Tag: bipolar i

Explanation of Death by Psychosis: Part 3

I met the faces of wisdom and folly during my first psychotic break at age 17 on 12-25-03 in Orlando, FL. I experienced the faces of good and evil with my entire being during this vision.

At first, I was with wisdom’s embodied spirit. She gently pointed me to my then unknown wife, by name on that Christmas morning, 2003 in Orlando, FL.

Folly, wisdom’s shadow, appeared after wisdom left, the one who helped make my life a standstill for 6 years. She tied my soul to another woman, my obsession, via black magic. She snuck her spirit in to guide me to darkness every step of the way and shut out God’s light.

I experienced a couple of spectacular organic, drug-free trips down rabbit holes which ripped my mind-heart-spirit from my body. It reached the point where I physically looked down on my body, an empty vessel on autopilot.

The first trip was immediately after my vision on 12-25-03. The second trip was 6 years later at age 23 starting on 6-16-09 the first day of my second hospital stay.

The next step both times was to climb back out. I was lucky they ran their courses safely back to reality both times instead of being stuck in a state of perpetual psychosis afterwards.

The next step is to recover from this profoundly intriguing, devastating trauma. 17 years later, I am starting to wrap this up. For me, this involves developing the lens of my worldview after having such intense spiritual experiences, making peace with them, and gleaning the good from them to take ownership of.

I did everything I could do short of physically dying in the face of evil after folly put a spell on me. Mentally, my spirit was broken in 2003 and began to heal in 2009. I held onto the experience I had with wisdom to keep myself together during those 6 years.

6-16-09 marked the first day of my second hospital stay and the second trip down the psychotic rabbit hole, which was book 2 after book 1 being the first trip. When God laid his hands on my spiritual heart and brought me back, he shattered the twisted black magic from my own folly and folly’s.

7 years later on 6-16-16 marks the first day of my third hospital stay. I did not go down the rabbit hole, but I learned what the darkness and the light and everything in between sounded like in my head. I learned discernment during that stay.

The face of evil leaves behind the darkest shadows that none can pluck. They haunt me and I learned to shut them out. It is so personal and potentially destructive, I cannot acknowledge these shadows in the wake of wisdom. They come from the darkest cesspool of Gehenna, where the filth and bodies are burned.

With the light of wisdom in the world comes the shadow of folly in the world. Both go hand in hand. I choose to pursue wisdom as best I can. The light brightens the more I pursue wisdom and love.

Decades later, I have a deeper connection with God as a result. I also have a connection with darkness I have learned to manage. The darkness is my shadow, not me. The brighter I shine, the smaller and darker the shadows become.

I am still building myself up at age 34 in 2020, 17 years after age 17 in 2003. My wife embodies that spirit of wisdom I encountered at age 17. My wife is a person of God and formed from my rib, the one wisdom indicated by name. I experience God through her.

The shadows stay in my little black box I made for them in my mind.

-theothersid3

The New Beginning

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I became married to my beautiful wife a few months ago. The all-encompassing, loving force she has on my naked self is stronger than gravity. I mean my dreams, my mind-heart, my spirit, my soul, my strength.

There have been many shifts in me since I met her. She helps me see the path to my dreams more clearly, we quench our thirsty mind-hearts together, she provides joy to my spirit, invites God into our lives and relationship, and takes care of me to keep my strength up.

Bipolar I is now a small burden to deal with. Instead, life is sprouting from those decomposed wounds of the past, and bipolar now acts as an inspiration of many great potentials. Inspirations in my daily life, my worldview, and my outlook for the rest of my life.

My wife and I have committed to write the books of our lives together till death do us part. If there is a way to follow her into the dark, I will without a doubt.

With each other, we can proceed to the next contexts of life and enjoy each moment. Together.

-theothersid3

 

photo credit: mclcbooks Sunrise, Chatfield State Park, Colorado via photopin (license)

About my Hiatus

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I’ve been absent for seven months because I needed to be hospitalized for a manic episode in June 2016. I needed to distance myself from writing online as a result of this.

