I was surrounded by bats.
The strangeness of what I was witnessing was not lost on me nor was it unusual. See, for years, I found myself in this place- the one where reality is relative and often suspended. Time would pass, diagnosis’ would be proclaimed, then changed, then proclaimed again. I’d have test after test after test that left me feeling cerebrally violated.
There was never a why, only a what: psychosis.
And as it would stand I’d later learn that my foray with daily auditory and visual hallucinations was a phenomenon that could never be explained by just one thing. Like most trivia of life, delusion is not singularly caused. The pressure in my brain caused by a rare neurological disorder was capable of causing psychosis, but so was the acute trauma I’d been surviving since the age of its onset. And after years spent with barriers in the shape of pillows and headphones cushioning my ears as well as the assumption of a calculated composure that my presenting symptoms required in order to make it through the day relatively unscathed, one day they just stopped.
For the first time in damn near a decade, I was the only person, voice or thing in my head which was not without its caveats.
I celebrated and grieved the loss on a 6.5 hour flight across the country, running away from home. Even in such teenage madness, something was crystalized. There was clarity I previously found incapable of achieving.
In the years since, my relationship to reality has suffered. There’s little that reassures me that my current reality is exactly that, reality. The same one experienced by the billions of people I inhabit the planet with. Most days, it feels too unlikely that I’m just okay now. That parts unbeknownst to me, slaved away for years casting out the source of my torment with no demands of payment. For the life of me, I can’t shake the doubts.
So even though the therapy has been had and the meds have been complied with, no amount of intervention will erase the stain of nearly 9 years of my life. It’s hard to believe when your ability to do so is where your mortal flaw lies.
Keeping that in mind, a few years ago I felt myself approaching a holistic, some would even say healed place in relation to my trauma- things were finally on track. That’s until nearly all progress I made was derailed by living through a mass disabling and mortality inducing event that the public decided was over well before that were true.
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