Morning

It was so good to sleep in and not worry about construction. I slept a good solid 9 hours, and Random was still asleep for a while when I got up.

This might yet prove to be a creative time for me. Yesterday during lunch and dinner, I mapped out an idea to resurrect my old web site. I'm thinking of making it overtly autobiographical: taking select entries off of here; finishing some entries that I never finished (such as my series of entries about my hometown); possibly writing more content; adding pictures that I've scanned, but never used; and calling it "First Draft: A Life". It makes sense to me to have LJ be the place where I dump the good, bad, and ugly, and have another site for the stuff worth keeping. After I stop doing work around my condo to support the construction, I should have plenty of time.

I was thinking when the condo reconstruction work was announced that I sometimes like events like that because they shake your life up. They allow you to see alternatives to the way that you've been doing things. I've been having a tougher time with the mental health problems; they seem gratuitous to me.

And yet...I've told my friend in my department at work ("movie friend") about the problems, and received a very sympathetic and graceful response. We've had some conversations about it that have stumbled into the very genuine and very vulnerable. I keep forgetting that loss strips away the superfluous...but it does.

Psychosis (Part 2)

Read part 1

Then I started to quietly hear voices. One time, I was thinking a long soliloquy at the suddenly attractive colleague and at the end thought "good night", I heard "good night". (I never heard voices that seemed like they came from someplace else. What I experienced is technically called "thought insertion". That is, I heard others' voices in my mind as if I was indeed telepathic. In this description, sometimes I'll state that I "said" something, when I really mean that I thought something in response to a voice. If you had seen me in the middle of an intense conversation with a voice, you would have thought that I was really preoccupied with something, but that I otherwise seemed normal.) One time when when I was looking at the golden hills while driving, I heard a voice say "Beautiful".

Then my mind started repetitively thinking racial epithets, with no particular trigger. It appalled me, especially because I thought others could "hear" them. They also were extremely distracting, especially when I was trying to work. To me, it was clear that they were not "normal" (unlike the other symptoms), so I called Kaiser to make an appointment. The Kaiser site that is local to me was extemely short-staffed and was having lotteries for screening interviews, so I called their Santa Clara site, which was close to work.

I told them about the racial epithets, but not the telepathy, because I thought that I was genuinely telepathic, and telepathy isn't a part of the DSM manual (psych diagnostic manual). Both they and I thought that the racial epithets were OCD--not a bad guess if they were standalone symptoms. The way that the symptoms would work if they were OCD is that a racial epithet pops into a person's mind, and then the person tries hard to not to think it again, thereby reinforcing thinking it, and the cycle continues. They booked me to be screened for OCD and booked a medication consult. At the screening for OCD, the screener decided that I didn't have OCD, but had generalized anxiety, so he booked me for an anxiety class.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, the voices hit really hard. One day, I had been startled to learn that the suddenly attractive colleague was married. (As I said, I really didn't know him very well.) The next morning, I was thinking about that when I heard a voice say that the suddenly attractive colleague had just quit because he was scared of working with me. I was thinking loudly, trying to reach the suddenly attractive colleague, telling him not to quit, that he was way more integral to the company than I was, and I wasn't really happy at the company anyway, so that I would quit. The rest of the day was a blur, and the voices continued the whole time. I'm not really sure what I did. I know that I picked up a package at the post office, ate something, and went into work, but by the time I got into work, it was dark. Somewhere along the line, I dimly remember a voice telling me to wait somewhere and that he'd come over there to talk to me, and I waited a while, and then realized that he wasn't going to show up. When I got there, I realized that the colleague had not quit, and said "They talked you out of it" (which they would). The voice said, "Yes". I told him not to worry, that I was going to quit.

A day or two later, I sent a note to my manager saying that I was going to look for another job after I finished the work for this release. I also said that I was going to work from home as much as possible "to avoid disturbing others". (I never knew what she made of that last part.)

Shortly thereafter, I contacted the friend with whom I'm now working, and asked him if the department that he worked in was still short-staffed. He talked to his manager, and in short order, I had a request for a resume and an interview.

To be continued....