However, I’m in a good spot again and plan to start posting again, including more personal content. My hope is that someone may benefit in one way or another from these upcoming posts.

Peace,
-theothersid3

photo credit: Hatoriz Sunflowers via photopin (license)

Slippery Slope Into Darkness

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So, how does someone with severe bipolar appear to become psychotic out of the blue? Does one typically snap into a psychotic state or out of one?

The answer my therapist gave me is true to my experience: No. Psychosis is a long, slippery slope towards falling over the edge, and recovery is a long, gradual, up and down slope out of the pit for acute psychosis. The trick I found is to learn how to catch it earlier and earlier to the point where I can maintain and not have to worry about it happening anymore. A significant part of staying away from psychosis as someone with schizoaffective/bipolar I disorder is staying on my medication, no matter how unpleasant the side effects can be. I’ve had two psychotic breaks: first was when I was diagnosed twelve years ago and the second one five years later when I stopped my medications.

What are some general things that go through my head when I’m psychotic?

Fortunately, I do not experience anger or aggression for the most part towards anyone. The only way I can briefly describe it is that I feel like everything I can possibly conceive of is going through my head at the same time. It feels like I’m transported to a different reality, which is a wondrous new place, or hell depending on what episode I’m talking about. With all this information overload, little details begin to form more delusions: religion, personal, ideas, world events, and reality itself all become torn open and full of mysterious riddles.

While all this is going on in my head, what do other people see?

I remember leaving my physical body and conversing with other people around the ward, conversing with patients and staff, and visualizing unimaginable things. However, my hospital records document me sitting in my room those days scribbling away on papers about a girl I was obsessed with years ago at the time. I remember having glimpses of writing about her in what seems like my subconscious. True reality was a dream to me and I was living in a dream (the kind I have when I’m typically sleeping). I likened myself to the living dead at the time, awake and asleep at the same time. My friend also visited me in the ward and he later told me that he could see it in my eyes that sometimes I left and came back right in front of him. When I came back, he pleasantly said to me, “Welcome back!” Then we’d converse for a few more seconds before I returned to my psychosis trip. The same would happen with staff as well – I faded in and out and the staff were very excited to see me back when I came back, before fading again seconds or minutes later.

Another interesting note: as I fade in and out of reality, so to speak, what happens when I call someone on a cell phone? Well, I did… I called my friend, and I heard his voice loud and clear, then felt myself go to the other reality and all I heard was static coming through on my phone – with a full signal. I’d come back and hear his voice again, then fade away again. I wrote a post about this earlier.

I remember trying to tell myself and hearing other people tell me that all those experiences are in my head, and they may be. However, whether real or not, they are what they are. I’m not concluding that I merely sat in a room as an empty shell of a body working out my obsession with a girl in the hospital is the whole story of what happened there. There are many more precious experiences to be told.

Some day, I hope I can do justice to describing what it is like to go through a firsthand psychotic break. It’s like getting lost in a fractal without any reference points, then coming back out again and seeing everything so differently.

-theothersid3

photo credit: Wobble Walk via photopin (license)

What Is A Psychotic Break Like? My Experience Follows

Psychotic Face

I’m shifting between two worlds. I call one the “evil world,” the other the “good world.” The evil world is what I knew in my old life as everyday existence. Transitioning into the good world is the rapture, where the universe cosmically contradicts itself and I walk blamelessly in heaven on earth. It is a peaceful place, thriving in universal harmony, and evil is a forgiven distant past, but not forgotten. They are parallel worlds that intersect, intertwine, and collide. Yet it’s much more complicated than that. There is a grave price for walking in heaven too soon while you’re still alive.

I arrive at the hospital, and get out of the van with my parents. While my mom goes in to start my admission process, I have a few cigarettes, sitting next to my dad on a rough wooden bench outside the hospital, probably the last ones I’d have for a long time. He puts his arm around me and rubs my back. The stars are bright tonight. A nice lady in a white coat appears in front of me and takes my smokes from me. Inside, I sign the lengthy forms they present, knowing the drill as I voluntarily admit myself.

