My year in psychosis: age 31 (a long read)

by

in

Some time around this time last year I posted in r/datingoverthirty a sort of recounting of my year, and how dating had gone for me. A lot of people were pretty kind about it, and some people weren't so much, but I loved writing it. This year has been totally different for everyone, and actually, the recounting of my year belongs more in this subreddit than it does in the other.

My first encounter with mental health services in the UK was when I was around 16/17 years old. I remember going to the GP with my friend because I was too scared to go alone, and crying in the doctors office. I was prescribed anti-depressants, and referred to psychiatry for evaluation. I remember that I wasn't diagnosed with anything, but that I was offered counselling for a period of time.

I took the counselling, which had always been difficult to do, because I didn't feel like I had anywhere private to talk to the counsellor. I remember talking with him, Johnathan, the counsellor, in his car, in a supermarket cafe, in my Grandma's living room while she spent time in the kitchen. I don't know if it was valuable to me at the time, but in hindsight, I don't remember anything that I had talked to him about except a boy I was in love with – RH. I told Johnathan that RH was better than me, and not many people were. Things for me and RH didn't go so well. He was very academic, and I'd failed all of my exams. He left our hometown, and I stayed there. I was always scared that it would happen, but deep down knew that it was inevitable.

After that I took an interest in philosophy, and when I had some money of my own, aged 22/23,I elected to see a private existential therapist, John. John was actually great, and I always enjoyed talking to him. Again, I'm not sure what I got out of this therapy, but it was always great to talk to John. He felt like a friend to me, never judged me and always provided stimulating conversation. I'm not great at talking, but I could talk with John. Unfortunately private therapy is expensive and after a while I couldn't keep on paying for it. So I stopped going.

During COVID, I spent my last days as a 31 year old in a mental health ward, being treated with anti-psychotics for what I've now been told was my First Episode of Psychosis, and in the tradition of last year, I thought it would be prudent to run through my year and what it meant to me. If you're interested only in the psychotic stuff, I would scroll to the end of the post – even if it's arguable that by March I was already acting, in some ways, psychotically.

December 2019

This was an awesome month. I had a great time. M2 (mentioned briefly in my previous post) was talking to me, he offered me some kind of commitment, I went abroad to Israel and had an amazing time travelling through the history of such a rich, rich culture, and then spent the longest day of my life in a Romanian airport on the way home.

I spent some time tracking the British election (geek) and accurately predicted some changes which just a few months prior were almost unthinkable to all of the reputable pollsters. I was interested in changing my job to advance my career and started to look around for new opportunities.

I had finally sold my car, this huge financial burden, and replaced it with a car which I'd paid for outright with a little help from my family. I was well on my way to achieving the things that I needed to achieve in order to feel good about my life and move back into a place on my own.

January 2020

January was an exciting time. Britain had a new Conservative majority and I'm fascinated by change. I applied for around 30 jobs to work for one of the new Conservative MPs. I got one interview, and was unfortunately told that I didn't have the political experience. I already had a job, and I loved my colleagues, but for several reasons, for me it felt like time to move on.

M2 sort of backed away from his commitment, but there was potential for us seeing each other. He lives overseas, but if he wanted a serious commitment from me it would be his. He doesn't seem ready, willing or able to make a serious commitment to me. But, my heart tells me that he's the one for me, and my heart hasn't really told me anything since RH. It's been a lot of thinking with my… Lady parts. By January I had been in love with M2 for well over a year, and it was awesome for me to imagine that maybe I'd get to see him again soon. It was awesome that we were talking at all. I always want to text/voice message with him more than he does with me, but that's okay.

I did go on a couple of sort-of dates, with a guy who reminded me a little of M2 that I met on a dating app. I always felt guilty though, because I knew that my heart was somewhere else.

February

I don't remember much of February, except that after I'd applied for a job for an American company, as I'd always been interested in living there, and I'd been fortunate enough that they had fought to hire me after I was interviewed and initially turned their job offer down.

Prior to starting the new job I had 2 weeks off and was considering a trip to Egypt. I really wanted to visit St Catherine's Monastery, a place that I hadn't known existed until I visited Israel a few months earlier. I love a last minute trip, but on this occasion I decided not to go away. If I was going to go to the Sinai region, I wanted to make a good job of it and visit Jordan and other parts of Israel and Egypt, too – and I just didn't have enough money saved up.

M2 had sort of dropped off the planet some time before I got my new job. He had a new job too, and I guess he didn't get the response he expected when he first told me about it. I'd been more excited that maybe some day my job would help me to move to the US.

