Back when I was unswervingly convinced of my delusional past I talked a lot about where and what I’d been. Things like having been kidnapped and hopping a freighter to Libya and going on tour at age 13 with a then aspiring indie rock musician. I found that while not everyone believed ALL of it most of the people I met believed me and enjoyed listening to my stories.
Later once I’d come to accept that these things were delusion I had to tell these people that, well none of it was true. When I completed my treatment at my dual diagnosis program my old friend DVS said as we gathered to wish me well that when he first met me he thought I was the most interesting person who’d lived the most interesting life he’d ever heard. But then one day I told him that none of this stuff was true and he was honestly a little disappointed but understood as he suffered a mental illness himself. He told me that despite my revelation that most of my stories were of things that never happened he still found me to be an interesting person who had lived an interesting life.
I mixed them up with science fiction and religious myth. Electromagnetic field with the brain. Occult power with the heart.
In fact, I found myself started to talk about unusual belief.
None of them know of my delusions.
I can watch a science fiction movie, thus watch a movie which is not about real or true events.
But that does not mean that the movie is simply the result of a delusion or an hallucination. The movie truly was created, and is not just created by our minds. Thus if visions or voices were projected into my mind from a second source, I would not instantly conclude that my mind alone was behind it all.
Back when I was kept awake for 2 weeks, I could not think clearly at all, and my thoughts were almost no thoughts at all and had become just weak whimpers. Yet at the same time, the voices were just as strong as ever. Then came the meds. They slowly reduced the volume level of the voices down to zero, yet during this, the voices continued as though nothing had happened. Only the volume was being diminished. The creation of the voices, was totally unaffected by the meds.
In my misguided/ anti-med past… I did a lot of drugs… and do to that… lots of things happened that I don’t remember.
For a while people would walk up to me and tell me how surprised they are that I’m alive and did I remember that one party where I did this outrageous thing and then went streaking and then jumped off a roof and then did something else and something else… I have to tell them… I don’t even remember who YOU are much less doing all that.
Sometimes I think THEY are the ones with the delusions and they MUST have me mistaken for someone else.
There were a few simple ones that I think people believed. I had a feeling that a baby was on it’s way into my life… I’ve had this more then once. I do remember when I was a teen getting ready for the arrival of this child and the ladies at the baby store we’re telling me how to be a good dad.
The worst one was telling my toddler sister ALL the time how the kidnappers were after her. When she was little, I think she believed me because she would stick close. But as she grew up… she began asking WHY?
Why were the kidnappers after her… why were they only after her and not other kids… as she grew up… I think she quit believing me about how dangerous kidnappers are.
This is what took so long for my husband to realize I had a problem… He believed me. It’s so sad to think about. I thought I had the power to see fairies, talk to animals, and feel what was inside of foods nutritionally… He believed it and so did I.
Yes. I shared my werewolf delusions with two friends while I was young and they wholeheartedly believed me. But we were children. (First one I told I was in 3rd grade, 2nd I was in 6th grade)
Then when my delusions started to become paranoid years later in high school, I would share them with one of my friends who believed that I was Jesus’ sibling and that the devil was trying to kidnap me. She was very scared all the time. But finally she began to question it when things I said would happen didn’t happen and when she approached me on it I crumbled and was very confused and didn’t understand why I hadn’t been kidnapped yet. I eventually lost her as a friend because she thought I had been playing a very cruel joke on her. It was very sad.
But I mean that whole experience made me open my eyes to my delusions, and realize my brain was making them up. So that was something important.
At the beginning of my mind slipping into illness, I believed my microwave oven was “bugged” because I believed my boss who was robbed at his house thought I was “in on it”. I had my girlfriend at the time believing it was “bugged” too temporarily until my delusions of grandeur kicked in and found out I was schizophrenic when I was hospitalized.