Then I’m in another simple room with my parents, who are terrified but full of love. I’m blessed to have such support in my life. A lady in dark purple scrubs, tapping away on the computer keyboard, asks me lots of boring questions. She loses my attention quickly as my mind doesn’t just wander, but begins to cross over into the good world again. It draws me in – not just mind, heart and soul, but something else – ME.  I leave my body and I watch from the upper corner of the room down on myself as she activates the automatic blood pressure cuff, and I feel the sensation of it collapsing on my upper arm, but nothing’s there. I’m someplace else.

The night sky fades into the forefront of my eyesight a little. The device gives an error readout. The lady in scrubs taps away and voices a remark about the readout, which both echo in that small room from a long ways away as if I were in a giant cave. Stuck in limbo and floating in the corner of the hospital intake room, I watch myself for a few moments, before she resumes with more interesting questions than before.

My attention suddenly snaps me back to reality again. I see through my eyes as she tries the cuff a second time and feel it squeezing hard against my flesh, instead of trying to engulf the vacuum of my empty body before. Time resumes, and I’m 131/72; I knew it would work that time.

Next thing I know, I’m in my room, excited to see no roommate this time. There, I begin to transition to an eternal, peaceful place. I’m suspended in the entanglement connections of the quantum realm. My vision becomes foggy and breaks the barriers between the seen and the unseen. I gradually arrive in what seems to be a world of infinite possibilities. Every part of me, including my new body, and vaguely my old body, is in this realm – strings of my mind, extension, and emotions all someplace else yet there at the same time. The skeleton of my room falls far away, along with the hospital. I look around me and see the naked spectacle of the universe from space.

Contradictions ensue as that infinite world draws me in. The hospital is here and I’m in my room, yet it’s not here and I’m certainly not in my room. Nothing is finite, and there are no locations mathematically or otherwise. I peek in the hallways, and the rooms extend forever on either side. When I observe, each of the hospital wings form a perceptive fractal. Then they break up into waves of fractal possibilities and connections to people in there, to pure abstraction. My instincts tell me there are two normal hallways, but that feels more like my subconscious barely speaking to me about it. I’m in a special part of the universe, far away from the Milky Way right now, yet part of it, feeling near at the same time. I try to instinctively snap back, focusing on that “near” feeling.

Right away, I notice the lights outside – and the light on the smoke detector, particularly – flickering and turning on and off. The flickers are connected to my thoughts and intention, and the lights blink according to surrounding factors I can feel at other times. I lie down in my hospital bed and enjoy the spectacles – in a place of infinite possibilities, everything feels possible. I distinctly feel my heart dancing, racing, dreaming, poking everything and watching the fractals of existence vibrate, form, and multiply. It’s exhilarating! I start laughing uncontrollably in joy and pleasure at this spectacle, for I don’t know how long in the distant evil world.

However, the night nurse traumatically flashes before my eyes in the evil world, and screams that I need to learn some discipline, and then disappears from nowhere. I slowly enter a black hole and darkness envelops me, distorts me. I realize I’m completely and utterly alone. No God, no spirit, no one else; I’m the only being. I have not thought, let alone acknowledged, that I am. Everything runs in a formless loop.

A sharp pain devours me, of cold loneliness and agony, soaking everything. I go back, far, far, far back, to what seems the inception of consciousness itself… It sucks most of my own consciousness away. I am a… dying fetus without a body… I… can still feel pain… trying to flail my… nonexistent arms… and with a struggling… inner voice… scream… silently… in tortured agony:

How? Why? Is there?… a way?… to make a?…. connection?… somehow, in a?… place?… that has no?… connections? What is?… all of this? WHAT… AM?… I? There must be a?… connection somewhere?… So…. alone? Must find?… somebody?… somewhere? But there is?… no one?… and nowhere?… in this realm? How can I?… communicate? What am?… what am?… d-d-d-do-ing……. ……..