I trained the lady who replaced my job in my old place, and started at the new place on the 25th February. I was super excited. Maybe one step closer to getting into the US, I thought. The receptionist looked a little like M2, too. So I started to enjoy some daily eye candy. Lovely.

The virus had started to hit at this point, and was really picking up it's pace in the news.

March / April

Was this period of time one month? Was it seven years? I had been living with my Grandparents for the past year whilst I took some time to sort out my finances. I'd finally achieved that and had started to think about moving out.

My Grandparents are both in their 90s, and they, initially, weren't worried about the virus. My new job at the American company required me to be on site to carry out my duties, so there was no option for me to work from home. In addition to this, there were at least 150 other people on the site every day.

It wasn't long into the COVID panic that I realised that I needed to get out of my Grandparent's place for their sake, and I hurriedly found an apartment not too far from my new work place. The keys were handed over to me and then a few short days later, the man who had handed me the keys was placed on furlough.

It wasn't the best time for me to move house. I borrowed a bed from my Grandparents, and I had a shoe rack for a TV stand. It was the first time I'd spent so much time alone since I'd moved in with my Grandparents, just over a year prior. I had to deal with my diet now, as I'd been eating my Grandparent's food for a year. I had to deal with the cleaning, with everything… And on top of that, I had to deal with it all in the manner of COVID – where everything was distanced and everything was delivered.

If I'm honest, I didn't think that I noticed too much of an impact from COVID. I was still going to work every day so everything felt normal. I was still seeing friends as much as the virus permitted, and I was still driving around and living my life. The only thing that really concerned me was that seeing my Grandparents felt unwise when I was exposed to so many people every day, and that I couldn't travel.

Not being able to travel bothered me a lot because I didn't know if the absolute lack of potential for us to see each other was the barrier to communication between M2 and I, or whether he just wasn't all that interested in me. He's always been kind of hot and cold, and difficult for me to read from a distance, but it had never put me off. I'm kind of a cold person to be around, and the time that I did spend with him, I knew I wanted to spend more. Immediately, the second I'd laid eyes on him, I'd felt like everything I thought I knew before about how he was the one for me was true.

I always had and have been scared that time and distance, as it did with RH, will be the thing that means M2 meets someone else. It's strange for me to type it, but it hurts me to think about. He isn't mine, we aren't together, but the idea of losing the possibility of us seeing each other again someday in a romantic capacity hurts me, so somewhere in this period of time I decided to tell him that I'm in love with him.

At 31 years old, I've never in my life told a man that I loved him before he told me that he loved me first. I'd never known it, either. But Good Lord, did I know that I loved M2. I was being patient in a way that I didn't know I could, I had faith that maybe someday we could work things out for the both of us together, and I knew that the way that I felt about him would last. It had already lasted for 15 months, even when he didn't want to talk to me.

Something else that I'd never done at 31 years old, was tell a man that I loved him by text message. But I did it. And it was like opening the floodgates. I messaged him once that I was in love with him, and then I'd said it and it felt so good to tell him. He didn't answer me right away, but he doesn't usually anyway. So I started getting braver. I'll send him shorter messages so that he can see without opening them that I love him, I want him to know.

And then I got more and more "creative" and before I knew it, I was in a spiralling mess of messaging M2 that I was in love with him over and over again. And getting no response. I asked him to marry me. I meant it, too. If he'd have said yes, we'd be engaged right now. But he didn't. And he didn't acknowledge my messages at all. So then I had to try and talk myself down from it. Which I did by messaging M2 more.

Of course, it wasn't ideal that the first man I'd ever told "I love you" who didn't tell me first didn't respond, but I'd known at the time that I told him that maybe he wouldn't respond. It's the risk you take when you send somebody an "I love you" text message. Or 100 "I love you" text messages.

May / June / July / August

Well that was all very romantic and daft, wasn't it. Never mind. Now I have a good long time to get over it.

It took me some time, if I'm honest. I'm a little bit like an armadillo, hard on the outside but squishy in the middle. It meant so much to me to tell M2 that I was in love with him, and it hadn't really gone to plan. He never owed me anything, and I would imagine that most people would be caught off guard by an "I love you" message, let alone 100 "I love you" messages in the middle of a pandemic when he'd just started a new, and I imagine stressful, job.

I didn't know what to do, but over time, the less I thought about it, the better I felt.

Summer was a bit of a wash out, but when British restaurants re-opened, I went on a date with a handsome doctor that again I'd met on a dating app. We kind of clashed but there was a little chemistry there and he seemed bizarrely keen. I wasn't ready for anything serious though, and even if I had been I didn't think it would be with him, but we kept things friendly regardless.

