Paranoia & Trust

The wonderful thing about going insane is that you don’t know you’re going insane.

What really sucks is going sane again because it starts as these brief flashes of sanity where you start to question the reality of a situation – imagine worrying that you might not only be wrong about something, but that something you know as a fact might be completely untrue.

After being admitted to the psych ward I wondered if I was going crazy, when actually I had only just begun to realise how crazy I really was.

I was already intensely paranoid of those around me, but following the realisation that I might have been incorrect about reality I started to become mistrustful of myself and wonder what was really real.

Most of my early time in the ward I don’t remember clearly because of the high levels of panic I felt, both because of my psychosis and also from realising things I strongly believed in might not actually be real. (Turns out continuous panic fucks with your memory.)

I had no line drawn between reality and insanity, and having lived with such intense beliefs meant that once I started to question those, I started to question everything.

What was real and what wasn’t? I had no idea where to start.

I realised that even though I had people in my life who I trusted to protect me and do the right thing for me, trust of another person relies on the confirmation of trust in order to continue. It takes time to build a trusting relationship, time and proof of trustworthiness.

So even though I trusted those around me in hospital to a degree (ie I knew the doctors would help me) I was waiting for confirmation of my trust in them knowing what was best. I needed someone I trusted to tell me everything was going to be ok, that I was going to be ok, but nobody could tell me that because nobody knew if I would be.

I needed to get better in order to fully trust them because that would mean I was correct in trusting them to get me better.

However in order to get better I needed to discern what was real and what was not.

I needed someone (or something) to trust.

I am not a religious person, but it was around this point that I really began to empathise with religion. How nice it must be to have unwavering belief in something.

I learned that despite hearing things or being told things, ultimately the only person we can really definitively trust is ourselves. Being told the sky is blue may be a statement we agree with, but still does not compare with KNOWING the sky is blue ourselves. And how do we know things? From our own observation of reality.

Shit. How could I really ever know anything when I had no concrete points to base my knowledge off? Anything could be real.

And if anything could be real, any action that I took could be the first step toward saving myself. Or it could be the first step toward failure.