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I think I might be schizophrenic and I don't know if no one has a clue or everyone knows and they didn't want to tell me about it.
I have very vivid and bizarre nightmares that come in months-long waves and then go away for a while. They’re so insistent. Like someone is furiously trying to pull my brain out of my head with a rope. They give me tension headaches and dizziness, sometimes just from thinking about them too much. It’s kind of hard to explain. I had explosive anger issues as a kid and the feeling is similar: this absolute forcing your emotion to manifest, like clawing your way out of a room. This weird almost-integrity of “I WILL make myself known, you WILL hear me, you WILL fear me”.
But as a kid it was never rooted in anything worth fighting for; it was over my dog grabbing a half-grown chicken in his mouth or my little sister eating an entire box of Oreos in one sitting. (I almost fried my mom’s laptop over the Oreos thing because I slammed this full glass of milk on the table like a dumbass and it went everywhere. 14-year-old me was less confetti cake and more someone’s terrible first attempt at ever making confetti cake. All the colorful bits had gotten lost at the bottom and all you could taste was tough, irritable egg whites and patches of powder people choked on with tears in their eyes. (She continued to do stuff like that until I started acting like a big sister should and being her friend rather than her mom. We’re very close now.))
You know, I tried to talk to a counselor at a Christian camp I’d known for a week about this once, and she straight-up laughed at me and said I was the least angry person she'd ever met before I could even try to explain. People meet me and I’m all “yay I love the circus:D” and “my profile picture is confetti cake!” and “look at my dogs aren’t they precious?” and then they laugh me off when I try to talk to them in one of those late-night bare-your-soul talks about how I go down such deep rabbit holes I make myself sick. The entire reason I hoard colorful cartoons and toys and circus vibes and pictures of desserts and ballerina GIFs is because they’re a safe haven from the seething glitchy dark place that tries to grab at me every now and then.
I think people not taking me seriously hurts more than anything. I don’t want to be told I don't have life experience; I don’t want to be told I’m a bunny who’s had it easy because my mom loved me; I don’t want to be told that I’m better off than other people because nothing bad ever happened to me personally. When I was seven I watched her come home from the hospital after her second baby died and just sit on the floor and stare at me and my sisters while we played, and then not talk to us or respond at all when we tried to hug her. When I was ten I watched her sit at the kitchen table and listen to “You Are My Sunshine” on repeat and just cry because my older sister had gone to live with her dad. When I was thirteen I watched her have a seizure and piss herself in the hallway while my grandma stood over her and laughed and told her to stop faking it. When I was eleven I watched her repeatedly fall asleep in her hospital bed in the middle of her sentences and then a doctor casually told her boyfriend she’d almost died in her sleep while me and my little sister were sitting on the floor next to her playing cards. When I was fourteen I sat at the very front of a church she would have hated and watched all the pretentious old ladies who were only at her memorial out of obligation stand there and talk about what a good Christian my great-grandma was and how she always prayed for my poor lost heathen mother and I couldn't even feel angry anymore.
None of it happened to me personally. Does that mean I have no reason to be traumatized over it? Are other people not fucked up over watching their parents get eaten alive from the inside out by their own trauma? She was the only person who listened to me and didn’t make me feel like a moron, and she was the only person who didn’t put up with my bullshit at the same time. She tried so hard to tell me that the anger and pessimism I thought we were all supposed to feel was wrong and that my strange imagination was good, not broken.
She was the only person who really wanted to live and bring magic into the world in her good times. Her good times were so radically different from her bad times. She watched movies with us and laughed, she helped us make forts and taught us how to cook, she played with my dog, she took pictures of her rubber ducks and did our hair all pretty and drew pictures of fairies and held us close to her like we were the most treasured things she had. Just knowing she was in another room, light and weed smell and quiet voices under the door, was always enough. I was okay as long as she was there. She was purple-gold stars in a warm red space. Shimmery autumn leaves on happy afternoons. After she died the world felt like cold orange-grey sunsets alone on the back porch and bowls of dead maggots and terrifying stillness. It took so long to even try to find my own magic and now I cling to it and hide in it so I don't have to look at everything else.
I don’t know what it is about my stepdad’s house, but I feel like I’m about to have a breakdown like I did last time I was here. It’s nowhere near as bad as it was last time, I keep telling myself that, but it’s there at the back of my head. Last time he worked all day, and it was just me and him, and his own anger issues were through the roof so when he was home he didn’t want anything to do with me. I was there 24/7 because I couldn’t get a job and this place is in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t fucking handle the utter emptiness of the house. I was having panic attacks almost every day.
I've never told anyone this, but I hallucinate all the time. It's constant. It only stops when I'm around a lot of people or covered in a big blanket or in a wide-open space like the mall. I don't think they're actual hallucinations because I don't *see* them, but I don't know what else to call them. I don't see them like I would see a real person. I just know they're there like I would know if someone was walking beside me without having to look at them. There are all these people standing in front of the oven, by the shower curtain, in the middle of the living room. They just stand there and sometimes they try to touch me so I have to go around them. I can hear their voices in my head unless I distract myself with a book or a game or a cartoon. Calling me a fatass, telling me I'm not really a lesbian and I need to be fixed, telling me to beat my dogs for making those licking noises that drive me crazy. Lately I've been able to sort of mentally push them away by imagining myself in a bubble and that helps a lot.
They got really bad when I was here last time. I think it was because I was alone so much. They overwhelm me when I'm alone. I would lay on the floor and laugh and cry and yell at them. I would try and change them by pretending they were actually the people I missed; I would have a place I refused to look at, like the front room or the kitchen table or the yard, so I could tell myself they were just hanging out in another room or even that they were right behind me being quiet because they were all on their phones. When I was forced to eventually look at that sacred space I would get this wrenching feeling on seeing the emptiness. I hate the emptiness. The sheer lack of anything but me. It feels like I’ve become the too-still ghost in my mom’s place. It feels like a thousand eyes are on me because there’s no one else to look at. Does that make any sense? I want to pull my hair. I want to turn the TV up to shaking-the-house levels and pretend I can’t sense that presence that just stands and watches me when no one else is here. I want a raging thunderstorm to beat away the silence and stillness with its thunder and lightning and wind and rain all reminding me that, for an hour or two, it’s there to stand guard over me and I’m not alone.
The only other living things in this house right now are my two dogs (the other animals are outside) and I’d rather dogs existed than dragons any day. They keep away the invisible people. I think that's why my room is safer than the rest of the house. The dogs are always in here.
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It sounds like you are dealing with some really scary stuff. If you can talk to your school guidance counsellor they should be able to help you. Or you could ask to make an appointment with your doctor. If you don't feel comfortable telling your Mom then you could just tell her you have a medical issue you need to see your doctor about. The doctor can refer you to have a psychiatric appointment. It is good that you are opening up about it on here and perhaps you could also speak with some of the helplines for support and resources. No one will be able to diagnose you on here and if you need further treatment you'll want the support of professionals. I hope it all gets sorted out for you sweetheart.
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