Work was going really well. I was getting on great with my colleagues, and starting to feel comfortable. I had created from scratch a daily reporting suite with some level of automation, streamlining a process which had become very time consuming for a large number of people – and what's more, it worked! I don't have any qualifications or any real structure for these kinds of projects, but I'd managed, and it worked, and I was delighted. I was constantly looking for my next process improvement project, and working well with my colleagues.

Slowly but surely, I was getting over M2. I remember sitting with a friend and saying that I'd never message him first again. It'd taken me a very long time, and one hell of a journey to get to that point, but I'd meant it. If he had nothing to say to me, then I certainly had nothing more to say to him.

And then just a few short days after I'd said that to a friend, M2 text me.

September

In September I took my first time off work for the whole year. I took a week, and COVID had meant that I couldn't travel abroad, but I could drive around Britain and take in some of the wonderful history and culture that we have here. I visited castles, a forest and an abbey, and one day as I was driving to see the former site of the house where Fred and Rose West lived, I got a text message from M2. It flashed up on my screen with my Mum in the car and I panicked. I hadn't told her anything, really, about my interest in him except that I had gone to Eastern Europe to meet him. As it flashed up, I said "that's that guy." She didn't say much in response.

We texted back and forth a little for a couple of days and then he stopped replying to me again.

It shouldn't be such a big deal to me, he's just a guy. He hadn't mentioned anything about my proposal to get married, and he hadn't responded to whether or not he would marry me. I figured, okay, no response is at least not a "no". He'd told me a long time in the past that it was difficult for him to think straight because his mind moves in a million different directions at once. I'd put a lot of pressure on him by being so open about my feelings and motivations with him, so in some respects I was just glad that he was talking to me again.

But it put me back on the slippery messaging slope. Every time he messages me and then drops off the planet I have to go through this same process of grieving the loss of him. It's really hard on me, when – rightly or wrongly – he means a lot to me. But the fact of the matter is that he probably just finds me a little too intense. "A little too intense" is also probably a huge understatement.

I'm not going to mention M2 again for a while now, but it's safe for you to assume that as the months progress and time goes on, I am still messaging M2. Even though he isn't answering me. I felt like I couldn't let him go again, and for whatever reason, incessantly texting him, just about my day or anything seemed like the best way to achieve this not letting him go. It was the only thing I could do.

Also in September, I got a job offer out of the blue from a girl who'd been in the year below me at school. I didn't really know this girl at school, but I do remember seeing her in a local bar one time and me smiling at her, and her rolling her eyes at me in response. I try really, really hard to be nice to people and that had bothered me and got me thinking about why she'd do that, when I remembered that when I was around 15 years old I had, for no good reason, approached her at school and with a smile in my voice and in front of her friends told her that I thought she looked like a Disney cartoon character; a male Disney cartoon character.

And ever since I'd remembered that I'd wondered if she had thought of me as a bit of a bully (which I never in my life before had ever considered anyone would think of me as). When she approached me with the job offer I was surprised (obviously, I thought she disliked me) and also really impressed by her career and career trajectory. We spoke on the phone and she was hugely ambitious, and clearly visionary in her approach about what she wanted to achieve in the new job that she was taking at a growing British brand, and the team that she was building to work with her.

She had a guy she knew from another business she wanted to hire, and then in addition to that she wanted to hire me, and offered me a 33% pay rise from what I was earning in the job I'd started in February – during which I'd already had a 33% pay rise from the job I was doing before. It was at an established company and it was clear that a lot of work needed doing, but I loved that. I couldn't put my finger on what though, but something about this job offer was stressing me out.

I talked to my Grandparents about it, and they thought it sounded great. Of course it sounds great. They told me that what had happened at school was ancient history and that clearly the girl who was interested in hiring me thought it was ancient history. Eventually, I decided to take the job offer. I handed in my notice at work, and told the girl I knew that I would be delighted to start soon. But something still just didn't feel right. I couldn't do it. Something about it made me feel like I was being set up for failure; which made no real sense, because S (the girl who approached me) was being so supportive. She had talked with me in depth, and offered me every reassurance imaginable.

But for whatever reason, the feeling of being set up just couldn't be shaken off. So I retracted my acceptance of the job offer, and then panicked for days while I waited to find out whether my job would let me retract my notice. I didn't want to shake the ground that I felt had got me through a pandemic; and there was still the overriding fact that when I joined the company I joined, it was a huge draw for me that while I worked for them, maybe there was a chance that someday they would be able to hire me as an employee in the US, where I wanted to live and had wanted to live ever since I was 12 years old. Just my aiming-low-ass had always seen it as something realistically unachievable for me, with me not being academically gifted.

