Giving Into Madness

"Who are you?" said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.

Alice replied, rather shyly, "I-I hardly know, sir, just as present -at least I know who I 'was' when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then."

"What do you mean by that?" said the Caterpillar sternly. "Explain yourself."

"I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir," said Alice, "because I'm not myself, you see?"

I spent many late nights in my pre-med, undergrad career adderalled out, with a red bull in my left hand and a pen in my right, cramming useless facts about phylum and DeMovre’s theorm, dropping potential hours of college bliss into the sea. Despite this, when college ended, I wanted to be sure that medicine was the right destination for me before I grasped my final committing breathe, studied for the MCAT, and then locked myself into another decade of school.

So I swam away from the dock to search for vantage points, just checking to see if there was something better out there. I chipped away at the bricks of my structured life, climbed over them and looked around. No longer was I the psychology major, rugby player, frat guy, or pre-med’er; I was just a twenty-two year old trying to find his place in the world.

I faded further and further into freedom, and these exploratory days led me to lots of drugs and literature. I spent my days and nights looking up, plucking the stars for wisdom, and questioning who I was so I could learn whom I should be. Slowly, I started to give into madness. I decided I wanted to be “that guy” who tiptoed along the line of brilliance and insanity. I didn’t just want to dance the way I’m supposed to dance- cool; I wanted to be the interpretive dancer. I wanted to be the wanderer. I wanted transcendence. I wanted the courage to give into man’s deepest fear- that we are weird, different (and thus, alone), beyond our wildest imagination. Some doctors (my doctors, specifically) might have called this bipolar disorder.

Nevertheless, the gods only halfheartedly heard my prayer and I became alone in my pursuit. As I chased the horizon, I paddled away my friends and family. Then, finally, my legs gave out from the increasing weight of freedom and I fell to the floor. It happened suddenly, like a stab between the eyes. It happened in one moment. I now look back and would give anything to go back to the mediocrity of normalcy

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Kevin and I played UC Davis rugby together, and after a night at the bars, we sat in his disgusting “bro” apartment, the American flag over our heads, pursing our lips to medical.

I took a puff from the blunt and kicked my feet up. Then I took a puff from the In-N-Out burger on my lap. Spit tornadoed into the smoke as Kevin and I argued about the girls we almost had, the good, ol’ rugby days, and who was stronger, he or I. I conceded he was.

“This shit is strong,” I said.

“I told you, man; nothing but the best,” he said like he got a brand new bike.

I took a few more hits, then slunk deep into my chair. I dipped deep and let the drugs take over.

 “Wow, you look so creepy right now,” Kevin said, referring to my twisted smile. 

My twisted smile twisted further and blended into my face, and my eyes blended into the colors they captured. All of a sudden, everything inverted. A fog came over me. My eyes blurred. This was not a normal high. “I’ve never been in love,” I started to say. Kevin looked at me like that was shit that wasn’t supposed to enter into the man-zone. My pupils swallowed my head. I took a step out of my body and looked at myself. “No one has ever truly understood me. No one could ever understand me. I can’t even understand myself. Who am I really?” I started to panic. I was breathing heavily. I felt my heart pounding. I grabbed my chest and pictured myself dying right there on his dusty couch.

Kevin stood up and began pacing. “This is good,” he said, spinning his finger in a circle. “It’s good to get all this shit out. Otherwise, it just builds up. Like, I don’t know when I’ll be with my family again…”

He went on, but I wasn’t listening. I interrupted, “No, man. Something is wrong.” I became petrified I might lose control of myself and commit suicide. I was too young to die. I looked up to make sure Kevin was there to save me from myself. I swallowed a bucket of oxygen. “Call 911. Please.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. Call 911.” I grabbed the phone and handed it to what seemed like the ghost of Kevin. I could barely see him.

“What?”

“I think I’ve lost my mind. You’ve got to call.”

“Come on. You are so gay. We got way too high, man. Let’s just go to sleep.”

I looked at him pleadingly.

“Jesus Christ, you are so gay.”

I was not sure if I was gay or not. I wasn’t sure if I existed. I looked to Kevin for answers.

“Are you gay?”

I just looked at him, paralyzed.

“Okay, John. Don’t kiss me. Let’s just go to sleep,” he laughed nervously. His laugh seemed so mechanical, almost like he was predestined to laugh in that moment.

