Everything’s Different

My memory is shot.

I feel like my capacity to remember anything has been cut in half since I was in my twenties.

And I couldn’t remember anything back then either.

It feels like these psychosis symptoms leave holes.

They create a time warp for sure.

The middle of the night could be two in the afternoon.

I’d have no way of really ever knowing by trying to remember.

Unless I wrote it down.

That can sometimes help spark something.

The voices I hear and figures I see make me live from moment to moment.

Not in a mindful way.

In a way that’s confusing.

And seemingly constantly uprooted and changing.

It’s repeated, but just slightly different.

The next day I could obsess over something totally different than the day before.

There’s no pattern to it.

I am thrown from one catastrophe to another.

I can’t remember what happens.

Not really.

Not easily.

Not details.

It feels like my body flashes forward in time.

Like a DeLorean.

But it also feels like my mind has not been able to keep up.

There are years and years of gaps in my head.

The ground falls out all around me.

They add to a swiss cheese-ing of my brain.

I don’t feel as though I process information like I used to.

There’s a delay.

A hesitating pause.

I have to work hard on processing what was just said.

And can’t work as hard on figuring out what I’m going to say.

So I respond in chunks of words.

And then have to smooth them out.

Make them make sense.

Sound how I want them to.

I feel like it’s taking up more energy than it’s worth.

Accompanying that is my loss of self.

I don’t feel like “me” anymore.

The wonderful, muting effects of Invega are making me feel so alone.

I’m by myself and that’s painfully apparent.

And I don’t know what to do.

How do I pull myself back?

I’ve been gone for years and it’s maddening, feeling like I don’t know who I am anymore.

The medication helped so much at first and now I feel like I’m falling apart again.

Now comes the time of this intense inner work, right?

Again.

More of it.

Trying to dig for answers.

Thinking and rethinking and thinking some more about what I can.

Trying to piece things together.

Analyze.

The medication is doing what it’s suppose to.

But I have to put in more work now.

And I don’t know what I even look like anymore.

My personality is kind of still here.

Kind of.

It’s muted.

It’s not as vibrant as it once was.

Not as lively.

It’s drained and sort of rubbery.

It feels like it will never be fully back.

Like I’m a partial stranger to myself.

Like a shell of the person I once was.

I’m someways, that’s good.

But right now, it’s painful and frustrating.

I wish there was a magic book, or gait, or dance move I could do to make it all stop.

I just want time to stop flying by on a scale that’s seemingly impossible.

Time just goes by so quickly for me.

Days spin from hours into weeks.

And I don’t know which one is active today.

But about ten minutes ago, it was five hours ago.

Every day flies by so quickly and I don’t have time to catch my breath.

I spin because my world is spinning.

And I can’t consciously stop it at this point.

It’s like my brain is fried.

Sparkly and shiny.

And completely different looking from what it used to be.

It seems as if I’m at a plateau right now at best.

Like, I’ve been moving and standing still or something.

I know the forward, productive motion will start back up.

But the question is when?

I don’t have a lot of patience.

But I also guess I don’t really have a choice right now.

Understanding myself is something I used to think was easy.

I had a general idea of who I am.

And I still do.

But then I got worse.

And worse.

The details are now nonexistent.

Some of the quirks I thought I had were really just mental illness.

It makes everything different.

It was awesome the first few months because things were quieting.

I was finding out how deep my hallucinations run.

But it’s becoming stressful as I get further away from everything I’ve ever known.

Honestly, it’s making me more anxious than I normally am.

It’s like I wake up everyday, understanding my sense of self less than I did the day before.

And that’s just how this works.

How life is sometimes.

But I wish it would at least slow down.

NA taught me that thoughts are temporary.

That a thought does not have to be acted on.

That I can live from moment to moment easier than week to week.

So, I’m trying.

– Keren