Confessions of a Psychotic
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I once drunkenly at a bar met a man who told me he was insane. I asked him what it was like, and this is his response. I do not know his name. I would not recognize his face were it shown to me again, but paraphrased below is his story.

The people who claim to love me, the people who know I have schizoaffective disorder, (which is what you get when you spice up schizophrenia with either depression or bipolar or both) all ask me what the hardest part of living with my “illness” is.

And I tell them nothing.

The truth is, it’s the feeling that we, as a species and as a society, are all blindly marching forward. Marching forward to a gas chamber. All of us are in this lumbering herd, following the person in front of us, and at the end of the road is the worst thing imaginable. You try to warn the people around you and they are offended by the suggestion. You try to stop and break from the mass of people yourself, but cannot. The person behind you shoves you onward unto hell. Everyone bands together to force you to march forward with them to the meat packing plant.

You feel like your friends and family love you so much that they will never listen to anything you have to say if those things don’t conform to the version of reality which they so desperately cling to.

Because they have to.

They have to believe everything will be okay, that everything is alright. The sun will rise tomorrow, they say through all the darkness.

Through all the rising seas and global eternal wars and every other hell of this world, they know the sun will rise tomorrow, so they need not worry.

But the thing is, the sun would still rise if the world were a radioactive ruin.

And the sun will still rise after an army of robots instill their owners as gods above men. The sun will still rise over the human sacrifices your descendants offer up to them. The sun will still rise as they take their tribute of the flesh of the less fortunate.

Just as it rises over the corpses of our battlefields. Just as it rises over those who trade their bodies for a chance at an education.

What I’m trying to say is, I have this memory. It’s over a decade old, and I’ve never been able to escape it. In it, I’m nineteen at an internship in [Corporate name Redacted to avoid being sued]’s Fusion research department. Corporate security took me, injected me with what they said was sodium pentothal, and showed me child porn videos, while taking me and letting me know that no one would ever listen to me or believe me.

And they were right.

I tried for years to cover it up, bury it, pretend it never happened. Drink and smoke it out of my head. And I did it well. Until it burst through the drugs and alcohol and tore me into pieces. A wreck no one listens to.

Living with that. That is what my illness feels like.

It’s like reading the declassified report of ICE’s Operation FLICKER, and seeing that you were right, and that National Security was more important than justice.

You might ask what I, someone who frequently rights on the greed and frivolity of war, was doing as an intern at a company that builds drones, atomic weapons and nuclear reactors for naval warships, among other high-tech weaponry. To put it simply, my political views were not always this way. For most of my life, I was a bit hawkish on war. The precancerous growth that is patriotism does not spontaneously and painlessly fall off. In my early adulthood, I labored under the naïve delusion that warfare was a necessary evil, and that the sheepdogs of our nation fought to keep the weak safe from the monsters of the world. That idea began dissipating when the sheepdogs took me. That idea shattered when the police wouldn’t even write down what I was saying.

Fuck all of you.

None of you will ever learn to listen.

That’s what my “illness” feels like.

It doesn’t matter that after my diagnosis and hospitalization I went on to graduate Kum Laude. My success in life doesn’t change that my trauma is a “delusion.” It doesn’t matter that the medical definition of “delusion” does not take the “truth” of the idea into account at all, relying instead only on whether the belief is commonly held in society. Which is why my aunt is allowed to believe five thousand people were fed with five loaves of bread and two fish, but I am not allowed to believe a security guard at my internship shoved a needle of sodium Pentothal in my arm, before having his way with me.

The voices, that’s stress, messing with my intuition.

The nightmares, punching out in the middle of the night, the first of sleep paralysis, those are all symptoms of stress.

I’m fucking terrified of where we are headed as a people, because of what happened to me and how the justice system responded to it.

That’s what it’s like living with my fucking “illness.”

It feels like being forced to take a medication that leaves me washed out, blank, soulless, devoid of love, anxiety, joy, anger, sadness, frustration, or even sexual arousal. All because no one gives a shit what I have to say. All because I don’t even have the right to feel emotion about what happened to me and how much no one cares.

Because no one gives a shit what happens to me or anyone else.

That’s what my “illness” feels like.

We’re just slaves. Slaves meant to maximize productivity.

And one day, our descendants will complete the march. And our shepherds will set a table. And feast on the flesh of the lambs, and feed the scraps to their loyal sheepdogs.

We’re just slaves, and the shepherds of mankind may pluck us and taste of our flesh at will.

Knowing that is what my illness feels like. Knowing that even now, during the march, some of us are taken by the shepherds and their dogs, that is what my “illness” feels like.

 

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