After a few days feeling like I was on very shaky ground, I was delighted when HR told me that my notice was retractable and that I would be fine to continue on with my job. I should expect that in the near future my manager would spend some time with me just to make sure that I was committed to my position and the company but that otherwise I was good to continue on as I had been before. Relief!

October / November

Now. October was a month. The things that I remember happening are that I had a flu vaccine, on Columbus Day. I was still sending M2 inordinate amounts of text messages that I was in love with him, and hearing nothing back.

At one point I left work very early in the morning. I had gone out to smoke (which I was doing excessively) and sat in my car, but after a reasonable 10 minute break instead of going back into the office and continuing with my day, I drove home, and left my handbag in the office.

When I went back to work I was asked something along the lines of "wtf" by HR, but I don't remember the details.

In hindsight, by October, I was very much in the depths of my first psychotic episode. I don't know what else happened in October, but I know that I was reading a hell of a lot about the US election. I was hitting all of my deadlines, but I couldn't sit still. I constantly wanted to be up and moving around.

If I'm talking about my year aged 31 then it ends in the middle of November, and it ends with me as an in-patient in a psychiatric assessment ward, after a mental health crisis team was called by my neighbour; who's flat I don't remember how I got into. I don't think I would have knocked on her door, so she must have seen me wandering around the building. Luckily, she has some qualifications in counselling and therapy, and knew who to call to have me assessed. She recognised at that time that she thought that I was having a nervous breakdown, and for that I am truly thankful.

I don't know when my psychotic episode started, and I also can't give you a timeline on when things happened, but what I can do, is give you a list of some of the things that I either did or thought prior to my hospitalisation on 10th of November:

