Originaly posted May 7, 2021 on my insta stories.
I started to write this thing on May 2020, posted it on May 2021 and now I'm reposting it on May 2022 xD I've also expanded some answers!
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I get a lot of questions about this so I started answering this old prompt last year in May...and finished a few days ago aksjsjs this stuff is really hard to put into words. But I finally did it! Keep in mind that schizophrenia manifests in many different ways, not everyone has the same symptoms and everyone is affected differently by them. This is just my own experience.
(Schizophrenia prompt created by sweetschizo on tumblr.)
1- Introduction.
The first psychotic episode I remember happened when I was four. I was overwhelmed with dread and sensed people inside the walls watching me and following me around the house. When I couldn't take it any more I ran to my mother's room crying for help, but she got mad and locked me out. I kept screaming and banging on the door as the whispers of the people undulated in my ears and the walls changed shapes and melted around me. I gave up and laid on the floor against it, certain that my heart would give out at any moment. Which is pretty much how it would go from then on. I got so used to sleeping on the floor that I still do it to this day xd
I’d had hallucinations and delusions before but that was my first full-blown psychotic episode. They all start with intense dread and build up for days or weeks until I get into a state of extreme stress overload. I wake up with my thoughts in a frenzy and the feeling that some calamity is approaching. I'm extremely terrified and agitated for a few days. I’ll have waves of panic attacks one after the other. My delusions intensify. I stop sleeping. It builds up until I'm an uncontrollable wreck of hyper-alertness and paranoia. Then the final hours (the acute phase) start. It’s impossible to describe. All your symptoms are at their worst, you’re completely consumed by them.
They tend to increase/worsen when I’m stressed but generally they happen at any time. I’m rarely able to tell I’m having one until after it’s over, no matter how bizarre or illogical it gets. After I did my Doppio costest I disappeared for a while because I was convinced that someone was trying to sneak into my room. I made my mother check the windows and the balcony multiple times, but it just got worse. They managed to get in. I couldn’t sleep with the intruder moving around in my room, and I couldn’t find where they were hiding, their footsteps always seemed to be right next to me. The cat and mouse game continued until the last night. I overturned everything trying to get the intruder to come out, they responded by starting to knock all my things my over. I could hear them shatter and break even though I couldn’t see anything hit the ground.
The sounds kept escalating until they were full-on explosions going off in my room. I forgot the intruder and ran around frantically, trying not to get hit. I ended up taking cover under my desk for the remaining hours, unable to process anything other than I was in danger. As soon as it ended I felt the post-psychosis shame. Usually afterwards I realize how absurd and insane everything that just happened was and feel embarrassed af.
One of my biggest whiplash moments after coming out of an episode was some time around third grade. At school I started thinking that everyone wasn’t real, the town wasn’t real either. They were illusions I was creating because the world was slowly leaving existence. Everything became an illusion until only my house was left. Then one night blackness started absorbing the house. I watched from the stairs as the first floor was eaten away, completely frozen in horror. When I could finally move I tried to call my mother but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't make a sound. The blackness took the stairs too and I ran upstairs, moving from place to place until my room had also been taken. I ended up trapped in my bathroom, weeping as I waited to be erased too. When the sun came out I was starting to snap out of it, but I was still hesitant to open the door for a while because I thought my bathroom was drifting through reality...until I got called down for breakfast. I went from living through the end of the world to peacefully eating bolitas de yuca with my mom. Even though I was almost completely detached from reality those days I was really confused and knew what had happened was impossible. (That rare moment of clarity didn’t last though, shortly afterwards I started to believe the entire thing had been real and I’d ended up in a parallel world. It was the start of many multiverse delusions).
Outside of episodes my symptoms are generally pretty manageable though, I’ve had them for my whole life so I’m used to it.
