When I’m in a high stress situation, I shut down or switch over or snap or split.
These actions are attempts at self preservation – and also surface from subconscious neurological misfirings.
It’s fear of abandonment.
It’s fear of rejection.
It’s self sabotage.
It’s self loathing.
It’s pushing someone I love away because it’s easier for me to ghost than to confront.
Once I was able to understand how significant the addition of psychotic features to my diagnoses is, I then began to truly own and understand my actions, my behaviors..
I have never blamed my childhood, but have used the bits I can remember to attempt to understand myself.
I have had to become friendly with myself.
I have had to empathize with myself.
I’m working on it all.
It’s difficult.
I’m Keren.
I’m 39.
She/her/hers.
I have been diagnosed with Bipolar 1 with Psychotic Features, Borderline Personality Disorder, PTSD and Dissociative Amnesia.
I have several physical health conditions as well, including Hypothyroidism (since birth), Legal Blindness (in my left eye since birth), Heart Murmur (since birth), and then while in my mid 20’s I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis.
It’s a lot of shit, I know.
I use my diagnoses to understand and explain, not excuse, my behaviors.
It took me longer to write this introduction than I had planned.. my psychosis acted up after writing and editing this post.
Since my fancy-schmancy terrifying diagnosis change is still very new to me, my meds are still being tweaked.
I had to double my Seroquel, then double it again, just to double it once more..
Wheeeew.
It’s taken more than a few weeks to be able to get back to this and feel “clear” enough to write again.
Piecing reality together through my fairly constant delusional state is just as difficult as it sounds.
My mind just becomes mushy.
My vision gets distorted.
I get very physically and mentally fatigued.
I hear familiar voices “talking about me”.
I can and often do fully disassociate.
I have changed passwords on myself and been completely locked out of email and Facebook sites.
I’ve hidden medications from myself.
I’ve lost friends.
I’ve lost days, years worth of memories.
I’ve not showered for weeks at a time.
I’ve been convinced I had a stalker.
I’ve thought neighbors were breaking into my apartment.
I’ve thought the CIA had placed a microchip in me and coated my apartment with cameras and microphones.
I had to be hospitalized in January of 2022.
Once my diagnoses were properly documented to fit my symptoms, the medications and treatments followed suit.
Everything is lining up like a solid round of Tetris.
The proper meds and therapy help me focus in on the core issues that hide well under my surface.
It’s like my treatment team is finally working on chasing my never ending series of meltdowns, and catching them before they get deep.
Talk therapy has finally become extremely useful as well, when for my entire life, it hadn’t done much. That’s probably because up until lately, I couldn’t properly dig into my mind..
I have started to control irrational angry outbursts.
I’m sleeping better.
My thoughts go from incoherent psychosis ramblings to smooth complex dialogues and writings again and back.
Psychosis is tricky and terrifying.
I have no control over my mind and/or body.
The shitty part is, is that within an instant, the hallucinations – audio and visual, are right around the corner, blindly stampeding in my direction.
Nothing can stop a psychosis episode.
It just is.
It’s freighting and overwhelming and vortex-like.
It turns days into torturous, well lit cycles of paranoia.
Psychosis will easily turn a day into a month of lost days.
The medications do help, to an extent..
They keep things quiet for the most part.
So, when the voices do surface, they turn to mostly background, inaudible tones.
They can, however, without provocation, speak of terrifying conversations that revolve around narrating my life.
They’ll call me the worst names you can think of.
But, when the voices again retreat into their den, my world becomes so silent.
It can get oddly silent.
My mental illnesses have been such a huge part of my chaotic life for so long.
Most of my life I didn’t know what to name, or how to explain what was happening to me.
Now that I’ve received the proper diagnoses, I can begin to take the credit for, and recognize my shit behaviors, and change them appropriately.
I’ve been learning how to be patient with and maybe even love myself.
It feels really weird to even write that sentence..
All I have known of myself has always been coated in a thick layer of self loathing..
I’m working on it, and as I move forward, I will continue to patiently mend myself.
-Keren
A Delusional Predisposition 