do much. Sometimes I got a flash of her rolling around or chewing on a blurry toy, fading into that space as the real room faded away. When she came into my actual environment, at the most random of moments, she responded to what I did, but not how I willed it. She cowered behind a shelf when my fiancee spoke loudly, and growled at the cats playfully; she might sniff the air and take a step forward curiously if I beckoned, in my mind or in reality, but she still didn’t get close enough to see if the tactile hallucinations would line up.

Like some recent others, I could feel her, but she simultaneously appeared several feet away. Still getting used to the tactile hallucinations, it was interesting to note the disconnect. The very occasional auditory hallucination of a yip or growl did seem in line though.

I knew she wasn’t real—no running cats or confused people, too many things not quite right—but the responsiveness was interesting. Imperfect and inconsistent, but there, like a dream.

Mostly Farrah was cute, shy, and playful. The only disconcerting thing about the photo calendar ready puppy was that she wasn’t quite right, wasn’t quite real.