Psychosis

Note:

I’ve been reading MounaLisa’s writing on her own experience with psychosis with tears in my eyes. I recognise parts I understand — parts I can understand only because those thoughts were true to me too. Then there are parts I can only look at from the outside; what the inside of felt like, I can’t know — I haven’t been there.

Exactly one year ago, I was in the depths of psychosis. It’s an experience I will forever cherish as my own, one which I am deeply protective over. I’ve spent a year now, figuring it out — what happened, what I was experiencing. I have hundreds of pages of attempts to describe it. It feels impossible to communicate across in a way someone else can touch. I’d built an entire world for myself, a reality of one.

Psychosis is impossible to describe from the inside and impossible to imagine from the outside. I’ve learnt to communicate those parts of me in the laconic cryptics they exist in. I know what they mean. And if someone else has been there too, they know what it means, too. They recognise the shape of the place the schizophrenic language is clumsily draped over. Human connection across these isolated pocket realities is very precious to me. Company in these desert spaces of human experience.

I’ve spent a year, now, translating my reality last year into fragments this reality can understand. I wrote this one a while ago. It’s the closest thing I’ve got describing the experience. None of this is metaphor. None of this is stylistic flourish. This is an honest to god account, as faithfully as I can describe it:

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You wake up and before you’re even really fully conscious, the court calls you to justify yourself before the jury. The jurors, made up of loved ones and strangers alike, eight billion of them, all watching, all witness to your every thought, impatiently awaiting your justification of your choice to exist.

You become aware that something’s broken and that is not allowed.

Perform perform perform. Perfectly.

Or risk annihilation.

The thought realises itself before it emerges. You are not allowed to exist. You can’t exist. Humans in the form you take are not able to exist. But you do exist. Either you are intruding on the laws of reality. Or the paradox of the implied status of not existing as a possibility for something that does exist exposes something deeply, deeply wrong in the laws of your reality.

Your nervous system marries the former before you wake up to the latter.

The faulty logic sits early and foundational, programmed long before the rest built on top, so to troubleshoot and repair, you rip out all the wiring.

Your mind opens up, meaning falls apart, language enters superposition, and you meet God in forms uncontainable in your discrete digital humble human comprehension.

You’ve lost your mind, but, cruelly, the mind remains intact as it malfunctions.

You, you, are still in there, somehow, somewhere, though unable to point to or describe what exactly you is.

Machines of meat and chemistry, electrically emergent, captured helplessly in the analog arbitrary of everything. The flesh continues to live as your capacity to compute it collapses, and you must suffer through it aware but unable to make anything of it.

You create a map to find your way back, build language and meaning up again brick by brick, starting at the foundation: I exist.

You stand on the horizon of schizophrenia, you’re convinced, if your theory of reality is correct. But if it is correct, then you should be able to trace your steps back home, though you’ve long forgotten what “home” was.

The thread tying your careful cover together unravels and the stars you’ve been counting scatter out, through your mouth, into the realities of others. You are no longer alone but you are still stuck in your own. You test a theory, risk careful words balanced on the tip of your tongue. Helplessly vomiting them up, printing error logs live, desperately praying others are able to decode them.

Help.

This is it. You either got it right enough to return to sanity. Or you are about to dissolve entirely into your own self-propelling interiority, severed irreconcilably from mutual communication.

Day by day, you wake up, until one day you wake up as yourself again.

You become a person again. Settle into the narrative container that holds the raw pulse of your self-creating consciousness.

You discover, as a child would for the first time, the world anew. The depth surprises you.

You try to capture this, too, human experience, though language does not reach it. You’re a writer, so you try.