I remember when I was younger, I always felt like I was different. I did a lot of living in my own head. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I didn’t do sports. I didn’t succeed in school like most of the other kids. I was mostly daydreaming in class and daydreaming, for what seemed like all the time.
When I was 19, that’s the first time I really started having serious delusions. I thought with certainty that everybody in the world was against me. I remember one time walking through K-Mart, and every person that passed by, I thought they were all tracking me and were all going to be sending secret messages to a government agency, who had plans on running illegal, underground tests on me. I always heard voices in the past, but this time, they were very prominent. “Get out of here! Get out of here! Get out of here!”
I remember walking as quick as I could toward the exit and just looking all around me. I was waiting for, any minute, a helicopter to come down from the sky, grab me, and take me away.
That night, when I went home, I started writing a journal about my experience. I still have it to this day. One of the passages reads: “The government is trying to inject my body with a secret serum that will liquify and, allow them to track my every move. They have plans on doing this within the next week. If I’m missing and you find this message, I will be located in an underground labaratory in Washington D.C.”
I didn’t sleep for three days after this. A lot of my time at nights, I spent sitting in my living room, staring out the window. My parents noticed that I was acting peculiar, but I thought that, since I didn’t know whether or not I could trust them, I didn’t say anything to them. I didn’t know whether or not they would protect me.
Later that week, I was in my room and thought I heard a noise coming from downstairs. So, I went downstairs and saw the figure of a man sitting on a couch. I walked over toward it, and the man told me that he was there to protect me, and that if I went to K-Mart tomorrow, the government would call off the secret mission because I would be seen too many times on their cameras, only this time the government planned on sending my brain to space to be reviewed by an alien coalition which believes I have information within my subconscious on the creation of the universe.
Eventually, I tried to kill myself and my parents found me with my wrists slashed. I was sent to the psych unit and diagnosed with schizophrenia. I’ve been working with a counselor ever since and they have me on medication. I’m not cured by any means, but I’m sure as hell a lot better than I was 3 years ago.