Without saying much, I agreed to try to sleep. But I was cold. Very cold. Kevin cranked up the heater for me. I told him to crank it up higher. He did. But the sun’s belly could not warm me in that moment. Every time I tried shutting my eyes, they would flicker back open frantically, coldness and paranoia crashing into me. My thoughts rushed away from me. I tried to keep up with them. My body chased my mind. I started skipping over words and sentences and lines, but my mind moved too fast. I could not control my thoughts. I grasped at dust. Needing someone, anyone, I texted my older brother, “I really need family right now.”

I stared at my phone, waiting. While waiting, for some reason, I kept telling myself not to leave the room by myself, perhaps to go to the bathroom. “Don’t go to the bathroom,” I repeated and repeated. I was terrified I might kill myself if I was alone. My body lay paralyzed, while my mind kept tapping its finger.

 Soon I heard a noise from the object in my hand, it read, “Daniel,” on the front of it. I slipped out the front door and walked outside to the parking lot and picked up. “Johnny, what’s up?” I heard a muffled voice through the metal thing in my hand.

“Daniel, am I gay?” I asked, thinking of Kevin’s comments.

“Johnny,” he sighed. He went to a very liberal liberal arts school. “Listen to me, there is absolutely nothing wrong if you are gay. There’s nothing wrong with it. Okay?”

“Okay, okay. Good, good. That’s what I thought. I don’t think I’m gay.” I was not really sure though.

“Yeah, I don’t think so either.”

“Who am I?”

“What?”

“Do you love me?”

“Come on.”

I bullied him, “No, do you love me?”

“Johnny…” He sounded like an automaton. Then he said something so stereotypical of a brother. His robotic voice box beeped, “I’m your brother. You texted me at 3 am and I called you back. I think you know I love you.” I sensed the robot felt weird telling me he loved me at 3 am. He had to wake up for medical school in a couple hours. But I didn’t care. He was no one. He was just a character in my movie.

“No, I don’t know that. You hardly know anything about me.” My voice sounded so much like his. I wasn’t sure whose was whose.

Reluctantly he responded, “I don’t have to know everything about you to love you. I think Grandma loves you, and she probably knows very little about you.”

I felt lost and disconnected from everyone and everything. “There is no way she could love me. She has no idea who I am. No one loves me. No one knows me. I can’t tell Mom or Dad who I am, or what I’ve done with my life. I can’t tell anyone.”

“You can tell me.”

My tongue started slopping around my teeth, and spewing out all the anxieties rushing my head: my anger at Dad, my loneliness, my manic sleeping around, and how I got kicked out of my fraternity. I sucked the marrow from my heart and handed it to him. He needed to know every detail about me, so I could be known to him, so my realness could be confirmed. Daniel patiently listened to me and then accepted me. At 4:30 am, anxious to put my high, warn-out mind to rest, I went to sleep.

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My eyes skeptically opened the next morning to my iPhone alarm. I blinked. My body buzzed and my mind crackled in a milky haze. To my horror, I was still dreaming. I looked at my hands. “Are those my hands?” I thought. I slapped cold water over my face, clapping my cheek hard.  Nothing changed. I flared my nostrils and stared threatingly into the mirror, then stuck my index finger in my throat, gagged, and coughed out the burger and fries from the night before. Nothing. I became frantic again. I did not know what to do. Thoughts maniacally guffawed in and out of existence; I could not control them.

My soul scraped its knee and gushed blood. I needed my mommy to kiss me. I needed to bury myself inside her arms and be cradled once again. I needed her truth. So I called her. Then I wuaaned, telling her everything that happened. I unearthed everything from before the incident, for instance, the fact that I transformed from a devout Christian into a staunch atheist in college. She did not like that. I went on and I went on, telling her everything I told my brother. I told her too much, the stuff moms should not hear from their sons. She cried with confusion.

“Mom, things are going to change. I’m never going to let you down like this again. I promise,” I said in prayer.

Both her and I were dazed and emotionally drained. She said the only thing she could, “Johnny, I don’t know what’s going on, but know I love you no matter what.” My heart started to shake. The lady kept going, “I love you more than you know. I’ll always be here for you.” I thought those words must have been preprogrammed into her machinery. I liked that they were. From afar, I saw a voice move across the movie screen inside my head. It reassured me that I would not kill myself before I saw this woman. It was comforting to know, for a moment, I was not going to die. It was comforting to know something.

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It is months later from the incident now and the only thing I can still see is that voice that moved across the screen inside my head. The voice does not seem like mine nor anyone else’s. It speaks in different volumes, sometimes loudly and sometimes softly; either way, it always speaks overwhelmingly clear. It screams through the hollow chambers of my consciousness, stumbling through the clouds, neither dead nor alive.

