Guest post by Jennifer

“It’s been a long trip with little days in it, and no new places” ~Anne Sexton

It started when I thought I had been molested and blocked out the memories. This made sense when I read books on the subject, and talked to a therapist or two. It made so much sense, I had things I thought were “repressed memories” and I became completely sure that they were real. It made so much sense, I destroyed some familial relationships that have never been repaired completely since.

The first time I hallucinated, I thought there was a bat flying around my bedroom. Another night, a giant frog was on me.

The CIA didn’t start to follow me until a few years later. I thought I was followed by the mafia, the Masons, the CIA, the FBA, the NSA, and Satanic cults, and became convinced I had a connection to all these groups.

I saw the same color, everywhere I looked, some days. I’d see red-white-and-blue on everything from someone’s clothing to the paint on a wall. Everything. And I didn’t know I was hallucinating at all.

I heard the voices first as if they were from people behind a wall. I thought I was overhearing people in another apartment or room. Then I heard people tell me how I was going to die. All the time, every day, people were telling me I was going to die. They were telling me how horrible I was, how much they hated me, that I was worthless, and that I should be dead.

I came to believe on alternating days that I was Anne Frank, Jesus, and L. Ron Hubbard. During one hospital trip, there were three of us who believed we were God. “Hi, I’m God,” one said to me. And I thought, “What?? She is obviously confused,” as I was Jesus that day.

I thought Anderson Cooper was my husband and that we were part of the “Illuminati”, I thought that he talked to me directly when he spoke on TV. I heard him. I watched him. Everything was directed directly at me. I thought the same thing about Ani Difranco’s music. It gave me messages.

One time I went to New York City because song lyrics and voices told me to. I didn’t know anyone there. When I got there, the world was ending. People were being shipped off in trains to concentration camps because the Holocaust was still occurring. I took a bottle of pills in a hotel room and cut my leg open with a piece of glass, trying to get the implant out – you know, the one the CIA put there. I woke up in some hospital in New Jersey. They wanted to send me to the state hospital. My family saved me from that fate.

I’m better now. I work part time. I live alone, with my cat, and I have lived in the same spot for three years, which is a rare thing for me. I take my meds, every day, without fail. I get injections of an antipsychotic every other week, without fail.

But I still hear voices. You wouldn’t know it if you met me. You can’t always see psychosis.