Spider

Touching from a distance and continuing a raft of posts that amount to, “Y’know, I feel a bit” *wiggles hand*.

NB: My hands are not this actual size, however, they are not far off.

About 55% of my posts here are private drafts not available for you to read. This post should probably be one of those consigned to the memory hole. However.

I think the recent changes in medication are playing with my mind somewhat. My antipsychotic was recently lowered and Lamictal, it seems, is finally kicking into my system.

There is a huge spider in here. At least, I think there is. This is one of those situations were I can honestly not tell if it is real or if it is isn’t. I am having this problem a lot at the moment.

My rational enclave is piping up to say that the spider is too big to be real, but how should I know? I first saw it yesterday, if “it” exists at all. It could be a trick of the eye, or something, not a hallucination as such, but it is one of these situations that I have felt exist like sponges in pockets.

It’s gone, for now, real or not. Either way, I’m sitting here with my legs tucked underneath me in case it is real and it decides it wants to live in my pants.

I have been quite fractured recently and none of my thoughts or sensations are reliable, I don’t know what’s what. The world is muffled, and it could very much be real, or in my head, and there is no difference. If I am aware, then, it cannot be happening. If you’re aware that you’re beginning to have trouble separating real things and unreal things, then is that enough? I feel so strange. I am having an awful lot of brain noise right now too. It’s making it very hard to think straight. I don’t think or suspect that I’m drifting into psychotic weirdness, if I thought or suspected it, it pretty much negates it. I just don’t think that my brain is working properly right now. I tried to explain it to Rob last night, but I couldn’t, so I just starting singing, “Ordinary World” in a faux-dramatic way to make him laugh.

Spiders are second on my list of horrors, with cockroaches being my first. These creatures always seem to be appear before a breakdown; two days before I was hospitalised, I woke up with a massive, black, very real cockroach sitting on my face. I was certain it was real because I crushed it with the thickest book I had to hand. A few years earlier, the yellow minutes before the madness were spent shaking spiders off my arms. And that awful feeling of insects under the skin.

The delusional beliefs I have held were always either maddening ruin or merry fortune, never something lovingly inbetween. I never once held the belief that I was a twenty five year old librarian who really enjoyed her work. I was spinning in a dying star at the ends of the universe, or I was bounding around thinking that I was famous, which was blatantly untrue has has earned me bemused sideways glances for life. And throwing yourself into strange gardens in terror because you think you’re being stalked by a lion, well. Refusing to eat because it’s been poisoned. Joyous. It is weird. No doubt about it. It’s weird behaviour. I only remember odds and sods of it all, though, just long, lost months. Mania and depression being what they are, they tend to wipe your skull (hence my tendency to repeat things on this blog). Which in some ways is good.

Why does the mind vengefully lead us down the worst paths? Most of the, certainly visual, hallucinations I’ve had have been terrifying. I’ve watched the scenes around me collapse into maggots, and pulled parts of my own rotting face off, bathed in washes of blood. Looking back on all those beliefs and experiences, I wonder how I didn’t understand that they were not real, and then I sit here today and think, “Oh”. It is easy to not understand. I remember putting Rob’s amps in front of the door so people couldn’t get in at me. For some reason that memory makes me smile.

I wish, in the past, that hallucinations had led me to less frightening things; like seeing a load of really interested and happy puppies in my room, or waking up to find three mewling kittens on my bed, or hearing a voice telling me that I was really nice, and that I smelled lovely today.

I did once think that this guy:

Fred, from the Homepride adverts, was floating around the room waving at me. He does look fairly sinister there, admittedly. The woman in the bed is transfixed by terror.

I don’t know. Life feels like an anesthetic dream right now. I’m very confused at the moment. I feel so bizarre. My mood is odd and I feel odd. I think I might be on the wrong dose of something. It probably is the medication making me feel this way. It can’t be a coincidence that I begin to feel super-weird when my medication has been jipped around. I know some of you have taken Lamictal. I am on 100mg now and think it’s finally in my system. Did it have any weird effects you on? If you ever lowered the dose of your antipsychotic (as recently has been done for me) did you go odd?

I think the spider is real.  It is a little silly, though, that I have to question my own perceptions.

Still curled up. Distraction is good. I managed to get to the dentist today. I have to get six fillings. I brush my teeth every day and rarely get sugar so this, I guess, is the bed I have to lie in. The fillings in the back will be the cheap NHS black ones because I can’t afford anything else, so I will look like I’m chewing on licorice constantly.