Beginnings Part III

This is the part of my story that I’m the most nervous about confronting. I’ve been reading over journals I’ve kept over the past few years that detail certain events that I want to write about here, but I’m still so afraid that I will forget to mention something, or I’ll be unable to write about it in a way that other people will be able to understand. I also feel a bit silly writing about all of this, as it all technically never even existed except to me, which is a concept I still struggle with understanding on some level.

I’m not sure why I’m confessing all of this, but it’s made me feel a little bit better to mention all of this before I continue.

–

Over the years, from about 2004 onward, I’d say, I started to sense more and more the presence of other beings around me. Actually, “creatures” is probably a better term for them. None of them were human. They started out originally as just being grinning faces. Not a comforting grin, but a terrifying grin, usually with extremely long, sharp teeth and hollow eyes. I’d receive flashes of these faces in my head at random moments, or else I’d occasionally see someone’s face transform into it, but then blink and it would be back to normal.

This painting was done in 2004. It was my first attempt to recreate what I was seeing, although I feel it failed miserably:

Over time, some of the faces started to form bodies and turn into something that resembled small children. I stopped seeing them so much all over and started to only see them hiding under tables and desks. It unnerved me slightly, but I didn’t feel really threatened because it was clear to me that they were just kids trying to scare me for the fun of it, not to harm me.

On the other hand, I became aware of the presence of a group of creatures living in my bedroom, and one creature living in my brother’s room, that I knew wanted to hurt me, but my acknowledgment of them was sporadic at the time, and they didn’t become a real threat to me until my breakdown in January of 2008.

The first time I was ever directly threatened by anything was during the fall of 2007. I had fallen back into anorexic habits at the time, and a friend had found out and was scolding me for it, telling me to stop and get over it. We were arguing online through instant messaging, and at some point during our argument, a voice started screaming at me that if I attempted to get better or I ate what I wasn’t supposed to, it would kill me.

I was completely terrified. I had never, ever had one of the voices scream at me before. They had always been looking out for me! What the fuck was going on?! Frantic and unsure of what to do, I pulled up a search online, because I remembered reading something earlier about “the voice of an eating disorder.” I found the page I was looking for, and it informed me that hearing an actual voice was either due to malnutrition / dehydration … or schizophrenia. I didn’t know what to think. I knew all my symptoms over the years were all adding up to one conclusion, but I couldn’t believe it. After all, crazy people don’t know they’re crazy. Right?

I argued on with my friend without telling her about the voice. All I told her was that I couldn’t just stop having an eating disorder. I couldn’t tell her the truth. For as much as she knew about my problems over the years, there was still nothing I could say to prepare her for a statement such as “The voices in my head will kill me if I don’t do what they command” (although that is a great way to break the ice when you’re introducing yourself to someone, take notes).

As 2007 came to a close, I did start to recover from my eating disorder. I hadn’t heard the voice since that night, and it seemed to be gone for good. I got a job cutting up and preparing ingredients for the salads and sandwiches at Panera Bread and everything started to become really normal for me.

Sadly, “normal” wouldn’t last long.

Near the end of January, on a Sunday night, I had a mild panic attack while trying to get to sleep, and had difficulty sleeping at all. It was upsetting, but as the week went on, there didn’t seem to be any sign of further disturbances, so I tried to put it out of my mind.

The one thing I did start to notice, though, was that my memory and concentration seemed to be slipping. Every day, I’d make a list of the order in which I’d go about preparing various food, and suddenly it started to become somewhat difficult to make the list. Putting things in order and keeping everything together in my head just seemed to be something that I couldn’t do very well anymore, and it frustrated me. I just assumed I wasn’t getting enough sleep and was stressing out about the audit the following week though. My inability to remember certain things or keep a list in order was annoying, but it never became severe enough to disrupt anything, so I finished out the week pretty well.

That Friday evening, my mom said some things that sent me spiraling off into a depression about how she had treated me as a child, and I decided to spend the evening drinking in order to cope with my emotions (smart people: do not do this).

After that night, my sanity slipped away from me, and I wouldn’t get a firm grip on it again for over a month.

Talking to my friend online again that night, drunk, I eventually started crying and going on and on about how afraid I was of the creatures who were trying to kill me. I said there was a thin veil between our world and theirs, and it was close to breaking, and once it did, I was totally fucked. I can’t remember everything about that conversation (being drunk and going crazy does that to your memory, you know), but I do know that it eventually lead to the conclusion that I was totally batshit and needed to go back to therapy.

The next morning, I was pretty out of it (which I thought was just a hangover, but it turned out to be the calm before the total psychotic storm took over), but I remembered my conversation the night before, and it was severely unsettling. I didn’t know what was real or not anymore. On some level, I knew these creatures I was afraid of didn’t actually exist, but at the same time, I couldn’t believe they were all just in my head. I just could not accept it. I hadn’t consciously created them, so therefore they had to really exist. They just had to. How could I possibly feel their presence, and the presence of a whole other world in general, if it were all just my imagination? I’m a logical person, dammit. Logical people don’t believe in monsters living under the bed (or by the bed / in the closet, in my case).

I spent the day drawing and trying to figure myself out. This was my entry in my livejournal for that day:

What if all the world’s inside of your head?
Just creations of your own.
Your devils and your gods
All the living and the dead.
And you’re really
all. alone.

(Nine Inch Nails lyrics)

Of course, nobody looking at that would realize what it actually meant. I mean, who would think I was being literal?

The next day, my brain still clouded, I drew some more, and called up a therapist I hadn’t seen in months in order to schedule a new appointment and figure my shit out. I feared for my sanity, but I was happy that I was taking steps to get help again. As I mentioned in Part I, I’d usually kept this side of things away from therapists, fearing they wouldn’t believe me, and I still feared that reaction, but I was at least glad that I was willing to talk about it now and acknowledge that it was possibly a real, serious issue.

I went to sleep that night fairly hopeful for my future and ready to go back to work the next morning and return to some sort of normalcy.

Normalcy apparently didn’t want me.