Well I wasn’t planning on writing today because I have felt extremely anxious all day with how this next week is going to go down. I am hoping to continue to stay in the mental health court and finish it, but it might be too late for me to implement enough change and demonstrate my commitment to my recovery. And whatever decision is made on Wednesday, I will be moving into this new sober housing situation and break my apartment lease, which I have had lived in for several years. However, I am laying on my bed and feeling less anxious after some Benadryl and sleepy time tea. So, I figured I would write a bit more of the decline of my mental health and venture into psychosis starting in August of 2019.
Although I had been experiencing more delusional and bizarre thoughts, I was still able to fly under the radar and appear normal. I had started getting some paranoia and feelings that I was perceiving more than “normal” reality, which I had attributed to “obtaining special knowledge”. There were some weird experiences that I had had during this time that would normally be perceived as just coincidences. I wouldn’t say that I believed that I could read people’s thoughts, but I had this sense that I could feel people’s energies. It is hard to describe and put into words, especially since it’s been over two years. Hopefully in the course of writing more blog posts, my memory will be more vivid and more easily recalled.
I don’t know how familiar people are with quantum mechanics, but one of the principles is the phenomenon of superposition. To explain it simply, it is an object existing in two states; Schrodinger’s cat is a great example. In this physicist’s hypothetical situation, he had a cat in a box with an atom that could decay and if it decayed, it would set off a vial of poison and kill the cat. In this scenario, the atom has a 50% chance to decay and a 50% chance not to. He postulated that before this box was opened and the experimenter could observe the cat, it existed in a state of being both dead and alive. It has only after the box was opened that this superposition would experience decoherence and the cat would either be dead or alive.
Although I had known about this, I had started delving deeper into QM around this time and compared my experience during a nitrous binge as being in a state of superposition. It seemed that once I had inhaled the first 50 or so canisters in a sitting, I had been in a state of being both dead and alive. I now believe that I came to this conclusion because 1) my reality and senses were so distorted and 2) I would do canisters one after another with little breath in between. So, by having very little intake of fresh air and instead cramming nitrous into my lungs, I thought that I was not quite alive although not quite dead. I couldn’t wrap my head around how it was possible to go a few hours with very little fresh air and not be dead.
I bring this up because it ties into a shift I worked that had an usual coincidence, which I had believed had a deeper meaning and significance. When I came into work, there was a patient who had and continued screaming at staff that we were all dead, when it was very obvious we weren’t. This was really eerie to me at this time, especially with other small quirks being experienced day to day.
I am going to end here and try to write more tomorrow. I am hoping to start remembering more specific examples of these weird coincidences and how I interpreted them to mean something profound. Also, I plan on my next post explaining my spiral into worsening mania and psychosis that carried into that September, especially during my house supervisor training. While I can look back at these memories and experiences with hindsight of being grounded in reality, I still wonder if there had been more going on behind the scenes that us humans cannot normally perceive.
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