"Eureka," I exclaim in manic joy.
"I have it," I repeat.
"Finally," I finish.
Only to be immediately beset with doubt. Questions arise.
"Have what?" I inquire.
"What proof have you?" I interrogate.
"What does this mean?" I query.
All in the space of just a couple of minutes I find an answer to one of the questions that plague me but in an onslaught of review it crumpled under pressure and just becomes yet another wild flight of fancy that my mind throws up from the unconscious, where I am under the distinct belief that there is a great deal more going on than the running my systems and reacting to stimuli with those reactions imprinted and learned of eons of experience that has imprinted in and on our psyche, registered in our DNA and slotted perfectly in our unconscious long-term memory for quick retrieval whenever needed. The more the trait is used the more prevalent it becomes in the conscious mind and becomes more prevalent in the unconscious drivers that create our personality and mannerisms. For instance; if a person were to have suffered trauma, or a series of trauma, the need for survival would become activated and prevalent and would stay active as long as the trauma remained in the first phase of processing stimuli, where it would percolate with the emotional response, never dwindling but repressed, until it is either processed properly by the mind and stored as a previous experience in long term memory or it continues to fester, overloading the prefrontal cortex and progressively impacting the conscious minds ability to process stimuli and impairs the ability to recall memories in order to process inherent behaviours. And it has struck again.
My mind is inserting a rational reasoning and response that says my latest conclusion is both ludicrous and patently absurd in all forms by any rational or scientific means available to the modern contemporary mind and certainly is an insult to anyone with a modicum of intelligence to their names. It would be the height of hubris to peddle this latest fancy to anyone born and raised by what is ascribed to as western culture. I fully expect that other cultures and viewpoints would find my conclusions equally absurd but in an effort to be sensitive to others belief systems I will go on record with only the culture that I was raised in being laughingly dismissive of my latest effort to understand the strange goings on that occurred in my life when everything, including reality, went off the rails as my mind slipped its leash in a desperate bid to hide from what was occurring, more than a decades worth of which had burst its dam and drowned me in grief and loss so profound I found myself staring into the abyss, soul shrieking in terror and my life became an uncontrollable odyssey that never ceased in its ability to reach new levels of craziness and new lows of despair.
As bizarre as it sounds, it will make a good jumping off point from where I am sitting in time, looking back from a position of sound thinking and rational behaviour and beliefs. Which make it very difficult for me as I relive moments from my psychosis that I then process and sort into memory that have two entirely different realities at play in the memory. Which is also compounded by repeatedly experiencing the same phenomenon while my mind is firmly fixed, and I suffer no strange disturbances in my inherent belief system.
My knowledge on the subject, as well as my overall mindset, have grown considerably since I last tried to capture somewhat of my experience and time certainly has proven healing. At least in terms of the psychotic episode. The traumas from before still bother me, though there has been improvement.
I haven't been hospitalized in over two years. I take an antipsychotic by way of injection into my muscles. It began as a high dose but has been reduced 66%. I take mood stabilizers as well and recently a new drug that is supposed to help with PTSD. The official diagnosis was Bi-Polar I with pronounced hyper mania. This is based on how I presented at the hospital for the third time. To this day, 16 years after I first approached a doctor about my mental state, not one doctor has interviewed me as to what I was living through by way of external stimuli and later, what I was experiencing in my life. It appears that these experiences had no impact on my medical diagnoses. I was diagnosed bi-polar in 2005 by my GP who dosed the shit out of me with Seroquel and Lithium. The diagnosis was upheld several months later and not once, then, or in the intervening years was I listened to beyond notes to the effect that I was lying and exaggerating and seeking drugs. I would really like to punch the doctor who said that. Especially considering how far my illness went and how I am still, to this day, marginalized and my condition remains unreported on, therapy is non-existent and I have given up on trying. I did manage to get my psychiatrist to admit I displayed the symptoms of PTSD 15 years after the initial trauma and 12 years after I first mentioned PTSD. The reality is I have severe PTSD as a result of trauma, ongoing abuse, and repeated traumas alongside legal and business issues that arose entirely out of mitigating the fall outs from the trauma. I honestly do not care if I am Bi-Polar. Having emotional extremes of mood is absolutely fuck all compared to the pervasive depression. Back when it first started, my coping mechanisms were not overwhelmed, I was not exaggerating, nor was I manic. The doctor judged me as having a non-existent issue that I was seeking drugs for. No. That is not what was going on and the intervening years did not improve matters much at all. Anyone, with any understanding of my perspective, would have been completely overwhelmed by the initial, criminal, abuses. They would not simply be dismissed as a result of poor emotional maintenance. They would have been diagnosed as traumatized by events that continued, year after year, without once letting up and downloading an inhuman level of responsibilities onto them. Responsibilities that legally did not belong to them. Responsibilities that were never discussed with anyone. I just got the bill, or the bill collector for that matter.
To shorten the matter, I am comfortable in stating that each individual trauma was, in and of itself, an incident that I could deal with, manage or mitigate but surely could cope with and did cope with for years. It was the severity of the first trauma alongside 12 years of abuse that was where my mind failed. It could have been the deaths of my family. But as I recall it today, and remember vividly, as experienced it was entirely my daughter and my relationship with her and my rights to parent that were the sticks that ultimately broke my back. I have mentioned before, I think, the added pressures that came, the non-stop work, the financial issues, the banks behaviours, the professional services etc. I don't feel I need to further encapsulate those dread memories as it is my psychosis that I am nailing into the timeline today and specifically my eureka moment that strains belief utterly but makes an excellent story, I think. I would love to have it in its own, stand alone, pages but I have noticed over six or so of these now, that the story becomes intimately intertwined with my own personal experiences at the time.
