hsphaven

I don’t see the point in me being in the city right now. I’m too unwell to see friends. I’m too unwell to play badminton, and don’t know if I can ever show my face there again after pissing my pants on the court. My physio doesn’t seem to want to see me until things settle down with my housing, which may take a while. I don’t have a job here. I basically don’t have a life here, and am just spending my days wasting away in bed. Without any structure I lose sense of what day it is. I am simply existing outside of time, no longer part of the world around me.

I want to go back and stay at my friend’s 800+ hectare bushland property. I left because the caravan was infested with mice, but my support worker in the country has a friend who rents caravans to people and they are reserving a nice, clean caravan for me. I am just waiting for my friend to give me the green light. She’s a stress-head and wants to figure out all the details, but I don’t know why it has to be so complicated. All I need is her permission to park it there. There are, however, things I need to organise on my end, which I’m struggling with given my health. For instance I need to be better prepared for the cold than I was last time, especially as the caravan won’t have heating.

Right now I feel like I’m in limbo, and I know this will probably continue even if I return to my friend’s bushland. I can’t stay there forever as she wants to sell the place. I know somebody who is moving to the area and said I can rent her caravan in her backyard. I’m hoping this will work out. As a friend commented, I can’t get a break wherever I go. It’s got to the point where I’m wondering if I’m cursed or something. I’ve spent the last week frantically messaging witches and anyone I can think of asking them if they can get rid of a curse or entity that’s following me everywhere, messing with me and “making my life hell”. I must sound like a total loony. I saw a photo of one witch and started getting ringing in my ears, which I took as a sign that I had a clairaudient gift and was picking up on the different vibration of this person. Another friend suggested that I may need to terminate a “soul contract”, which led me to spiritual healer Julia North. I read her article “How to terminate a difficult soul contact or lesson (without a practitioner’s help)”. One of the negative patterns she mentions which I relate to the most is “constant sabotage of all my efforts”. I went through the exercise on my own, but it hasn’t made any difference.

I’m struggling to hold onto reality as most people know it. I feel like I am the center of the universe which is either conspiring against me, or which I am creating. A lot of people I know are sick right now and I’ve been wondering if I am making them sick with my bad vibes. I also wondered whether it was my energy which caused my internet to cut out the other day. I wonder if I am actually dead and this place is hell. Below is one of the emails I sent the past week:

“I’m fed up. I’m sick of it. Whatever I do, wherever I go, I can never get a break. It’s like this conspiracy to keep me in an eternal cycle of torture. The enemy knows exactly how to torment me. My whole life I have subject to this. I have all these regrets…. if I hadn’t of come back to Melbourne, this wouldn’t have happened. If I had or hadn’t of done this or that then life would be different. I realise now it doesn’t even matter. Whatever I do, the result is always the same. I thought Melbourne would be cleaner as there’s no mice, but now I’m stuck in a house with my dad who is sick, blowing his nose, coughing and says he feels totally miserable. Or in a hospital full of people who are sick. The atmosphere is wild. This warm northerly wind is bizarre for this time of year and making people crazy. Last night there was a man yelling in the street in the wind, just before an earthquake. It was terrifying. I locked the doors. Now there’s a bushfire near the airport??? And dogs are barking all the time.

Am I causing all this? Or am I reacting to all this?”

Everything feels like a plot against me by invisible forces: my car not starting, items going missing, hammering and other noise in the neighbourhood, the upgrades to my favourite park:

I see hidden meaning in absolutely everything, such as double digits (I seem to be seeing 33 a lot).

