Friday, September 15, 2000
It is very often my suspicion, but nearly never my conviction, that much or all of my thoughts and experiences that my family members, upon whom I depend for most of my "reality checking" services, almost always judge as being generated by my paranoid tendencies, were real in most ways. (This of course is not very surprising since at times I am delusional.) I often suspect that my family, friends, and neighbors and my many current and past therapists and psychiatrists have over the years deceived me about the genuine nature of what is discounted as paranoia. Perhaps, I think, these things happen almost as they appear to me, only I slightly misinterpret them, mostly because I cannot pin the precisely right motivations on the people who laugh at and gossip about me and my misfortunes. I ask, "What did I do to deserve this?" and "Why do they hate me?"
My inability to answer these two questions could be the result of the people I trust constantly feeding me lies. They know what is really going on, but they won’t tell me. I can’t quite figure out why, and. it is a little like what happens in the Jim Carrey movie "The Truman Show." (However, these ideas actually predate that movie.) Everything is partly staged, at least to the extent that wherever I go in my hometown of Cleveland--I don’t go to too many different places and mostly go to the same places over and over again--there is someone who knows who I am. They know about my "schizophrenia" and tell others about the big joke that is being played on me.
Even I find it hard to believe that something like this could really be maintained for so many years, but I keep considering it. I can’t help myself; It’s just part of my insanity (or is it?).
I often think that perhaps I look and behave so bizarrely that even strangers quickly sense that there is something very wrong with me. "That boy ain’t right." When I see some people with mental illnesses out in public, it is very easy for me to determine that there is something wrong with them, although others with mental illnesses blend in very well. I don’t really have much confidence that I fit into the latter group, especially when the same people have observed me repeatedly over an extended period of time in many settings, such as at the college I attended for about six years on and off. Even if I don’t know them, they probably know me. After all, I dress somewhat unusually. I use a disability bus fare discount ID card while I am clearly not blind, in a wheelchair, or using a cane. I don’t work. My hair looks unusual. I look poor. People know who the crazies are--pretty much.
I often think that perhaps the joke being played on me is a form of torture. Perhaps I am being punished for something I am or did. My paranoia tells me that many people don’t like me, so it seems somewhat reasonable. I can come up with many reasons that this would be so. From racism to dislike of people on welfare, from my being a selfish jerk to my arrogance, the options are bountiful. Perhaps my stepsisters or my stepbrother have spread rumors about me. Perhaps my stepfather has talked to my neighbors and let them in on the deception. I really don’t know who it could have been, but these possibilities are also manifold.
These types of thoughts come to me at least a couple of times almost every single day, since my paranoia always seems to be in a rut. Usually I easily recognize this is all a conspiracy theory, but I can’t put it behind me for long.
|THE END|
PS: It turned out all these things I talked about above are what was really going on. I’m not really crazy, but they keep saying I am and drugging me. Now that I no longer voluntarily (even gratefully) take the meds, they have me locked up and force-drugged, including long-lasting injections. So it goes...