A peek into psychosis

I’m only really writing this to try and batter my extremely confused mind into a semblance of coherency – writing helps me focus. I wondered whether I needed to publish it, but it occurred to me it might give you, dear reader, an understanding of why my posting is erratic in timing and often erratic in content. If you just read Elitistreview for lewd yet interesting tasting notes you might want to come back another time.

Twitter and Facebook followers will know I’ve been ill for about a week. I don’t deal with illness particularly well and it has aggravated my psychotic mental illness. Since moving to Winchester and solving my insomnia problem this happens less regularly. However, I am scared, confused and devastatingly unhappy too often to manage anything like the pulsingly successful career I expected when I was an academic before I lost my marbles.

Historically my diagnosis has been paranoid schizophrenia, but my current psychiatrist, probably the best one I’ve seen in nearly 14 years of being ill, described me as having a ‘psychotic illness triggered by childhood trauma’. There is a lot of paranoia in that illness, though.

I just stubbed my toe on my bed frame and shrank into a ball on the floor, not due to physical pain but because of the crushing understanding that everything in the universe, even the bed I need to sleep in, wants to hurt me and cause me harm.

I’ve got a couple of emails from lovely friends in my inbox that I’ve been too scared to even read because I know they will be deviously worded attempts to get me to disclose information that can be used to damage me. I love my friends and so having these thoughts about messages from them, which I will no doubt find to be warmly friendly when I feel better and read them in a few days, creases me up with unhappiness.

Some of the delusions my knackered mind subjects me to are deeply uncharitable toward people I care about (and me, come to think of it). Something that can spook me for days is when I wake up in the middle of the night and see one of my best friends screaming abusive obscenities at me from the end of my bed. Last time this happened someone I know who would drop everything to help me at a moment’s notice was apparently waving a knife at me and threatening to kill me for being such a disgusting waste of a human life. Oh dear.

WP_20121004 2I haven’t felt terribly suicidal since my unfortunate Christmas Day experience in 2010, my medication keeps things under control most of the time and getting out of horrible, horrible Woolwich has undoubtedly lowered my stress levels – this is all good. Yet on days like today it’s more than I can manage to get out of my pyjamas and stop hiding under the bedclothes (note: this is the most recent picture I’ve taken and all I could manage to think of illustrating this not particularly photo-friendly post with). The bad times are not particularly easy.

I like to think I can write in a reasonably compelling style, and Elitistreview seems to support that (I’ve had nearly 90,000 unique visitors in the past year), but sadly that doesn’t make me a vastly competent and successful person… Well… I suppose I could view it as successful that I even manage the little I do with the problems I have. And that seems a good note to end this on, I’m losing coherency again and want to hide. Thank you for reading.

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