On the Previous (Brief Psychotic) Episode...

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog and one of the reasons I like a semi-public forum for my thoughts is that I find it so hard to share myself - the personal side of myself - with others in face-to-face or even direct online communication.  It turns out that this is necessary to establish deeper connections with others, which would explain why I don't feel like I have many deep connections in my life, or at least why I don't actively foster those connections with those I do have in my life.

I liken it to a bed of nails.  Talking with someone one-on-one feels like I'm laying on a single nail: piercing, vulnerable, painful.  But to talk or share with a group of people is like laying on a bed of nails - the more nails there are, the more the piercing vulnerability is distributed; I'm less likely to be hurt.  This could explain why I've always felt more comfortable on stage playing music or performing theater or improv than I have talking to people before or after a show.

So in that spirit, I've decided to share something of myself with the lovely bed of nails that is the Internet - something that, it turns out, is a huge part of my development, my identity, and a huge part of my psyche.  It is not something I talk about because, well, these things are difficult to share with others.  These things are not something that just come up in conversation.  I've been in group therapy for a year or more now and I still haven't really talked about this there, in that safe space, beyond mentioning surface level details.

About seven years ago I found myself out to lunch with a work colleague and close friend at the time.  For the weeks leading up to that point I had been consuming massive amounts of coffee.  My reasoning at the time was that I wanted to understand why caffeine suddenly, a few years earlier, started giving me big anxiety and panic attacks.  I'd been able to drink coffee successfully until one day I couldn't.

When I started drinking it again, it was intentionally, with the attitude that I will learn to get over the anxiety, that I deserve to drink coffee as much as anyone else, that by delving into the anxiety full-force, I could conquer it.  After all, I'd managed to quit smoking cigarettes around that time and had just started dating someone I'd pined after for years.  I felt empowered.

So I took the extreme route and drank up to ten cups a day for a period, no joke.  Then I would come home from work all wound up and panicky, maybe smoke some MJ, and explore full blown panic-land alone in my apartment, terrified at my palpitating heart but stoic and determined to resolve the dread and anxiety I was feeling.  I'd recline for hours on my Lay-Z-Boy while my heart spun in my chest.

I did this for several weeks and after a while I stopped sleeping.  Then came the day I went to lunch with the colleague and something made me snap.  We were at Chilli's and I think the Red Hot Chilli Peppers came on the radio and maybe it was the subtle coincidence of that or maybe it was something she said, but I snapped.  When she got up to use the restroom, I ran out of the place, through a local supermarket where I left my phone in the cereal isle, out through the store room and made my way up a hill behind the complex.

As I made my way up the hill, I systematically removed all my clothes.  I then took my wallet and systematically emptied all its contents.  When I reached the top, I was having full blown delusions about heaven and hell, God and the Devil.  I believed the government hatched a plan to nuke it's own citizens but that I had foiled their plot by running out of the restaurant.  So I had to rid myself of everything the system gave me in order to remain invisible.  The answer, it seemed, was nature.

To protect myself from the impending blasts, I rubbed leaves all over myself, plugged all my openings with them (yup, all of them).  I found out later, the hard way, that those leaves were poison ivy / oak / sumac.

On the other side of the hill was a large quarry where active work was being done - I could hear the rhythmic pounding of the machines.  Somehow I managed to make my way down the rock face to the bottom of the quarry where a large excavator rolled by and the driver saw my nakedness with a terrified look on his face.  An ambulance eventually came and I ended up in a psych ward.

I've written a much more vivid, first hand account of these events and maybe I'll share that one day, but for now, for this sharing, I find myself in a psych ward, out of my mind.

The thing is, I can answer all questions correctly: who is the president, what's the date, logical type questions.  I know how my reactions and responses will elicit responses in you, so I know exactly what to say and how to say it to get myself out of this bind.  But nothing else makes sense.  I see patterns everywhere.  I see that everything is essentially the same, complex transformations of some more basic element.

When I first get to the ward, a guy comes up to me, real close, and shows me the bandages around his wrists.  He tells me excitedly that he tried to kill himself.  I'm a newcomer, I'm a star, there's a whole group of people surrounding me.

There were a lot of things I experienced in the psych ward that a lot of people, if I told them, might be apt to dismiss as hallucinations on account of my eventually diagnosed "brief psychotic episode."  I saw doctors one day turn into janitors the next.  I saw complex formulas appear on packs of gum.  Even the fucking doctor assigned to me was wearing the same fucking shirt design as the one I'd discarded on the hill.

All of these things would be classically dismissed as hallucinations of a crazy person or maybe meaningless coincidences.  Fine, easy enough on paper.  But this was my experience, and these things had and have meaning to me.  What I saw and what I experienced were not mere hallucinations, distortions of some more true, objective reality.  What I saw and experienced was more real than this day-to-day bullshit most of us live.  I was tapped into another realm of existence, one better described by quantum physics and probability than by psychology and mechanistic certainty.

I was in the ward for a week or so, eventually being transferred to a higher functioning unit filled with alcoholics and people who recounted their traumatic stories all day on loop.

After I got out, I spent some time at my parent's house and eventually went back to work part-time, then full time.  And the most painful part of this whole experience?  It's not the psych ward itself or being crazy, it's that all of this had zero consequence, save a few thousand in medical bills.  It's like nothing ever happened.

I returned to work and no one talked about it (at least to me).  Like nothing ever happened.  My phone was returned to me, found by the owner of a local burrito joint I frequented.

That's the basic theme: no one talked about it and nothing ever happened.  Who really wants to go "there" right?  And I can't blame anyone for not wanting to broach those subjects.  Or maybe I'm enacting a confirmation bias and people did inquire and I was the one who didn't want to talk about it.  But, then, how could I talk about it?  Who has the language to accurately describe this stuff, the actual experience of it, when you're in it?

This is not to say I didn't feel supported, because I did and I was.  But that's how it felt to me, like it never happened.  Even my freaking girlfriend at the time, whom I had dated for only a few months before that episode, stayed with me.

And so that's why I'm sharing this with you now, you beautiful bed of nails.  Because if you're reading this and you feel like you're crazy or you've been in a psych ward, know that you are not crazy.  It's the world around us that is crazy.  It is our culture's inability to properly manage mental illness that's crazy.  It's all the fucking pills we take to calm ourselves down, the socially-accepted massive amounts of alcohol we consume to socialize and connect with others, and most especially the things we don't say for shame and fear of reproach that makes us crazy.  If there was less stigma about mental illness, then I believe mental illness would start dissipating on its own.  I believe it is what we are hiding out of fear and shame that drives us nuts.

So fuck this fear and shame based culture; I refuse to live that way any longer.  I will be my true self.  I will learn to speak my truth despite the perceived consequences.   I will learn to share myself and connect with others.  I will learn to receive and give love.  I will learn to live a compassionate life if it kills me.