During my parent's divorce, my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia to prove that she was not fit for custody*. From the age of 10 I've had this thing looming over my head. The realisation that one day I might also start hearing voices and, so to say: "go crazy". I'd convince myself it wouldn't happen, the way you have 1 in 6 people over 80 suffer with Alzheimer's** yet you still try to believe it won't be you.

I would sometimes get stuck in logical fallacies. Like: how do I know I won't one day wake up and this is all a simulation, or, how do I know I haven't taken a drug that makes me forget I've taken the drug and eventually I'll find my way back to it again, only to forget I've taken it once more.

On drugs, that's where everything all fell apart for me. Whilst at university, I slowly came to the idea that drugs were okay. I started off smoking pot with a school friend who went the same university. I barely felt anything, until one day, during the pandemic, I met up for the third or fourth time with a girl I was seeing to smoke weed. This time the weed really really hit. I thought I'd gone crazy and nothing looked real. Despite this traumatic experience, I decided to redo it the next day with people I trusted more. I wanted to prove to myself I could handle it. Then within a few months, I'd taken acid a couple times.

At the same time, I'd gotten back into uploading to an old YouTube channel, and then fell off again. It only lasted a few months. I had an idea to come back with that was about proof that religion couldn't be true. It was about evolution. I wondered, if we had evolved and there had been numerous mass extinctions, could the world really have revolved around us. Humans being the most important thing? Could no life reach enlightenment before the civilised human came about? It didn't make sense, so to me, that was definite proof there was no God nor reason for our existence. I felt smart, though I never got round to writing my script.

One day, I smoked weed with some friends I wasn't too comfortable with me. And for a moment, the thought caught me, but in another way, did life have no point? Why am I here? What's the point? Life is pointless. Life is pointless. I felt I'd ruined my brain and this was it. The next day, I was okay. But I kept getting high and the thoughts would take over, until they became my normal thoughts. And soon I got used to getting high, it felt like just a different version of me. It became an irony, getting high was the only way to feel free, but it was also where I panicked the most.

I became very closed off, I came to realise a lot about myself, my mistakes, my insecurities, my vices. I couldn't handle it. Soon, I was convinced I wasn't me, I was someone else who had replaced the old me, forced to carry on the life and bad habits of whoever it was that was there before. I knew this couldn't make sense, but still I believed it. I realised I may have become schizophrenic, but also I could function so it didn't make sense.

*Of course, there was evidence far before this. So don't get too political about this.

**Source: Gemini AI search accessed 19:42 2/12/2024