Beginnings Part II

In March of 2006, I was sent home from my job (at that time I was serving fast food in Target–a truly glamorous job, to be sure) because I wasn’t making any sense to anyone. My speech was very fragmented and none of my sentences were connecting with each other. The inside of my head felt clouded. A co-worker asked if I’d hit my head recently, but I told her that I hadn’t. I was ordered to sit down and drink some water, and when I still couldn’t snap out of it, I was told to call in a replacement and just go home. How I managed to drive home without crashing still amazes me.

I believe I fell asleep at some point after arriving back home, and I woke up sometime later to find my mom sitting on the edge of my bed. I told her what happened and then started crying uncontrollably and saying that I needed to go to the hospital.

To be honest, this whole period is a giant blur to me because I was pretty out of my mind. I just remember that everything stopped making sense, I was crying and screaming a lot for no reason, and I was eventually brought to a mental hospital.

It was my third time being placed somewhere, but the first time I’d been anywhere as an adult, and the first time I was put somewhere besides a psychiatric ward. Before being lead inside, while looking over my body and taking notes on all the self-inflicted cuts and burns (mostly scarred by that point), one of the nurses told me I was too pretty to have so many problems. For some reason, I remained polite, and smiled as best as I could in reply to that comment. Later on, other patients would tell me I was too young to have problems (at age twenty, I was the youngest one there, along with a boy who I’d gone to high school with [we had a laugh about that]; everyone referred to me as “the baby”).

Too young. Too pretty. There is no such thing when it comes to mental illness. I never understood how people could think such things. Logically, if I were so pretty, why the hell would I apparently be “choosing” to destroy it and be ill? For attention? I already received attention! For much better things! I know that people giving me these comments meant them to be taken in the best way possible, but it ended up making everything worse. I started to convince myself that I was just creating problems for some reason, that none of them were serious and I was just a spoiled bitch who loved drama. I felt like nobody took me seriously, and it caused me to close up about all my issues, especially those dealing with how I viewed myself.

I’m digressing a bit here though.

I only stayed in the hospital for a weekend, and then I asked to be released because I didn’t feel like being there was helping me at all. I was put on an anti-depressant and sent on my way, everyone still believing that I was dealing with bipolar disorder, myself included. I came to the conclusion that what had happened at work was just a severe panic attack, probably brought on by how little I had been eating at the time (due to my eating disorder). Since my breakdown this year though, I believe that what happened in 2006 was another precursor to everything, as the two episodes shared many similarities. But at the time, after getting out of the hospital and returning to work, I pushed it all back and tried to forget about it. I certainly didn’t think it was significant for any reason.

The next (and last) precursor occurred in the summer of 2007. It was then that I developed my fear of walking.

Yeah. Walking.

I didn’t want to walk because I knew that my legs would snap in half if I did. For two or three days, I’d wake up in the morning, pull myself onto my computer chair (it had wheels and could therefore transport me easily), and use that to move around as much as possible. If I absolutely had to walk, I’d hold on to whatever I could while I moved, and I’d crouch low to the ground.

I seriously looked fucking ridiculous.

I eventually got a hold of some elastic knee supports, and I realized that wearing them made my insecurity about walking disappear. As long as I kept the supports on, I could walk just fine. The only problem was that I couldn’t wear them all the time, as they cut off circulation quite a bit, and I certainly couldn’t wear them in the shower. Curiously, I don’t remember anyone inquiring much as to why I was wearing the supports, but I think I probably just made some logical excuse as to why I had them on and that was that. I mean, who was going to suspect the real reason, anyway?

I don’t remember how long this lasted, but one day it just .. stopped. Although, just like my delusional fear of being shot in the head, it wasn’t gone forever.

Beginnings Part I

I don’t remember the exact moment when I started hearing voices, but I know I was around fifteen or sixteen years old when it started. Back then, I only heard them when I was lying in bed at night. They weren’t speaking to me, and they weren’t speaking about anything in particular, either. Sometimes they weren’t even speaking words, it was just sounds. Most of the time, it was as if I’d picked up a phone and was listening in on a conversation that meant nothing.

You’d probably assume that I would have run screaming to the nearest hospital pleading for them to lock me up forever in response to hearing voices that I knew weren’t real, but (wait for it) it actually really comforted me to hear them. I looked forward to hearing them, and was disappointed when I didn’t. They lulled me to sleep. Sure, there was a side of me that was a bit concerned about everything, but for the most part, I didn’t worry about it. The voices weren’t talking to me, so clearly I wasn’t crazy or anything.

But then a day came when I was spoken to directly.

