What If I'm Actually No Good At It?

What if my writing sucks? What happens then?

Do I have an identity crisis?

What would be next for me?

I guess I would still be writing, even if it sucks.

It's kind of the medium of my soul. It'd be a damn shame if it sucked because there's so much fucking love put into it. If it sucks, then I guess I'm pretty helpless.

I suppose that I would be devastated. It feels like life has been like that. Just... Devastated. It's difficult not to feel preemptively rejected.

I have been so rejected since my episode. Isolated, really. Totally ostracized in several different capacities of my life. Writing felt like the only thing that stuck with me the whole time. No matter what, I could write.

How many times can you commit social suicide before it sticks?

I guess that I would know. Probably should, but I don't.

So let's rewind a bit.

Let's talk about the elephant in any room that I am ever in.

Let's talk about the episode.

Let's talk about psychosis.

Let's talk about what was real and what wasn't.

I would like to start with something my psychiatrist told me. Psychosis can happen to anyone at any time. It's not always an indicator of overall mental health. I would like to add that western medicine is incredibly lacking in the psychiatric field of study-especially about psychosis and schizophrenia. Our culture around it is to shun and disregard. Everything that I know about psychosis, I had to go out of my way to find out. I have read about it academically. I have read others' experiences with it. We, as a society (and medically) are woefully unequipped to support people with these conditions.

It's ironic too because the most effective treatment for psychosis and post-psychosis recovery/depression is a good social support system.

The stigma is a total nonstarter. I encourage you to read this with an open mind.

Anyways, here we go.

It started with writing.

I got disillusioned that a song was about me and I wrote an actual poem for the first time in years. To my credit, this person in mind (and in the band that wrote the aforementioned song) did not treat me well. So it stood to reason that I was... the subject matter of an unironically dirty little secret diss track. This made sense to me because the other members of the band are in committed relationships. I couldn't see them writing such a song, so it made sense to me that this... former connection wrote this about me. So, I did the graceful thing. I wrote a poem about our connection and sent it to the band email. If he had written this song about me, then I refused to stay anonymous on his account. If his friend group knew that we were hooking up, it would’ve rocked his world. He was very good friends with my ex, who I had a very messy breakup with. The poem itself was actually very sweet and nostalgic. Both of these sentiments can be true. They definitely were for me. I missed this person as a friend and enjoyed their company platonically. That simply was not returned. He treated me like a body, despite saying otherwise. It took me a long time to get over that. We had been friends since high school and he was very special to me back then. In regards to our arrangement, he always told me that we were “friends first”. His behavior towards me, however, indicated otherwise. He was dismissive and detached.

I have also since realized that the first time that we “hooked up”… I was drunk. I was drunk and he drove me to a parking lot where he took advantage of me. By the time I sobered up a bit, I felt like I had to continue with him. Nobody knew where I was and I wasn’t sure where I was either. I felt pressured to continue because he alone dictated whether I made it home or not. It was scary.

I was going through a domestic violence case at the time. I was in nursing school. I did not have the emotional bandwidth to recognize what was happening to me. He told me that we were friends first and that he would keep me safe. I had other questionable encounters with him, but something in me told me to distance myself as far as I could away from him. So I did.

I repressed this and told myself that it was just… a situationship. It wasn’t. It started off as assault and I had a fawn response.

I wrote it out and got it out. It felt so good to write again. It felt like I had this hardened fucking mucus plug on my creative writing sinuses and it was finally cleared. I was really proud of that poem. It was gorgeous. It will only ever exist for its recipient. I have no record of it aside from a couple of heavily edited verses in my book. At the end of all of this, that was a gift. It is a gift. It just also happened to be karma as well.

I was so proud of that poem that I posted it to Reddit. People were starting to reply to my post as if it was written for them. I was already a little disillusioned at this point, but that tipped the scale a little closer to psychosis. Still not there, but very close.

I have since learned that subreddits like these are full of this kind of activity. It isn't exclusive to me, but it felt like it was during that time. It is a cesspool of longing people outwardly replying to posts as if they were written for specifically them. Someone had messaged my account pretending to be someone that I knew. They were very vague. I can recognize that now.

I thought that this person who messaged me was the same person that I had hooked up with years ago. It made sense to me that the recipient of that poem would be the same person reaching out to me. They said that they were in danger and needed my help because I am a nurse. I was starting to get sick, mentally, at this point so I was very impressionable. Everything felt like some kind of clue. It's difficult to describe what it's like, being that suspicious of every little thing.

This account gave me an address to go to. I saw that it was twenty minutes away in a location that made sense to me at the time. The person on the account said that they had to put their dogs up and that I could come in through the backyard. I sent them my location once I had arrived.

They write back that I am stupid and that I should be glad that I'm in Missouri because they had "hollow points trained on my ass".

That sent me into psychosis.

It made sense to me that everyone that has ever assaulted me or treated me like a body would be ganging up to hurt me. Several of these people are in the same social circles. I have known them to be incredibly cruel, especially to women. There are a few that I can pinpoint.

There's the one that let his brother molest me in my sleep. There's the one that discarded me after a miscarriage. Several of them even had a shared nude file that they would all contribute to.

I come from a community of people that are so absurdly abusive and sexist. I could recognize it as the hellhole that it is once I went away to college. These people are casually and prolifically violent against women.

It stood to reason, to me, that they would be ganging up to hurt me.

I found out that the group broke up because of a known instance of sexual assault. This triggered me.

