“Anosognosia” and Delusions

I’m forty years old.

And I didn’t understand that the voices I hear are actually hallucinations, until I was thirty eight.

I thought they were my thoughts.

My internal system.

The paranormal.

The voices are a nonstop discourse of layered timbres and volumes.

They loop over one another.

Commenting on my every thought.

My every feeling.

Everything I’m seeing.

They narrate my life.

My days.

My reality.

They tell me what to do and grip my emotions so hard that I could never see past them.

I have reacted most of my life because of my hallucinations.

As opposed to responding.

I could never see my symptoms for what they were.

The voices, I thought, were just my internal dialogues.

My internal process.

Because in the beginning, I knew the voices were in my head.

But I also believed full heartedly, without a doubt, that the external voices were that of a spiritual, paranormal nature.

That I hear them because I have a third eye.

Psychic powers.

The internal voices have almost always been there.

They’re complicated and heap themselves into random but seemingly relevant sentences or words.

Relevant enough to think they were thoughts.

And I now know that these are just one of the layers of my hallucinations.

Just like the external voices, they vary in volume, texture, and tone.

They overlap one another more constantly than not.

For decades I thought the external voices were ghosts. 

Spirits, trying to communicate with me.

They talk to me so I can communicate with others.

They would interrupt me while I was talking to people.

I would hear a static type noise sometimes before and after their phrasing.

As if the ghosts were on a paranormal CB radio.

They would bust in, mid conversation and make their presence known with the external voices – or external sounding hallucinations.

For decades I was told by people I love that what I hear is special.

I was told to not tell psychiatrists or therapists what I hear.

Due to fear that they would “lock me away”.

So I would just share my stories to other people who believed in the supernatural.

Afterall, I had the ability to talk to those who have died.

And for decades, it made sense to me.

I have a “gift”, right?

That’s what others would say.

I can always feel out a new apartment for energy.

Bad or indifferent or good.

When I was finally put on an antipsychotic in January of 2022, this thought process hit a wall.

Because the voices started disappearing.

They unevenly let go of me.

I had a realization, after several months of medication, that my paranormal, psychic thinking is majorly flawed.

And simply put, it is wrong.

Inaccurate.

False.

I wasn’t hearing spirits or ghosts at all.

Because the voices were fading suddenly, with this new treatment plan.

And a consistent dosing of antipsychotic medication helps dull hallucinations.

So I had to put two and two together to make sense of it all.

The voices and hallucinations receded so much that I had to uproot my entire way of thinking on the topic of the paranormal.

I realized that it was a coping mechanism.

I couldn’t understand what was happening, so I called it what others wanted me to call it.

I couldn’t see it.

I couldn’t see it at all.

The supernatural is dangerous to those who deal with psychotic symptoms.

Because for me, a person with schizoaffective disorder, it turned into practically half of a lifetime of delusions.

I never took medication seriously because it wasn’t for me, because I have a “gift”.

And I would never, ever discuss the voices I heard with a mental health professional until December of 2021.

I was always told that doctors will never understand me, and that they will just stick me on medications that will alter my entire being for my entire life for the worse.

If not that, then hospitalize me for a lifetime.

So I didn’t say anything.

Ever.

Because I thought these people were right in telling me to not tell.

I thought the voices carried messages.

Secret communications.

Instead, I have a lifetime of missed opportunities.

Pockets of blankness.

I have horrible memory issues because of my psychotic symptoms.

My symptoms started surfacing when I was around the age of thirteen, fourteen years old.

In years where so many things changed that I can’t even list them.

Formative years where “normal” doesn’t exist. 

But is always trying to be found.

I just figured that everyone heard what I hear daily.

Why wouldn’t they?

I do.

Doesn’t everyone deal with this persistent chatter?

These messages from beyond?

It wasn’t until later on in my teenage years that my “normal” sense of self turned paranormal.

The external voices became closer.

They became more believable as other worldly.

This created a huge hurdle in my adult life.

Because I was hearing hallucinations.

I was not hearing some paranormal radio.

The voices that have plagued me since I was a preteen are hallucinations.

Symptoms of a far bigger and more complicated issue.

When this life shattering epiphany washed over me, I cried.

Hard.

Ugly.

For quite a few days.

I have lost decades to hallucinations and my psychotic symptoms.

When they started to surface, my ability to see outside of myself took off.

They consumed me.

And I was known in my group of friends as being somewhat psychic and sensitive to that “world”.

I do not say that to blame.

I do not say any of this to blame.

I do not blame anyone for my mental illness.

It just is.

It is, and I have to deal with that.

But sometimes people don’t know when to start thinking outside of their beliefs.

Because I surrounded myself with people who believed in the supernatural.

That meant that I was never seeing my slowly degrading mental health for what it really is.

I stand here now, alone.

All of those same people have left me over the years and will never understand how sick I was.

They just saw me, over time, as selfish, self serving and self loathing.

Because I couldn’t control myself.

I was out of control.

Because somehow, over the years, my clairvoyance turned into a major fault.

And I would project my dysfunction onto everyone around me.

Because I couldn’t see my mental illness for what it was.

What it is.

My logic was coated with the paranormal.

The unseen.

The mystery of it all.

In reality, I just got sicker.

The longer I stayed away from my medication, the worse I got.

See, I was labeled bipolar throughout most of my life.

Due to sporadic, hourly fluctuating moods, and being very quick to anger.

I was told my mania took the form of anger.

That that happens sometimes.

And I didn’t necessarily have to be happy, or grandiose in order to be manic.

But I would never talk about the voices.

The bigger symptoms.

Because I didn’t know what they really were.

So I feel like the doctors would always see my behavior, as behavior.

Not symptoms.

Not as a chain link from me to my mental illness.

But more explosive in nature.

It felt like they saw me as erratic.

I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder for years too.

ADHD as well.

When I got the schizoaffective disorder diagnosis, I felt like these three, bipolar, BPD, and ADHD, all folded into one.

And my life, my issues, started making more and more sense.

My symptoms started to become logical.

Almost predictable.

They were not whimsical anymore.

The romance behind my hallucinations was gone.

It went from a “gift”, to an illness.

I started to see it for what it is.

Not what I was hoping it was.

My world is dark and dead because of the voices I hear.

The hallucinations and many other delusions that took hold over the years.

It’s getting easier now.

Getting greener now.

But in the grand picture of things I thought my hallucinations were informative things – messages.

I was quite literally unable to understand that I was having psychotic symptoms.

I didn’t know any better.

Ignorance was quite the opposite of bliss for me.

I struggled with the intrusive hallucinations for so many years that I thought I would break.

I would act out and have no recollection of it.

I had become the worst version of myself.

I was self absorbed.

Every issue I had was the end of my world.

All because of psychosis.

Like most things in life, I don’t have a satisfying conclusion.

I’m still a work in progress.

And I’m beyond grateful for being able to see myself and, for the most part, the rest of the world, as it truly is.

– Keren

P.S. I know this isn’t a typical entry for me. I actually submitted this to themighty.com as a short story. I appreciate all of you so much so ✨