I’m working on a project on delusions, for a class I’m taking. For this class we have to assess the delusional state of a person, explain their symptoms and the source of the disorder.
It brings me to something close to my heart but that is hard to talk about. I’ve had delusions, and hallucinations, and further they happened while I was absolutely sober. There was no warning, just bang and the reality I knew was gone and I was talking to people that didn’t exist.
It occurs to me that this may all be a delusion, every moment from 2010 to present. Supposing there was some severe stressor; both parents dying violently, for example. Someone sick enough could conjure up an entirely different delusional narrative, and present it to themselves as fact. It might be so.
I have no evidence for this little hypothesis, but that makes it no less troubling. When I was delusional before I wasn’t very realistic about the difference between reality and un-reality.
I might imagine those parents still alive, and any help they provide would be entirely a construct of my mind, I might be effectively gaslighting myself. For a reality so horrible terrifies me to the core, more even than the possibility that it may be false. I could be sitting in an empty house, imagining the woman that loves me in the next room. I may have dreamed up people to like me, all to satisfy my own needs, to make myself hold on and not kill myself.
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No way of knowing is there? This radical idea is mad in itself, and presenting to my potential delusions that I doubt their reality isn’t going to end well for me if they are real. I have to wait for evidence, for things that present as outlandish or foolish.
It’s a tough project, tougher than my project on suicide actually, if only because I have so many reasons to deny reality at the moment. I want to be connected, and such desire might motivate me to pretend. I’m not laughing as much as I was before, the bounce gone from my step as I determinedly march through my routine. The pain is there, denied, hidden, held back by years of careful planning.
Worse than all this, what if that dam breaks?
I cannot think of how I might cope, and thus I bolster the barrier and push through to the next moment.
2 comments
Well, I am real as far as I can tell. If you are living in a delusion then it is likely that I am too. So on the bright side even if none of this is real you aren’t delusional and alone. Technically everyone thinks and looks at things differently, so how can we know what is the true reality. Life to me isn’t worth living, but to the person in front of me it’s worth more than anything. Being delusional isn’t bad. If it’s keeping you together then be delusional. That’s what I do.
I was sat in the garden when I had an hallucination of a guy abusing my computer. When I went indoors he was skinning up on the screen of my brand new tablet that had come in the post that day. I and my son get these a lot but I can’t say they are wrong… Just one reality removed??? Stay safe and strong x