I’ve started taking 5mg of olanzapine again. Without it, my sleep is incredibly disturbing. I confront something dark in my mind when I drift off and feel like I’m dying. I wake up nauseous, breathless and with a distressing feeling of gas being trapped inside. A few months ago the nausea had a very nasty edge to it and my hands and arms turned numb. Some neighbours saw me wandering around the street in a strange state and called my dad. He wasn’t home so called my mum, who found me sitting in the shower screaming as all the red dye ran off my dress like blood. We had the paramedics here again, but by that point the storm had passed and they said there were no grounds to commit me to hospital, even though it only takes one look at my house to tell I am clearly not functioning. I thought that episode had passed so stopped taking the olanzapine, but something similar has been happening again. I’ve felt fragmented and disoriented, as though I left a piece of myself in that mouse-infested caravan, a piece in the emergency department, and a piece here at my dad’s. For a few nights my sleep improved with the olanzapine. I went from no sleep to oversleeping. But I had another weird night last night. I started getting body jerks again and was haunted by this feeling that I’ve been saying too much to people. I checked my phone today as I was worried I had sent some bizarre messages in the middle of the night, but thankfully I hadn’t. I’ve been getting confused about what I’ve dreamt and what has actually happened.

Today, I was woken all day by hammering, which felt like another demonic attack. My mind ran with it, and I started wondering if it was a sign that I am in fact Jesus, with the hammering a reminder of my sacrifice/crucifixion. I felt this strange mix of distress and emptiness, as though somebody had extracted my feelings. I stayed in bed all day feeling as though a dementor had drained the life from me. I could not do Mother’s Day this year and asked my dad to deliver my present to my mum, which I managed to purchase yesterday without passing out in the store or crashing my car on the way.

Then, this evening, a post came up on my Facebook feed from a spiritual group I don’t even remember joining. It was unfortunate timing, the cherry on top of my Snow White dessert:

I felt like I was attracting some really weird people and energies and it set me off on another tailspin:

A lot of people recognise the “positive” symptoms of psychosis: delusions and hallucinations. But what a lot of people don’t know is that psychosis also comes with “negative” symptoms , things like social withdrawal, diminished capacity for emotional expression, lack of speech, lack of motivation, and inability to experience pleasure. Usually, psychosis doesn’t happen out of no where. Sleep deprivation and the build up of stress can trigger it. The person has usually been withdrawing for a while, which worsens when they develop “positive” symptoms, and lasts for a while afterwards. I am curious to get the discharge summary from my presentation to the emergency department and see whether they picked up on any of this. I have had a sense of it happening, though as I slip further into it I find myself getting lost in it, as most people do. Many think they’re possessed or something. It can happen to anyone, even those with qualifications in psychology.

I like SchizoKitzo’s video, “Showing Pictures of Myself in Psychosis: Does Psychosis Have a “Look”?”

My answer is that psychosis doesn’t always look like somebody speaking to themselves in public, and can have very quiet presentations, as is said to be the case with other disorders like BPD.

The overlap between psychosis and spiritual emergence is something which fascinates me. Where is the line between spirituality and psychosis? It is said that shamans swim in the same waters that those with schizophrenia drown in. There is definitely a spiritual aspect to what I’m going through, and my sensitivity has become extremely heightened to the point where I feel like I have no energetic boundaries and am genuinely absorbing other people’s stuff. It was probably not a good idea for me to present to ED a week ago. Being in that environment was so overwhelming to my system and for a day afterwards I kept getting these strange body jerks/pulses. Unfortunately the world is unforgiving and cruel for people like me, making recovery very difficult. Hospitals are not conductive to healing; there is actually a point where you’re too sick for hospital. But home is not conductive to healing either. Noise from neighbours invade my space, stopping me from sleeping when I need to. I have to see another person whenever I open my bedroom door, and somebody who is associated with a lot of trauma growing up too. I am left feeling like a prisoner in my room. Dr. Nicki  Crowley has written an article, “Psychosis or Spiritual Emergence? – Consideration of the Transpersonal Perspective within Psychiatry”. In it they have some suggestions for dealing with acute crises, such as grounding food (for vegetarians and vegans, this might be root vegetables), and reduction of environmental and interpersonal stimulation, the best one can in this world anyway. It makes me wonder if the “negative” symptoms of psychosis are really the body and mind’s attempt to deal with this process. One final suggestion I have is to be VERY careful about the media you’re consuming.