I used to see people die right in front of me in some of the most gruesome ways. Necks being sliced in half, eyeballs being diced, limbs being chopped off by some disembodied, evil force. Of course it was all in my head, but it was real enough to scare the shit out of me. I loved these people. Well, most of them, anyway. Looking back, I don’t know if I could ever say that was mutual with them, but I blindly loved them, anyway. Seeing someone being brutally murdered right in front of you - but not - repeatedly, day by day, with the blood dripping from the walls and ceiling, all the worse in a large crowd... I have to admit, it took a toll on me.
Most of my days back then, I looked down, trying not to look at people. As long as I didn’t see them, I didn’t hallucinate their horrible deaths over and over. They would still talk and act normal, since... well, they were actually perfectly fine, but that only creeped me out all the more. Just several years ago, I handled hallucinations - both auditory and visual - as well as mood swings, paranoia, and just plainly my full blown insanity much better than I currently handle my semi-treated, moderately-medicated, much more ‘blah,’ grey life now.
I can’t explain it - I truly can’t - but I crave with such deep, powerful longing to return to that unfettered, crazed state where my mind ran rampant and I had almost no control and very little grasp on reality. Well, I take that back... I could always tell a hallucination from reality, my mind just also maintained a constant break from reality. But these ‘breaks’ from reality were what, ironically, held me together. Without them, in my current state, I have no adequate coping mechanisms. My hallucinations were what got me from point A to point B. Now... I’m just stuck somewhere around G, not moving forward, but perhaps steadily moving backward, heading back to A.
Now, I don’t want to be mistaken; meds were certainly the route to go. Without them... well, my brain just might be mush and my life might’ve been exponentially worse off. These are hypothetical possibilities, of course, as I obviously didn’t stay off meds. I have fought with the costs and effects of my various med regimens for quite some time, now, of course, and it’s altered me both biologically and psychologically in quite a drastic way. I look back at what my life was five, six years ago... at it seems almost like an entirely different life from this one - an entirely different world.
It feels as though my soul doesn’t really belong in this new world, however, and I’m constantly being tugged back toward the old world through distant memories that hardly seem completely real; more like dreams than memories. Writing about my old self almost feels like writing fiction when it’s far from it. It’s probably some of the truest stuff I’ve ever written about, but it goes in circles, in a continuous pattern repeating itself over and over, and I can hardly elaborate further. My memories are both very finite and continuously expanding through finding the keys to those memories through scent, taste, touch, or other sensorial data. The slightest, most seemingly trivial thing can trigger an uncontrolled tsunami of memories, and these memories sometimes pour over me over and over, overwhelm me, and even control me. They’re unpredictable, and closely tether to my senses and my heart, and can sometimes seem like flashbacks or glitches, flickering on and off erratically.
Unless a person has personally gone through what I have, I’m not sure I could ever get someone to completely understand. It’s like I phase in and out of this world, always on the edge, on the border, between two parallel universes that are all too different simply because of a matter of perspective. There’s the old world, before meds, and then the new world, stable and sane, and I seem to have started to ebb and flow between the two. I’m not quite insane, but not quite sane, either. I’m constantly on the edge of the cliff, not even knowing where I am or how I got there, staring down and down and down, knowing that a gusty wind pushing in the wrong direction could send me falling to an inevitable demise, and yet I can’t seem to simply take a few steps back. I become petrified, staring into that seemingly endless canyon, only able to dwell on the possibility of danger.
I feel drugged; not from meds, not from anything I know. I feel as though I were slipped a mysterious, foreign drug to which I’m at the mercy of, for I don’t know its effects, nor do I know how much I’ve taken, how potent... anything. It’s a mystery to me. All that I know is that things don’t feel right. Things don’t feel familiar or comfortable. Things have changed and I can’t control them - I’m out of control. All I can do now is try to weather the chemical state I’ve somehow fallen into and hope to come out the other side...
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