Psychosis

I’m currently attempting to write an album of ten songs all relating to my lifelong companion, Bipolar. I’ve got the song titles done and I’ve written one song and made a start on three others. It’s now a work in process.

Bipolar

1. Self Medication
2. Mania
3. Antipsychotics
4. The Psychiatrist
5. Sorted for SSRI’s
6. Psychosis
7. The Art of Depression
8. Lithium
9. Hibernating Insomniac
10. Bipolar

#MightyTogether #MentalHealth

I had delusions about a year ago and I was so traumatized by it. I tried to get sympathy from my family and it helped some.

The delusion seems weird to me now. I wish I had my social worker to help me figure it out. I ended going to that office.

I am on my own basically trying to heal emotionally from past trauma of psychosis. The pain of psychosis is something people don’t often understand or talk about.

I have to be on my medication for the rest of my life. I guess I have to embrace that. I accept that I have a mental illness. I am learning to challenge the disabling power of my mental illness. So far I’ve had success.

I am deeply wounded by memories of my illness. I will just take it one moment at a time. I know that healing will come.

So... I have this whole pile of paperwork from my multiple trips to various inpatient situations. I periodically think about going through it, or alternately just chunking it all in a shredder. Looking at it long enough to decide what to do with it is actually hard though. There is somebody else's outside view, and they took notes, and gave them to me, reflecting on a version of myself, at the the most honnest I'd ever been, durring a period of time that, for the most part, I now can't remember. The most recent of these records ends over a year ago, and somewhere between then and now something changed. I really don't know why. It was almost like the way I wake up from nightmeres. One reality ended. Another began. Somewhere along the line I quit having actual halucinations.

Right now I'm actually doing pretty good... about good enough to swing between something like imposter syndrome... because really? I've never been even nearly this ok, and really frusterated about why I'm not doing better. I'm supposed to be really ok. Surely I can do better than this.... if only I cared a bit more for the people around me, instead of just myself. If only I tried a bit harder. That's when everybody goes: "HOLD IT 🐅!"

Anyway, one of the things I'm dealing with, now that I'm doing somewhat better, is being aware of the fact that nobody talks to me about psychosis or paranoia anymore. As far as I know those are not things that usually go with my diagnosis, though apparently they can. They certainly used to be something that went with me. Now, like so many other things before, I'm struggling with the way this part of my life has suddenly become invisible.

When I've gotten to talk about halucinations with other people who experiance very convincing things that nobody else can, these people usually seem to have quite a different experiance from mine. My halucinations were sort of like my PTSD nightmeres, but they happened when I was awake and they sort of braided the immagenary stuff into the actual reality as I was witnessing it in real time. They were also sort of like my flashbacks, accept that they immersed all of me.

I won't describe what I actually experianced. I don't read gafic violent content, so I won't be writing anyone else any. Sufice to say... it was all very upsetting and led to me doing odd behavior that other people often found upsetting.

One occasion I remember was realizing I'd just ducked for no reason, and run, scattering a few chairs in the process, then found myself standing having oppened the door of my graduate school faculty's coat closet....Oops!I did mannage to shut myself in the nearby gender neutral restroom instead. That counted as a win. It is a more normal looking alternative to spending some time communing with packed lunch bags and wintertime outerwear that belonged to my professors. When I came back out a few people I'd been in class with still had questions about the duck and the overturned chairs. I certainly had no effective way to explain that.

I'd been talked out of believing my own senses so many years before... my senses were, however, apparently willing to try again and again, as many times as was nessessary. There is no way to explain what this was like. The tactile and smell bits were deffinitely the worst of it. I still do get something occasionally, but now the unreal things I see are a lot more like the other kind of memory.

Maybe, now, it's really like encountering a ghost. Now, although a face is still a face, it's become a face I can see and also see through it. A hand is still a hand. I can feel it. I can now also feel the lack of substance at the same time. These things used to be much more real to me, arguably just as real as when they really happened and maybe everyone, but at least a lot more people than just me should have noticed. What happened wasn't a secret, not really. People witnessed. This could have been a shared experiance. I guess it was just one nobody wanted. Somehow, I was the only one who couldn't escape... not even inside my mind.
#PTSDSupportAndRecovery #PTSD #BorderlinePersonalityDisorder #BorderlinePersonalityDisorderBPD

This was a vision I had in a meditative state before developing full-blown psychosis in 2018. Painted on my iPad. #Schizophrenia #MentalHealth