What A Bad Day is Like Part 2

I think one of the hardest parts of following a path of wellness after descending into a well of madness is recognizing and acknowledging our humanity. We are inherently not perfect. We are inherently cursed with a frightening amount of insecurity, duality, and uncertainty. Our confidence is easier to lose than to gain. Our bodies are fragile, even in their strength. Our minds hide things from us, trick us, and their true biological workings will probably never be fully understood. Physical nature limits us because our true nature, our particle make-up, is unlimited. That power would be reckless and uncontrollable in our physical reality.

Everything starts to feel insignificant after our re-entrance into this reality. That’s how I felt. It’s how I still feel.

There’s a deep sense of loss that can follow acute psychosis which outsiders often have difficulty understanding. Many people are resistant to thinking anything so terrifying can have positive results. This is why psychiatry is in the state that it is: coercive, power-hungry, and rather daft. Much of modern Psychiatry seeks to eliminate the “problem” (psychosis, depression, anxiety) while presenting the “solution” as normalcy, as lack of the symptomolgy they define. This isn’t obtainable; for years I chased their vision of a crystal city. Sometimes I still catch myself crying for relief. What breaks me out of it? Reminding myself that relief isn’t in the form of an absence of experience, it’s in the form of walking alongside those experiences.

The voice which has been instructing I kill myself had affected my mood, as such a thing should. I learned that I obey my voices and the messages I receive more than I thought. My psychologist seems to see this as a problem. I did at first, as well, simply because I was so unaware of it. After a few days, however, I’ve realized that there is power in sitting with a demon. I obey some things and I don’t obey others and that’s kind of how a balanced life goes: you make some choices, you don’t make other choices, and you keep following a path until you are where you need to be. She considered this voice in particular a problem. I do not.

This gets labeled as “denial” in the world of psychiatry, and that may have been the first word that rang in your head as well. This is not denial–which, ironically, makes this sound more like denial.

Instead, being on solid ground with voices, feeling rocked by them, rocking them back, is no different than being in a relationship that requires excellent communication skills.

Back to loss. The loss I felt when I returned home from the hospital in 2017 with a couple prescriptions and a zombie walk is indescribable. I wanted the euphoria back. I wanted that sense I was special, that I had purpose and a place in life that was so important to humanity that entities from another realm had to attempt to strike me down. I put my sadness and aloofness into art projects that consisted of wood carving, sketching, and getting lost in music. I walked often as well, usually 6 hours or so, across town and back. I people-watched. None of them knew how tiny and worthless they were in the grand scheme of things, I thought.

That sounds depressing and it was.

Researchers have been fighting over whether or not antipsychotic medication causes intense apathy after acute psychosis. You can find publications in journals galore about this, and some of them are free on PMC. Without evidence, I can’t say for sure either way. I can hypothesize, though, that the sense of loss, confusion, and shock that results as you’re introduced back into the world everyone says is real, might just make us a little unexcitable.

You guys, I don’t know what the point of this post is. I have some good points in there about loss, about voices, but I can’t seem to gather them into an organized thought today. I am struggling, and I was going to keep this in drafts. I’m thinking this is a part two to What It’s Like on A Bad Day.

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