Ive been thinking about my mental health history lately, which is something i havent really ever done. I always assumed mental health is something that can be ignored as long as you live in a physically healthy way, and pay attention to the present moment. This may have been horribly wrong.
I spent almost all of my teenage years hallucinating or detaching from reality in some other way. I hated school so i figured out a way to trigger hypnopompic hallucinations intentionally. I would stay up until about 2 am every night and forced myself to get out of bed at 7 by connecting my phone to a guitar amp across the room at full gain, so that i was jolted awake all at once. This caused me to continue hallucinating for a couple hours after waking up every morning. I would skip classes at school to take walks in the woods while listening to music and imagining that i was in a candyland where real life didnt exist. Then i would come home and either make music or play video games. Sometimes i just wouldnt sleep and would stay up making music until morning. I also kept a dream journal so that i could have very wild dreams, which i almost worshipped and thought they were transmissions from ancient mesopotamian deities. This was a daily routine that i rarely broke out of.
I eventually got out of it when i was 19 with the help of some friends who i got much closer with, but i very quickly got wrapped up in a shared delusion with one of my closest friends, who became almost like a brother. We joined the russian orthodox church together and would spend hours ever day looking at things like music and finding the hidden symbolism that shows why it’s demonic and evil. We would interpret current events through this lens, and pretty much everything, right down to our personal lives.
This way of thinking became incredibly oppressive on me and after three or four psychotic episodes i broke out of the church as a whole. This happened last year when i was 23 years old, and i was living at a farm out in the middle of nowhere at the time, where i had to do livestock work every day, multiple times a day, without any days off.
I developed a serious drinking problem after one of my old friends killed himself last year and had to go through withdrawal in the spring. After that i got tired of the oppressive lifestyle i was living at the farm and moved to the city as fast as i could. Ive been trying to integrate into the social city life and act as “normal” as i can but obviously i failed and realized that i still have a lot to work on.
The point of this rant is that i think having such a bizarre and extreme lifestyle during my developing years may have had a disastrous effect on my psyche, and this could be something that ill have to deal with for a very long time, maybe forever. I hope not, but when i was young i never questioned it. I rejected all of my family members and the authority figures who were telling me to be more normal and thought i knew best.