I believed that I was being watched in my apartment, and I stopped eating, drinking and going to the bathroom because every time I ate I believed I was covertly guiding the negotiations in Brexit, and I didn't want that responsibility. I just wanted to eat dinner. I believed that a COVID test card handed to me after I'd been swabbed had on it the nuclear codes. I believed that I'd accidentally given the nuclear codes to Google by taking a photo of the COVID test card on my Google phone. I called the police, from the middle of a car park in a shopping centre, to say that I believed if I turned my car back on then it would cause a nuclear explosion. The police attended to the car park, and when they advised me just to switch my car on, I thought "alright then, well, if the world ends right now, this is on you", and switched my car on and drove home. I asked the police to follow me home to check whether there was anything in my apartment that would indicate that I was being watched. They told me that if I was being surveilled, it was a far more sophisticated operation than anything they would be able to see with their untrained eyes. I called an ambulance because I believe I was having a stroke due to repeatedly being able to smell burning. The ambulance told me that smelling burning was not a sign of a stroke. I called out the fire service to my apartment block because of the smell of burning. One of my neighbours appeared in the stairwell to try and reassure the fire service that there wasn't a fire. As he was trying to reassure the fire service, I asked him "Are you in charge of fire?" and when he said "No.", I expected the fire service to keep on looking into whether there was any signs of fire in the building. I called the police to report a terrorist plot (COVID) being orchestrated by my Dad. I called my Dad to say that I had noticed a plot with one of his trademarks on it. I believed that my eye had been replaced with a camera. I believed that my thoughts were being broadcast to the world, and that therefore I was the head of the British Broadcasting Corporation. I tried very hard to stop thinking of anything unsuitable for children prior to 22:00 GMT. I got a copy of a Cosmopolitan magazine, to whom I'd submitted the last post I made in the hopes of being able to contribute to their publication. They'd turned me down saying that it wasn't for them. The magazine that I was bought had on the front cover "You're Hired!" to which I thought, wow, nobody was interested and now not only do I work for the BBC – I work for Cosmopolitan, too. Who don't I work for? I wrapped up my phone and left it at the side of the a road, and then went and asked a stranger parked nearby whether they needed their van (I needed a getaway car, and I believed that my car was being tracked.) Fortunately, it was still there when I went back to get it. I bought 2 pregnancy tests because I believed that I was being raped in my sleep. I tried to go into Pizza Hut to use their bathroom because I was too scared to go back to my apartment, and Pizza Hut told me that I couldn't go in "because of the smell." I took the pregnancy tests at the hospital, where I used both a hospital pregnancy test and the 2 tests that I'd bought and wasn't satisfied until they all agreed that I wasn't pregnant. Sitting on my balcony one evening I noticed a Tesla parked over the road. The doors on the Tesla opened, and I thought I could see a dead body wrapped up on the back seat, so I went out to check. Thankfully, the dead body turned out to be a roll of bubble wrap. At this point I noticed that I was now in the back seat of a Tesla, and figured that this must be my getaway car. I climbed in to the front, tried to download the app to pair it with the car (if that's how it works) and FORTUNATELY my phone battery died. My phone is a Google phone and the car didn't have the right charger in it, so I went back in to my apartment to find my phone charger. When I went back to the Tesla it was gone. The psychiatric consultant kept telling me that I wouldn't have been able to steal the Tesla. In hindsight, I hope that's true. If I'd have been able to pair my phone with that car, whilst being sat in the drivers seat, there's a good chance that I would have been arrested later down the line, and further down the road, in possession of an $80,000+ car that wasn't mine. One of my family member's had told me that there had been an attack on somebody nearby to the lake I lived alongside. At a friend's place one evening, she sent me a photo of Andrew Lincoln on WhatsApp because she has a huge crush on him, and I believed, instantly, that Andrew Lincoln was hiding at the lake and waiting for me, as part of a survivalist reality TV series, so that he and I could go to America together. I went home from my friend's place, put an umbrella up in my bathroom so that I could stop myself from being watched showering, got dressed, took the umbrella and went and sat on a bench by the lake waiting for Andrew Lincoln to take me to America. I figured since I was already in love with M2, that I would never get into anything romantic with Andrew Lincoln, it was possible because we would be in close company on our trip to the US, but I would give him my friend's phone number since she has a huge crush on him. I sat on the umbrella, so that I didn't look like I had a weapon, but did – it was a survivalist reality series, afterall. I needed to be able to defend myself in case it wasn't Andrew Lincoln that arrived. After I'd been sat waiting for a good half an hour, I reached the conclusion that the producers of the series must think that I'm "fucking daft" and went home instead. I believed that there was a huge operation in the basement of my apartment block where people that I knew and loved were being dissected and turned into electronic/robotic versions of the people that they used to be. I kept trying to see my friends and family to make sure that they were still OK. I believed that I was being drugged in my sleep. I kept thinking that I saw M2. He doesn't live in the same country as me, and in addition to that, he had not been responding to my text messages or my admission of love or proposals of marriage. But I thought I saw him leave my apartment block, I thought I saw him driving alongside me on the way to the hospital, and I thought I saw him leave the hospital. When I thought I saw him leave the hospital I followed him outside, and when I saw my Mum outside, told her I thought I'd seen him. She told me "M2 isn't here", and I broke down in tears and had to be coaxed back into the hospital. One day I thought I walked into my apartment and found him in there, alone, in the dark in my bed. I was heartbroken when I realised I'd just left my duvet all scrunched up. At one point I messaged one of his friends on Instagram (a kind of thing I've never done in my whole life) because I wanted to check that he was okay, and he wasn't answering my messages. He understandably did not appreciate that. It is stalking kind of behaviour, and I really don't want to be that person – despite everything that I've written here. When the mental health crisis team came to assess me, I told them I thought I had seen Vladimir Putin in a local supermarket car park, I felt like I was in the Cold War, and that I thought I had a nuclear bomb inside me. I've been told that I actually told the crisis team that Vladimir Putin had been in my bedroom and that I had a nuclear bomb inside me, but I don't remember that at all. I've since heard jokes about Vlad the Impaler. I also thought my neighbour was drugging me with ketamine.

When I'm writing here that I believed things, I believed them. To me, they were true. And I had theories upon theories to back up why what was happening was happening. Every time I had a new idea I weaved it in amongst the other idea's I had; sometimes my Grandparents were the Queen and Prince Philip. Sometimes my Mum was Boris Johnson, and other times she was Princess Diana. Sometimes I was an MI5 agent, other times I was just a person that had stumbled across a tremendous, terrifyingly fascinating plot by those with the largest amounts of power in the world.

Hunter Biden was also a source of endless fascination for me.

But, in the tradition of last years post, I will write only about my year aged 31 on this post. My birthday was in the middle of November, and I spent it alone, in a psychiatric assessment unit. Also this is a very long post, and if anybody got this far… Well done and thanks for reading.

Wonder where my year age 32 will need to be posted?

Also – I am usually a very, very private person. I don't talk to people about what I consider "sordid details" of my life very often. I have 4 or 5 close friends with whom I'd share these things, and that would be that. I've tried to be very vague here about any identifying details, and I guess just because of residual paranoia would like to say that if you enjoyed reading this then please respect my privacy 🙂 🙂 🙂

submitted by /u/DOTdiary [link] [comments]

Article Source and Credit reddit.com https://www.reddit.com/r/mentalhealth/comments/ki3623/my_year_in_psychosis_age_31_a_long_read/ Buy Tickets for every event – Sports, Concerts, Festivals and more buytickets.com

Discover more from Teslas Only

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading