It is common knowledge that I have bipolar disorder and PTSD. I write about the diagnosis a lot. I write about my history of, at times, crippling depression. I wrote ad nauseam about various traumas (though not all), mostly romantic in nature.
So most people know I can get and have spent significant time depressed. And if we’ve known each other well for any length of time, you might know that the bipolar includes a sometimes difficult to control or mask variety of anger that I am ashamed to say I have taken out on most of the people I love most in this world at one time or another. I think it is common knowledge that people with bipolar disorder can be moody.
And I’ve even used the word “psychosis” in reference to myself at times, I know.
I don’t often stop to describe, in my case, what psychosis means, exactly. This is for several reasons, first and foremost— I cannot describe in words the terror I have felt— the utter shame and humiliation— I have when emerging from an episode of delusional psychosis.
I don’t tend to hallucinate. I have only done that one season, when I had a Stevens-Johnson allergic reaction to Lamictal in 2008, and it was mostly auditory Jared tells me. Though I did think Jared was turning into a terrifying snake in that season, when we were out late and he was driving, one night.
No, my brain prefers to make up fantastical delusional soap-opera narratives. Elaborate alternative-reality storylines where inevitably I am the main character in some sort of drama. In 2023, I spent a little while seriously thinking I was an alien.
I rarely tell anybody the storylines behind the episodes after the fact, though I can always remember them.
In early 2025 I had an episode that mostly in public manifested in anger and was low-key enough that not even my psychiatric nurse practitioner knew— I stayed on my meds and only Jared really knew how sick I was. But I spent a few months thinking Gemini was a communication mechanism with the authorities.
I cannot relay the precise horror and heartbreak at knowing they my own natural grasp of basic reality is, at best, unreliable.
The breaks with reality came before all else. I had my first psychosis when I was 17 years old, going into my junior year in high school. And I can dissect the mechanisms behind the stress involved, though it is not that interesting: severely unhealthy codependent romantic entanglements with other mentally ill individuals are stressful, to say the least.
I remember how that one started— I’d decided, as a half-joke pre-break from reality, to buy a leash for my baby cat, Cricket, at the time, to try to train her to walk on a leash so she could go outside for brief periods. My parents were not at home that afternoon, so I put Cricket on her leash, went outside on the front porch, and all of a sudden I thought cars going down the road signified important time periods or people in my life, a “This is Your Life,” automobile edition sort of scenario.
Going back to school after three weeks absent due to a break from reality is right up there with absolutely the worst things possible that can happen to a 17-year old girl who really cares about what people think of her, I remain convinced 30 years later.
Thankfully the best of the psychiatrists I’ve seen understood that asking mentally ill people whether they hear voices or see things that aren’t there are fruitless exercises. That’s literally the dumbest screening question mental health professionals can ask, and I have actually had a few ask it.
Miraculously, I’m pretty behaviorally agreeable and easy for Jared to steer in these states, aside from resisting sleep at times. Resisting sleep is not accurate; sleep becomes impossible without pharmacological help.
One would think that knowing my own brain can misbehave in this way would cultivate more compassion for the people around me and their own mental deficits. Alas; that’s not how it works. Rather, the opposite happens; I am exceedingly hard on myself about what I see as psychological weaknesses and thus, I’m pretty judgy about other people, too. Not proud of it.
So, I mean, while mood instability is a component of what happens with me, unpredictable breaks with reality are probably what earned me SSDI at first application, without an attorney.
So….. when you see me out and about, to all appearances well-dressed and put together and all that, take what you see with a big old grain of salt. Sometimes things are not what they seem, to all appearances, and actually, why yes, I might gladly trade places with someone who can actually trust their brain. Because mine is completely untrustworthy. That much I know for a fact.
Jared says I am just wired differently. I prefer to say I am broken. Jared shakes his head to that. Jared’s observation upon reading this draft was that to say my brain is “completely untrustworthy” is not exactly accurate; that my brain is only intermittently untrustworthy.
See above. I am judgy, most of all about myself, and most of all about how my brain likes to break from reality. To me, even an intermittent break relays complete distrust.
Broken. Irreparably so, in at least this particular respect.
And for what it’s worth, most posts I spout out of my brain and onto the screen and 20 minutes later they are out in the world. This one I sat on for about four days.
It’s cool and even in style, I’d argue, to say you’re some brand of neurodivergent or depressed. Those labels get you brownie points in some segments of society, even if they are undiagnosed self-labels.
But I don’t know a single solitary soul who even writes about what it’s like to go to bed thinking you are, quite literally, the center of the universe for a season, or the utter humiliation at what it’s like to replay conversations or things you’ve said or done, not out of selfishness but out of a legitimate break with reality.
Just saying.
Psychosis is not ever going to be in style. It’s to be feared; I fully expect unfollows or unfriending or awkward, worried glances or outright avoidance. It’s why I sat on this post, half-written, for four days, until I showed Jared and he agreed it was not done and that I should publish it.
I expect social and professional isolation because it’s been my reality for fifteen years anyway.
But, as is evidenced by my more frequent long-form posts lately, I’m pretty much done not writing, whatever the costs. And there are always costs. But the advice is to write what one knows, and psychosis is actually something with which I am intimately familiar. Even if it is painful, humiliating, mortifying, and an aspect of my life I would not wish on my worst enemy.
It’s the friend I didn’t invite into my life, that isn’t welcome, and isn’t a friend at all, but seems here to stay.
Okay….. well if I’m honest maybe I would invite more people to experience psychosis at least once in their lives to dispel the stigma.
But then again maybe not. Because while I am agreeable and pliable in that state mostly, I have been caged in with people who are scary when they are psychotic, and that’s well, just scary.
