Paranoia, Hallucination and Delusion

As long as I can remember it’s felt like someone is watching me.

I have “heard” friends talking about me since I was fifteen.

When I look at the few memories I have, it feels like there was always someone, something waiting, whispering, watching me just out of view.

The voices are always just out of view.

When I was going through a major psychosis episode through most of 2021, I was 110% convinced that one of my neighbors was repeatedly breaking in and placing microscopic cameras and microphones on every inch of my apartment. 

That they were actively watching me and then narrating my every. fucking. move.

At one point I didn’t use my bathroom for almost two days, because of the surveillance. 

I didn’t shower for about two weeks at a time.

The voices were the same neighbors I was convinced were breaking in.

They would make horrible comments about me, they became sexually verbally abusive and disgusting if I would remove any bit of clothing.

And that meant even just to pee, or change, I would hear the worst things yelled at me.

I’d be verbally beaten.

I would stand by my bathroom and bawl and yell.

I’d yell out of my downtown Denver, sixth floor apartment window that my neighbor was a perverted piece of shit.

At one point I almost lost my voice.

This went on for months.

Many, many other hallucinations and delusions were layered below and above my main stalker neighbor paranoia in that episode.

This last Sunday I had a lot of breakthrough psychosis symptoms most of the day.

I had to do all of my laundry at the laundromat.

My low back has been spazzing for a couple of months now as I wait for my ablation in a couple more weeks.

So, I hurt physically. Bad.

To a point where I fell into a full blown panic attack just after I painfully and tearfully switched everything to the dryers.

I was in the laundromat, and the people in there were talking about me.

They’re commenting to one another about me and what I’m doing.

They’re talking about how my back hurts and asking one another what they think happened and where the pain is.

I went out to go sit in my car while everything dried.

There was a guy outside who was forcing me to listen to the words of the song he was playing.

He was in love with me and trying to tell me.

Another man kept walking past, pacing through the lot, staring and glaring at me.

This is what happens when I start to fall into psychosis.

I’m doing laundry and I just want to go home.

Everyone is looking at me.

Everyone is talking about me.

I keep my eyes glued to the floor just ahead of me.

The dryer still had nine minutes on it and I’m sitting in my car so the people will stop.

They are making me extremely anxious.

I know it’s not really happening, but my ability to do much else besides obsess about the fact that they are talking about me is not surfacing.

That same night, I had a really hard time trying to fall asleep.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep I try to count backwards from 100.

The deal is that if you mess up, you have to start over.

I was attempting to count that night.

Mind you, this was the same day as the laundromat.

I was really spiraling that day.

When I closed my eyes, I just saw a very dark gray background with lighter colored scribbles. 

It was so thick that I couldn’t see what I was trying to do.

I couldn’t see the numbers in my mind.

Normally there’s a countdown when I do this.

I couldn’t even count at a normal pace.

I was extremely slowed and absolutely unable to speed up my counting.

For the life of me, I could not keep up.

I felt so, so scrambled. 

I literally couldn’t put my thoughts together.

How fucking terrifying.

I started to panic and then just started focusing on breathing.

After about an hour, finally got to sleep.

Psychosis is beyond exhausting.

Mentally and therefore, physically.

These paranoid states of hallucinations where the delusions are trying to break in have almost broken me.

It makes life very, very difficult. 

When I can’t trust my own eyes, ears and mind, what can I trust?

This week my caseworker talked me into finally getting an actual mood tracker app to help me really see patterns that may emerge over the months ahead.

Since I had been keeping real good track in my calendar already, I thoroughly transferred two months worth of information over the course of a few days.

I need to figure out my psychosis signs.

I feel as though I might be able to better sense an oncoming episode if I have access to better, more specific data.

It will just take time to try to put myself back together.

From where I’m sitting right now, I’m not seeing my mood affect my psychosis symptoms.

I have 69 consecutive days of data plugged in, including today.

If that’s the case as time progresses as well, my diagnosis should and probably will be changed, again.

I see my psych doctor on October 20th, I’ll have an even better idea by then.

The app is great, I can have multiple mood entries throughout the day, and customize all of my activities.

It gets into breakdown of data mode even. It’s quick, user friendly, and straightforward. 

I can see in the graphs the data creates now that my mood has absolutely nothing to do with any of my psychosis episodes.

When I brought this up to my therapist, she agreed 100%.

She said in her notes about me she’s labeled my psychosis as “mood incongruent” since we were about a month or so in.

Mental health really is a type of art science.. It takes so much patience on every side playing.

As the week progresses, I can feel the Risperidone take effect over me, and it’s helping, a lot.

The Seroquel and Geodon are both officially done as of last week.

I’m sure this stop and start of medications had an effect on this last weekend of psychosis symptoms.

My therapist is convinced and hopeful that the voices are still really trying to protect me.

Regardless of what they actually say.

They’re usually very vulgar and mean.

But I teach folks, and myself how to treat me.

I have never been nice to myself.

So, maybe they just ran with what I’ve told myself all these years.

I suppose, if it’s meant for me to understand why they surface, time will reveal it to me.

– Keren