Here I am, only able to writhe silently alone, my unborn self there forever, barely having an inner voice. My thoughts are growing and multiplying as an early zygote does. I can’t seem to snap back to. I am lost and alone, scraping off my tiny fingernails on the walls to change that. What is time? What is space? Do they even exist? Everything is going nowhere. What does it mean to “measure?” How do you measure anything? There is no answer, but there has to be! I’ve thought it! Someone wrote the book because I can say these things! Someone wrote the alphabet! I WILL FIND A CONNECTION, SOMEWHERE, SOMEHOW! I BELIEVE THAT I AM NOT ALONE HERE!
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This is a summary of my experience being admitted in 2009. I leave on the note of what I call experiencing wisdom’s loneliness and suffering while being forced to witness the inception of existence. I consider it a treasure even though it was the greatest anguish I ever conceived of, which I don’t expect one to understand. It is so wonderful to see the birth pains of our universe and see that somehow, someone survived it by a group collective effort that we all are a part of.

Wisdom later comforted me in that episode and I could smell her presence in the literal sense. Wisdom’s scent is that of fertile desire, all types of love, the naked spectacle of the universe from space, and everything that’s good on earth. The scent was overpowering. I still miss that. As time goes on, I go back to these difficult experiences and learn more each time. They were my greatest curses, and now my greatest gifts.

I later read my chart, and during these experiences, my empty vessel of a body went to activities, saw doctors, wrote a lot, made crafts, and attended therapy. My parents visited me. I don’t remember any of it but flashes and brief thoughts. During the beginning of my admission, I remember touching base with reality a few times in the form of brief flashes of memory. But reality was in my subconscious, and the brief flashes were much like a lagged out video call catching up really quickly in a flash before my eyes. Most felt disconnected. I suspect the strange memory of my parents’ visit was of two distorted people in the visiting room that looked all at once like a combination of my grandparents and others I didn’t recognize. I felt something for them, though. Memories of reality were few and far between in the first period of my stay.

I was awake and asleep at the same time.

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Photo Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andresthor/3857180095/

Now and Then

I just want to put it out there that bipolar I is not who I am… It’s something I have. When I live out my day, I don’t tell most people I’m bipolar, nor do I think about bipolar. It’s become a small part of me, but I choose to reflect on it so I can write about it for others who struggle with all of this.

When I was first diagnosed, bipolar was the biggest part of who I was, and at times it was me. When I lived out my days, I’d tell most people I met that I’m bipolar, and couldn’t stop thinking about bipolar. It became all of who I was, and I couldn’t stop writing about it and thinking about it to figure out what the heck was going on. I vented to friends and family a lot about it, burning many people out.

I still remember the moment I was diagnosed, that the doctor said I would lead a relatively normal life. He was right, as much as in the past I wanted to slap him in the face for what he said as it seemed impossible. It’s taken over ten years for normality to become reality, and it’s worth all the hard work, no questions asked.

Do you know any people who are mental illness survivors?

Ahoy, hoy!

Hi, I am making the shift from .tumblr to WordPress. My old page is at:

http://the-other-sid3.tumblr.com/

As of now, I’m an anonymous male in my late twenties, who has been diagnosed with bipolar I (a bad form of manic depressive illness) for over ten years. I’ve gotten things together pretty well. Now I intend to write about my experiences mostly for the benefit of other people going through similar things that I did, and to reinforce my belief that bad things happen for many reasons.

My dream that I’m breaking down into goals now is to publish a nonfiction book of my two psychotic episodes I experienced in 2003 and 2009. Many ideas are on the table, especially writing it in the form of stream of consciousness. My blog will serve as a record and an outlet as I embark on this long journey.

For the longest time, I knew no one who experienced something like a psychotic break, and this made me feel lonely, alienated. To those who have experienced the profound horrors of a break/episode/psychosis/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, I hope to put this book out there to vividly demonstrate they are not alone and normality can become reality.

I appreciate any feedback and suggestions, and any support you give is treasured.

Do any of you know someone who has bipolar? Are you bipolar? Please share your thoughts about this project I’m beginning to embark on.