Nihilistic ruminations get sequestered into my being by the emptiness I have become. I see the irrationality of humankind as an outsider, and see what people live and die for, and it is all so pointless. Fight for religion? Dogma does not deserve all of this. Fight for women? Because of their glorious boobs and asses, and potentially a decent personality? But still, that seems so shallow- at least too shallow for the profundity of love. What is love, anyways? What is success? Is success living a happy life? But what is happiness? Neuroscientists and modern philosophers concur that happiness occurs when the concoction of pathways, neurons, and chemicals create a positive product. Like my Dad- I know my Dad has found happiness at the end of a bottle of anti-depressants. Is that what all of this is about?

Socrates’s observation about human endeavors is not a mere postulation for me anymore; it is my reality every wakeful moment. Whether or not the old sage conjectured correctly that the unexamined life is not worth living, the examined life is too painful to bear. It is no place for the daring fools who laugh loud, gamble their hearts away, and kiss regret goodbye. No, it is a cemetery for those who can only postulate about laughter and bravery. Examining life is only for the unliving. Yet it is all I have the ability to be.

            I am the walking dead. Nothing looks familiar. I got kicked down the rabbit hole and I am stuck in Alice’s wonderland. I am trying to climb out. Running for miles, masturbating, taking cold showers, and praying to a God I do not believe in, I claw at the shell that captured me. I can’t shake the cloud. The gods fully granted me my opulent, manic dream I sought when I graduated college. I am now different (and thus, alone) beyond my wildest imagination. I am mad.

Change is Gonna Come

This song get me pumped. I know I'm going to get better one day. Looking forward to it

Depersonalization Disorder Definition

"Symptoms, although quite specific, may sound vague or metaphorical rather than clear subjective experiences, such as “feeling dead,” “everything is unreal,” “I don’t feel I’m the one doing anything,” “it’s like I’m watching a movie” etc. The symptoms are typically extremely distressing, at times crippling, and are associated with major morbidity and some mortality. The affectively flattened and robotic demeanor that these patients often demonstrate can also fool the clinician into not recognizing the extreme emotional pain of the condition. It is not uncommon, for example, for patients to wonder whether it would matter if they died. A relative high rate of suicide attempts was associated with DPD; however, given the high rates of comorbid depression and other psychiatric disorders in DPD, the relationship between suicidality and DPD remains unclear [6,13]. (See 'Comorbid conditions' above.)  

Two factor analytic studies of the core symptomatology have reported five discrete symptom clusters common in patients with DPD [35,36]:

• Unreality of self, defined as feeling detached from one’s physical body, mind and thoughts

• Perceptual alterations, which encompasses visual, tactile, and somatosensory distortions

• Emotional numbing, characterized by blunted affect, pain & volition

• Anomalous subjective recall, which consists of disrupted experiences of time and related imagery

• Alienation from surroundings, which comprises symptoms of derealization."     Daphne Simeon, MD

Introduction

Through the Looking Glass

Preface

I told my psychologist recently that when I was previously, seriously contemplating suicide that I would have left him a handwritten letter. It would have asked him to speak at my funeral. I would have asked him to let the congregation know my deepest thoughts. I would have wanted those who cared about me to know that the thoughts I thought and told my psychologist hung from me like lemons on branches, that they bounded into the atmosphere, even if only one fisherman was there to catch them. 

He would have squeezed my lemons and spray-painted them over the world. Then I, and everything inside me, would be ratified. My thoughts would not just be whispers to myself like schizophrenics words to benches, but they would be scribbled on the walls like sketches on bathroom stall doors. The scribbling would say, “John was here,” and whoever saw those words as they took a shit would know I existed. That I was here. That I thought things, real things, meaningful things, ugly things, beautiful things. That even though I did not tell the world those thoughts, they still coursed through my blood like magma. That people could not hear me because they were too busy sticking cotton in their orifices in order to keep their conversations about iceberg lettuce. But I was here.

After telling him my previous, fantasized request, I looked at him under his gray eyebrows and said, “But I have decided that I will not kill myself.” He scrunched his nose, and looked at me medically. “I promised myself that I will stick around until I am thirty years old. At that age, if I still want to kill myself then, I’ll do it.”

I am far from thirty, which means I am still alive. And I’m already happy about that. And I am supposedly standing on this gigantic ball of matter spinning madly in circles around a gigantic ball of fire. And I am trying to figure out what it means to be human again. I seek desperately to find myself, or become myself, or become someone else, or just became “I am that I am.” I long to be again. I am ready to move on from this sickness called depersonalization disorder.

Not only is this book a barbaric yawp to the world to let them know I am, but it is a barbaric yawp to myself, beckoning myself to be me again, the real me. Whatever that means.