Originally posted by stare rape
It can't be the official thread if it's misspelled in the thread title
But really, I know exactly how you feel. Really. I spent almost four years of my life hiding from people I thought were after me for things I'd posted online and done IRL while amassing an arsenal of weapons, ammo, medications, and survival gear. I had over $10,000 worth of it at one point. I spent a shitload of money on firearm training, had a gun club membership, and went to the range for hours three times a week.
Sometime in 2015, I said "fuck it. If there really is someone after me, let them come after me. We all die eventually anyway."
And from then on I was seemingly able to look at my condition from an objective point of view and realize that I was being ridiculous. Almost all of the things I had taken as "signs" were nothing more than coincidence, or people going about their business who happened to see me and look my way. Sometimes it was a hallucination, but now, somehow, I could tell the difference. Once in a while, i still find myself caught up in some delusion that somebody is after me, but I "snap out of it" much faster than I used to. It was like a switch had been flipped.
I thought it was the drugs at first, so I stopped taking them. I stayed mostly clean for three years, only taking Crouton and the occasional benzedrex. It's only recently that I've started on that shit again. Didn't seem to make much difference. Though the intensity of the paranoia was diminished, it was still there.
In July 2015, after getting extremely fucked up and telling everyone that was staying with me at the time that I was going to kill myself, I had some sort of "moment of clarity" and had myself committed (although they wrote "involuntary" on the paperwork)
I was diagnosed with depressive psychosis, but the "medicine" they gave me for it made it twice as bad, and I could barely get out of bed most days because it sapped every bit of motivation out of me while making me shake like a Parkinson's patient if I tried to sit still, something that still hasn't completely gone away. I tried to stop taking it but it resulted in a terrifying psychosis that was far worse than the original symptoms and ended up committed again, but I convinced them that it was the medication that had done it, and they tapered me off of it.
Then I find out schizophrenia (and mental illness in general) has a much higher rate of incidence among Native Americans than the general American population.
I've mostly accepted the fact that I've got some mental illness somewhere between OCD and schizophrenia, and that I will most likely be unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality 20-30 years from now. Just look at a certain other poster here.
All that said, I still believe that there was a point in time that I was being watched, but I was involved in medium-level criminal activities at that point, it was probably just people making sure I was doing what I said I was going to do.
As of now, most of the weapons and such have been sold or confiscated, but I still have a lot of the survival gear, and feel like I could hold my own for quite a while if some sort of disaster or apocalypse were to happen.
I'm still very paranoid, and won't let anyone get close to me, but it's still much better than it used to be. I think I've hit the "ceiling of improvement" for my current situation and will have to change it to improve further.
I know I'm going to regret posting this, but there it is
TL;DR: I'm slowly losing my mind but at least I'm aware of it
That sounds a lot like what I have gone through
A few years ago, through meditation using marijuana and VR, I began to hack reality and was able to pull unlimited knowledge from some unknown source, maybe the akashic records.
I started thinking to myself, hey what if I use this ability to take down the government, what if I go even further and find a way to destroy this reality ... then I thought surely there would be some organism that oversees all the ongoing processes within this reality, it would notice me and try to stop me ... then I got to thinking maybe the government would tyr to stop me ... then I started thinking maybe it was their doing all along.
I would hear voices occasionally, and grow really paranoid thinking certain happenings were proof that they were on to me, sending agents out to monitor and fuck with me to try and demoralize me so I couldn't take them down.
I really honestly don't think I'm schizophrenic, I think I was just having a psychotic period from nonstop marijuana use for years, losing my grandparents and going from being a hikikomori since the age of 11 or 12 to starting to go outside and be around the fleshnet and humans so I'm not used to the variables that come with the chaotic outdoors, I'm used to everything being aspeptic and calculated, coming from living my entire life on the computer.