The incident occurred the morning after I had spent the night at my dad’s house (for some reason I can’t recall right now). He was re-organizing some rooms of the house at the time, one of them being the room I was sleeping in. The bed frame leaned against a chest of drawers, and he’d put the mattress and some sheets / pillows on the floor for me to sleep on. I woke up in the morning, and a voice said to me, “Move out of the way, the bed frame is going to fall.” I did as I was told without hesitation, but nothing happened. I was a bit disturbed that a voice in my head had just spoken to me, nay, commanded me, and even worse, I’d listened, but I just shrugged it off. After all, it had been warning me about something concerning my safety, not telling me to kill my parents or something. What was the harm in that?

There were a handful of instances after that initial incident where a voice warned me about something, but I can only clearly remember that first time. Even though the voices (and let me clarify, there were voices, but there was no distinguishing them from each other) spoke to me, and it started to happen frequently, I still didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. I mean, general knowledge on hearing voices is that it only happens to people like David Berkowitz (the Son of Sam killer who claimed that a demon possessed dog commanded that he kill people). I wasn’t being ordered to hurt anyone, and the voices weren’t even threatening at all! I couldn’t see anything wrong with any of it.

Therapists would ask me over the years if I heard voices and if they told me to do things (I was being treated for bipolar disorder at this point in time). Sometimes I would tell the truth, but usually I wouldn’t mention it at all. I saw no reason to. Yes, I heard voices, and yes, they gave me commands, but they were just looking out for my well-being, not making me a threat to society or myself. I honestly didn’t think anyone would believe me if I told the complete truth. For starters, I was a teenager. I never felt anyone took me seriously, even in therapy. I was always afraid that I’d just been seen as an attention seeking liar. Lots of people I associated with in high school would brag about being on anti-depressants or cutting themselves or whatever it was that they thought would make them look completely outrageous and interesting. I never understood it. I’d been placed in therapy and medicated before I was ten years old, and it had always been something I’d been deeply ashamed of and hidden from everyone. To witness people actually bragging about everything was a complete shock to my system. And it made me doubt myself. For years, I hadn’t believed there was anything wrong with me, but around age twelve things really did start to screw up and I started to slowly accept that I probably needed help. To have everyone around me in high school be in the same treatment that I was made it all seem like a joke to me. After all, how could we all have the same problems? I started to believe I was actually completely fine; therefore, the voices were just a figment of my imagination. I was just being a teenager and inventing problems to look cool, obviously. This was all further cemented in my head by various boyfriends I had at the time who would dismiss all that I told them and say I was being histrionic .

Hearing voices wasn’t my only symptom though, although I still didn’t believe this all meant anything.

While walking with friends down a sidewalk one day, I saw a large, black dog running towards us. I waited for it to slow down or turn to avoid us, but it just kept heading straight forward. As it neared me, it leaped. I screamed and fell to the ground, covering my face.

Seconds passed and … nothing. I cautiously brought my arms down and saw my friends standing ahead of me and casting confused glances in my direction.

“What the hell was that?” one of them asked.

“Where did the dog go?!” I demanded.

“What dog?”

“What the fuck! The dog. The big fucking black dog that was running towards us!”

Blank faces. I decided to shut up.

“Nevermind.”

That was the first hallucination I remember having, and the only one that I’ve responded to with witnesses present. I didn’t hallucinate very much back then, but it would worsen over the years (which I will expand upon later).

My delusions, on the other hand, have been around for as long as I can remember, but they didn’t start to really disrupt my life until around when the voices started.

I’ve always felt like some faceless / nameless someone is out to hurt me. I have a lot of rituals that I feel keep me safe from this happening, such as always sleeping with my back to a wall, keeping my bed away from windows, keeping curtains closed at night, etc. I’m terrified of sleeping, to be honest, but that’s beside the point.

I started my first job when I was seventeen, at a dollar store. I worked as a stocker / cashier during afternoons and evenings until close (around nine or ten o’clock at night). I spent most of my time in the front of the store, which was made of a wall of glass windows. I am absolutely terrified of open windows at night. I don’t feel safe around them because I feel they make me an easy target (since, if lights are on, it’s usually impossible for the person inside to see outside, while outside anyone can clearly see what’s happening inside and be kept hidden by darkness). Most of the time, I kept my cool around the windows though. I talked myself through my fears. I didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself in front of the managers or, hell, anyone.

One night was especially hard for me to deal with though. It was near closing time, and I noticed a pick up truck parked in the parking lot. There was hardly anyone in the store, and as people came and went, nobody seemed to be the owner of the truck. I kept telling myself there was nothing to worry about and I was just being stupid, but a very real fear started to creep up over me. I became convinced that someone was in the truck aiming a gun at my head. Since I had to stay around the registers, I kept moving about in whatever way I could. I bent over behind the counter a lot and pretended to be sorting through things. I was absolutely petrified to raise my head above the counter for any reason because I thought I was going to die if I did. Eventually I think I was called to the back for some reason, and when I returned to the front, the truck was gone.

It’s taken me years to even realize that that incident was a delusion. At the time, I truly believed in all of it.

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I’ve exhausted myself writing this, so I’m going to stop here for now. More parts to come.