I can hear people speaking to me from across the universe and the world, regardless of place and time. It never ends. As long as I am in this room and I am given ambient music, immediately, I hear people speaking from afar and they are all conversing in contexts that I don’t know or do not remember. It keeps going, and I can feel this sense that I am and that I can barely match up to the entirety.
I don’t think this is a bad thing. It just shows that indeed, the mind, when given time to stop and wander, becomes a chain-reaction minefield of memories. It never ends as long as I am alive, because this is the mind developed from such a well-lived life. It was so overwhelming at first that I tried to plug my ears and did all sorts of things to ensure that I was not just there in my room at home, and even if I was, I would find all sorts of ways to cope. Even if I went to church regularly back in 2019, trauma and sudden loss of social circles overwhelmed my mind and kept me from being able to take it. 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 were all years of overwhelm and trying to find a way to cope with this condition.
But in 2023, I started my autobiography-journal. Today, I am over 3.5 million words, and the voices are no longer intrusive or overwhelming. I can easily write it all out and find to modulate or regulate myself much more consistently and with greater rapidity and effectiveness.
But yes, I can hear and see constantly my mind flooding me with all these things, unless I intentionally put myself in an environment like a cafe.
But even then, I’ve learned to be in the peak of this condition and manage it in my room at home. I can go on months without going outside. It is a sign that I’ve learned to deal with this. But that was only a rare occasion, I do go to the cafe at least once a week and even went to the cafe 4 days in a row just recently and am going to another place about a week from now.
And it is why I am so capable of interacting with things that people would not otherwise encounter or see. I do not really want to talk about why this is why it is, save for the reason that I gave earlier: a well-lived life.
But if you need the diagnosis, I was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder with psychotic features; though part of me is suspicious that it is just thoughts and memories, or pseudohallucinations or high sensitivity. Either way, I would prefer not to use this, since it is not a card. It is a conceptual handcuff1 or laurel (from “resting on your laurels”).
Footnotes
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“Conceptual handcuff”: over-reliance despite ineffectiveness and “get-away-free-cardness” without actually engaging with the reality and experience of the described. ↩