What a Bad Day looks Like

What a bad day, or week, or month, looks like for people with psychosis is variable. This is what it’s like for me this week.

I count today as a bad day, and figured writing in the midst of the experience, if I can continue steady coherency, may paint the best picture. The two sentences above took some rearranging as a bunch of words came out that didn’t make a complete statement at all.

Last night I couldn’t get to sleep until around 4:30 a.m because of a tightness in my chest, anxiety as usual. This comes from a myriad of things. One reason is simply anxiety. I struggle with trauma, and some thoughts were triggering those reactions. Another reason is voices. For the last few weeks they’ve been instructing that I kill myself. They’ve told me I’m going to die, specifically from a heart attack, which has been a fear of mine for many years. After experiencing family members in and out of the hospital for multiple Alcoholism related events, (Seizures, blood pressure spikes, medication mistreatments on the part of the doctors) I struggle with feeling my body and not assuming the worst.

I don’t usually talk about what they tell me, as they also tell me not to tell people. They also tell me no one will believe me, and I often believe that, as a lot of my experience has been internal voices. Although science tells me this is valid (I can site the studies if you’d like), multiple mental health advocacy websites will not acknowledge this. HealthyPlace.com is one of them. I’ll talk about my history with them later. It’s usually the websites that take kickbacks from drug companies and have antipsychotic ads all across their homepage that seek to limit the expression of variable experiences. Internal voices can be just as distressing, more so for some people, and are not the voice of your conscience that you hear when you make a mistake or that inner voice you hear as you’re reading this post. They are separate voices, often pushing their way through clouds of my own thoughts intrusively, spontaneously, and they can get loud. When they push the volume, I experience both external and internal voices. Today I hear nothing external.

But, I bit the bullet and told my therapist. She got concerned, and I worried she’d 5150 me (California’s version of forced psychiatric care). I really just needed to vent about what they’d been telling me, though. This morning I haven’t heard them much, as I just woke up, but the tightness in my chest comes in waves, and my stomach has been upset back and forth. No it’s not Corona, and not it’s not a physical problem, as much as the voices will tell me as such.

I struggle with somatic experiences, and correctly labeling those somatic experiences. Today, I’m convinced my voices–although I don’t hear them as I’m listening to this music–have done something to my body. I believe I hear my ancestors, and I also believe I hear and receive messages from what I call False Angels, kind of like the concept of Jinn. They are tricksters, angery sometimes, nice other times, liars and truth tellers, conflicted and dual in their existence just as we are. I also believe they like to harm me spiritually and internally to try and prevent me from living the life I want to. *For example, as I’m editing this and reading back, the more I read over their identities, the more upset my stomach becomes, because they know I’m talking about them.*

This morning I believe I feel my anxiety because they’ve done something to me overnight. Two parts of me appear when I have this kinds of thoughts.

I am post first-psychotic-break and for many people that means living with an uncanny realization that things you experience are not necessarily the things you think they are. I know my body and mind play tricks, and so at the above thought a part of me pulls me to the side of: “that isn’t real”. It tells me anxiety can cause the same feelings. It tells me what I’m feeling may not exist at all. It tells me to focus on other things.

The other part of me craves the unreality. Not only does my mind concoct surprisingly sensical (to me) impossibilities, it also thrives off it, it seems. I’ve always been an imaginative child, and that talent intensifies in these sorts of thoughts. This part of me believes I am so special that divine and otherworldly entities focus their existence on warping mine. This part of me pulls me toward dissociation, toward long thought, toward staring at the wall, toward lethargy, toward apathy. That is where I am this morning, on the raft of dissociation and a flight of unreal explanations.

I’m forgetting my words, stumbling over these sentences, and quelling my frustration with Kodak Black and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie.

I’m getting messages from the songs, feeling connected to the artists, and reconsidering my life. I doubt myself constantly, and never has that been more obvious than this last week. I’m worried how long I can keep up working full time. I’m worried if I’ll have to fall back on a medication regimen and risk my long-term physical health. There’s a reason those diagnosed with Schizophrenia have a shorter life-span, and it’s not suicide. It’s medication, poor diet, cigarettes, and lack of support. I’ve corrected my diet, got off medication, never smoked cigarettes–now I just need to convince myself I deserve support.

There are overwhelming senses of failure mixed in with all of this, like no matter what I do I am trapped. I think a lot of us experience that.

I’m not going to lie and say I’m going to “try and stay positive.” I’m going to do the exact opposite. I’m going to plunge as low as I need to. I’m going to fall beneath the voices if I need to. Let myself be absorbed by the unreal thoughts if I need to. The best way I’ve learned to survive this is to let go of this idea of control. Writing this is a good reminder of that.

Bad days are a way of life. They are necessary for life. I am thankful for their boldness, their spiciness, their unequivocal strength. A voice has let me know that I’m genius, that I’ll be famous specifically, and although I’ve always been bright, I learned to squash my ego because it only fuels what the psychiatric industry considers delusions. When he tells me to kill myself, I say “I don’t want to do that”, often out loud, sometimes inside. Other times I’ll ask him “why would I do that?” and that shuts him up. I learned that from a Hearing Voices Network workgroup. The point of it was to initiate a conversation with your voices, really get into the meat of their existence, but for me it seems to scare him away. I’m happy with either result.

I heard a child sometime this week, I haven’t heard since. I don’t hear women often, but when I do they’re usually condescending, external. One woman specifically screams. She mocks used to mock me before I fell asleep, but I haven’t heard her in a while. My sleeping patterns have improved, I think that’s why. I have a kind man, external and internal, who asks me if I’m okay when I’m struggling. I haven’t heard him recently either. I don’t know who I’m left with. This is uncharted voice territory.

I will spare everyone my long-winded thoughts on why I think this most recent string of voices is one deep voice in particular, wanting me to kill myself.

I don’t know what the rest of the day will be like, and I don’t need to waste time assuming things either. Comment what your bad days are like below.

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