I try to make each story as entertaining as possible and hopefully not repetitive. I want it to be interesting for the reader, but I am mainly writing this sequence for personal reasons. I find that trauma intrudes on my writing when I am seeking to tell a story and I have found that it fits with the tale I am trying to tell. Each one of these that I complete in rough draft give me multiple reasons to be thankful.
1. I have managed, over 20 pages or so, to put together a coherent line of narration that is following a coherent path. This is important to my wish to become a writer.
2. I manage to bring a traumatic experience into my mind in a different format and through telling the story I am able, to relive the experience from a different position than that of merely being the recipient of the stimuli. I am, able to shape it, mold it and place it down for my mind to see in a different medium and context that it is used to. It then goes into my long-term, memory and my limbic system response dwindles.
3. This has the effect of removing said experience from the wheel of flashbacks and repetition where so many negative memories clash amongst themselves to push to the forefront of my conscious thoughts.
A perfect example of this was The Dancing Plague. Regardless of whether the reader believes a word I say, they should still be entertained by the ludicrous audacity of a mentally deranged writer stating that they suffered a medieval maladaptive plague that modern science has been unable to explain. Mainly from having no contemporary patients to observe would be one guess but observation would only provide the dancing aspect. They would need to know the environment and the stimuli that led up to the onset of the plague wouldn't they. Only I have already established that the doctor would dismiss me as lying, exaggerating or believing in something that didn't happen. The doctor would not take me at my face value and consider even for the briefest moments that it happened.
Well, it happened, and it was completely overriding me with fear and shame and coming back in non-stop flashbacks to the pieces I remember. So, I wrote about it, filled it with references to my traumatic past and included descriptive additional characters that may be poetic license or may be vestiges of hallucinations or may be proof of cultural contagion and proceeded to capture as much as I could remember. And it worked. I got the story out and it stopped haunting my thoughts. It settled to a regular memory of an experience I once had. Considering that experience itself, I would say that it is nearly miraculous that it doesn't bother me. Or should I say, doesn't bother me too much. The experiences were extreme, certain memories are potent, and I still seek answers for questions that have arisen in lieu of that time.
What I believe happened was extremely severe pervasive depression that led to a psychotic break in which I retreated into a separate reality so I would no longer feel the impact and emotion of my imploding life. It's the alternate reality that continues to give me issues, but it just keeps on reiterating it's existence and I am of sound mind and body to the best that I can be, I believe.
Why I believe that Hyper Mania is the wrong diagnosis. No external stimuli were ever considered in the diagnosis. Nor was I questioned as to the length of time I had been in this alternate reality, nor, for that matter, has it ever come up in the first place. Finally hyper mania, and regular mania, is marked by joy, happiness and hyper arousal. I suffered none of these effects, except from the drug euphoria the day I was arrested and hospitalized for the third time. As for length of time, I was suffering hallucinations at least for two years, visions over a year period and was completely immersed for at least six months. It was so powerful that vestiges of it still Mark my daily experiences or, conversely, what I see is an existing reality.
There, I said it. I said it with yet another introduction by way of my mental state. I guess I just want the reader to believe I experienced these things but at the same time I want the readers scepticism as well because my rational mind exclaims, "where do you get this stuff bud." After all, I have little or no science behind this. I have little knowledge of the world whose realm collided with mine. I have no knowledge of terminology, per say, to effectively describe my experiences, though I have learned some. I am also completely smashing two different worlds together that are universes apart in their own codices. Or are they?
What keeps me in the present with this iteration of my development is the recent, leap of faith, that I have had. After spending countless hours staring and thinking I judged that the Pareidolia I see are The Horde as I named them when I believed a multitude of them had come uninvited into my home and were wagering on the outcome of the competitions that I was being subjected to by an ancient Kobold of some sort. What also keeps me in the present this evening is the conclusion I have made. It is that everything exists, realms collide and the reality that I have witnessed is a realm that is supplementary too, or in the same realm as the signals we use to transmit data. The Internet. Wi-fi, Broadband, telephone lines, fax signals. Software, hardware, and all the places in between.
So, either, this world has existed for thousands of years, and we are just scratching the surface of an unplumbed depth with our early, faltering, footsteps into signals and frequencies that will become apparent as technology improves, or this overlayered reality is the result of something new in the matrix. Something that fundamentally shifted our reality as we know it.
What if it is new? What is it? When?
So maybe the Hadron Collider really is messing with the fabric of the universe and that fabric is displaying the characteristics of the Law of Quantum mechanics, giving rise to infinite universes wherein every thought or action, thought taken or not taken, reverberates throughout in an infinite layering of realities. Where everything is real, every thought, every belief and every action takes root and manifests the sentience that drives the mind to see in these dimensions.
Maybe the human mind does process stimuli in 11 different dimensions and my experiences are the result of those unseen dimensions sending information into the visible dimensions that I experience. Which would give rise to different planes of reality and existence being experienced by our minds and bodies. And sometimes you read up on the Thai forest tradition and get profoundly shocked.