I’m going insane.
Weird, right? Yeah.
Lets start at the beginning. 07-29-2007 my mother died of cancer. I was 17 years old at the time. Now, my brother and sister handled everything like you should, but I, I didn’t. I bottled up. Its what I do with my emotions.
In the 2 years that my mother suffered of cancer, I cried twice. In the 1 and a half year after my mother died, I cried twice. And thats with the funeral. Unhealthy right? Yeah, but it seemed fine.
I was cruising through life, relatively, for about 9 months. And then suddenly, I realised, I haven’t been sleeping well. I’ve actually been sleeping less and less. To the point that it was worrying. To the point of being so tired that thinking about my alarm-clock, having to start my day was horrifying.
Again, I ignored it, just like my mother ignored the orange-sized tumor in her head. And, another month went by. At this point, I was sleeping for about 4 hours a night. I was getting sad, feeling like I was sinking and couldn’t handle it.
Around this time I started hurting myself. It started simple, just punching a wall untill my knuckles bled, you know, the usual for a boy with troubles. And, as my feelings grew stronger, so did my urge to hurt myself. I was never quite there when I did it. I mentally zoned out. I could, in fact, discover that suddenly, I had another scar on my arm.
I hear a lot of “I hurt myself because I want to feel something”-type phrases from the girls I know, and it’s nothing like that. It’s not that I feel empty inside, it’s not that I do it to feel anything, it’s the opposite. I started to cut myself, and as I felt that hot sting, as I ground my teeth and thought of something else, I didn’t think about me feeling sad. Or depressed. I think about nothing. It feels like when I bleed, everything around me turns to black. When I’m done, I feel better. I sleep better, I feel relaxed, the sun seemed to shine a bit brighter, the cold seemed to feel a bit more frosty. I loved it. So, I did it again. And again. And again. Untill, one day, I realized I was in the wrong. Sure, I felt great for a day or two, I could sleep for more then 6 hours again, but when the high faded, I crashed. I felt worse then ever. Best to describe it as being very tired, and staring at static. But then, the static is your life. The static is you.
So I stopped, and I slept even worse. I sleep for 4 hours, but I don’t really sleep. I’m awake for 20, but I’m not really awake. My dreams and my realities started to overflow, to the point of me hearing voices. They don’t say anything interesting, or scary, they just say my name. I just hear them calling my name, sometimes shouting, sometimes whispering, just behind me. And they keep me awake.
Actually, at this point, I don’t know what came first. Did I hear voices, causing me to sleep less, and feel bad? Did I feel bad, causing me to sleep less, and hear voices? I honestly don’t remember. Only thing I know now, is that I think I’m getting worse. I think I started to hallucinate visually. Its started vague, about two weeks ago. I had the idea that I was surrounded by invisible fireflies. I thought, that if I squinted, I could almost see them flickering, and I believed it to be true. Thinking about it, after it had subsided, its nonsense ofcourse. But it felt so real. Like if I reached out and caught one, I could feel it between my fingers. Insane, but interesting.
For the last two days, I’m thinking that I’m actually walking behind myself. That if I turn fast enough, I can see myself run to get behind myself again. That if I would look in the mirror to see myself, I would see me looking in the mirror to see myself. Its hard to explain, but for some reason my vision felt like it had shifted from first-person view, to third-person view. It’s the most annoying thing, because it not only seems to impede my judgement in depth, but I’m starting to question myself a lot. If this is actually how I feel, a warped vision of how I percieve the world, then what else isn’t real. Did I really have that conversation with that person? Or was that all in my head? Am I really hearing that music coming from over there, or is that just me again.
I want this to stop, I want to feel good again without self-mutilation, I want to sleep for a full 7 hours and I want to be sure of what I do and what I percieve. I want to be better again.
I’ve started to talk to a psychiatrist, and I want to document my decline and progression. I choose to do this because I find this all extremely fascinating, and maybe I can benefit from it. From now on, I’ll document anything I find odd, anything I’m not sure about, and how I feel. There will be a lot of pulp, a lot of stuff that is irrelevant to what I’m trying to write down, but I’m going to filter that out as much as I can.
-Robin
I don’t think you’re going insane, if only for the fact that if you’re insane, you don’t know you’re insane. If you know it, you’re not insane, you’re just troubled, which is entirely understandable given the situation. So in answer of your question which came first, the voices or the poor sleep, I think it’s the latter. Personally, I’ve seen stuff that wasn’t there after a couple of days of being awake during the Bulldrek Gathering, so it’s not unlikely that lack of sleep caused auditory or even visual hallucination. Hell, it could also just be a result of being only superficially asleep, enough for your imagination to start producing sounds and images, which wake you up once you’re confronted with them. I have that, sometimes, too.
I think you’re not well, that you need to continue talking to your psychologist, but I am confident that with a little bit of time and effort you’ll be right as rain.