I felt like I was being stalked and it spiraled out of control from there. I made posts on all of my social medias, exclaiming that this person (the presumed point of contact, the one that I thought wrote the song) is dangerous and had tried to hurt me. A few of his exes reached out to me and told me that he treated them badly as well.

So I went to the courthouse and tried to get a restraining order against him, monitoring these subreddits for potential threats and clues.

I felt that I was in danger. I felt that I had narrowly escaped something very sinister and that nobody was taking me seriously. I was taken to the hospital and hospitalized in a psychiatric unit shortly after I had tried to get that restraining order. I was so frustrated that nobody was listening to me. That nobody could see how scared I was. That I was in danger. I was discharged back out into the world without being talked to about my diagnosis: psychosis. Nobody told me that my "sleeping pills" were actually antipsychotics. Nobody explained the science of the condition to me. Everything that I know about it is because of my own academic reading.

I digress. I got discharged and this escalated exponentially. I plastered everything to all of my social medias. Everyone that I had ever met in any capacity saw my very obvious psychotic rambling and conspiracy theories. Fuck, surgeons that I worked with saw that. I still haven't recovered socially from that. None of my relationships were salvageable. Everything was completely burned to the ground. People were afraid of my instability now. They didn't want anything to do with me. Honestly? I didn’t blame them at the time.

I was acting batshit crazy because I was so scared of these men. I was so sure that they were going to kill me. I knew it in my bones. Being scared like that? For a fucking month straight?

It's not sustainable for the brain. It is akin to a brain injury due to the neurotoxicity that it causes. I violently shrugged off anyone who didn't take me seriously. I was offended that they didn't.

About 99% of what I "experienced" is not real. I recognize that now, over a year since my episode. I told you the tipping point for me, right?

I truly do believe that someone was intending to lure an impressionable person for some reason or another. They were sending me which routes to take. They expressed urgency that someone from my past needed my help. They alluded to a drug overdose.

It felt very practiced to me. It felt too specific to not have had the intention of luring someone over the internet. Since, I have learned a lot about the online human trafficking scene. There's a series called Undercover Underage that tries to catch these creeps with the help of law enforcement. These people really are everywhere and they know how to blend in to society. They know how not to get caught and they are very careful. In hindsight, if this was what was happening to me, then it makes sense why they wouldn't outright provide their identity. There was a sort of caginess in their interactions.

These predators are often on anonymous forums to find their victims. These victims are often children. The arrests that have been made were everyday members of the community. Police officers, teachers, etc. It really can be, and often is, anyone. There has even been an arrest near me for this reason because the police department caught him in a sting operation. Someone only a little bit older than me that I had went to high school with. He expressed that he wanted to be sexually involved with a minor and that he had been in the past as well. It’s Insane. It's everywhere.

The organization that created the series is called SOSA. The people that engage in this behavior are very difficult to prosecute. It requires elaborate operations that law enforcement are regularly ill-equipped for. It is becoming more prominent as we become more informed to this issue, but it is still lacking. When they finally get to the point of plausible arrest, it's when these perpetrators intend to meet with a minor. They find the most horrific devices in their vehicles. Ropes. Plastic bags. Zip ties. Guns. Knives.

How this isn't criteria for attempted murder is beyond me.

This shit really is everywhere. We aren't doing enough to combat it.

I mean, think about how deep-rooted the Epstein files are. There are sex trafficking rings everywhere and they are well-oiled machines. It is a billion-dollar industry that isn't exclusive to undeveloped countries. It is evolving every day and it is important that we, as a collective, stay informed and stay safe. During my travel contract on the coast, I met someone who has a sister that had nearly been trafficked. She had an online boyfriend that lured her somewhere and then she was found in a ditch, unconscious, a quarter of the way across the country.

This happens every day.

All of this to say, I think that someone had some kind of sinister intent towards me. If they prey for people to fool in these communities, then that is also very sinister. If they mentally torture people over the internet for their amusement, then I would think that to be sinister too.

Either way, something happened to me. Either way, I want to express the importance of internet safety because it is absolutely fucked out there. That's the only part of this that's real. The rest was full-blown psychosis. I thought that the neighbors were spying on me. I was convinced that Taylor Swift was going to rescue me from Kansas City. It was bad. I know that.

But, fuck, I was sick. I was triggered. That isn't me. It was just the perfect set of circumstances to trigger me in this way. I have CPTSD and I was very viscerally triggered. My amygdala took over the rest of my brain and thrust me into full-blown survival mode. Autonomic fight-or-flight. Someone that used me sexually triggered memories of people that have sexually abused me (or have been in complicit in doing so), and then that triggered the trauma of losing my mom.

My mom died very suddenly, traumatically, and suspiciously. Not having definite answers gutted me. It still does. It became abundantly clear to me that someone can die suspiciously and law enforcement can deny the family an autopsy and cremate her before the ink fucking dries. People can get away with shit so easily because law enforcement doesn't care. It made me scared that the same would happen to me. I feared for my safety a lot, especially in the beginning of my grieving process after she died. It's been years since then, but I still feel scared sometimes.

I had to feel that all over again, but worse.

My psychosis had my brain trying to force answers into my trauma. It escalated to me thinking that these men who assaulted me had killed my mom. I wanted justice for her and that manifested in my delusions. I felt that they had already wronged me once, but I would not let them kill me. My therapist described psychosis as trying to force puzzle pieces together. It's like making connections between things that don't even exist, but they could.

So I lost my entire support system over this. I lost what little family I had left. I was socially shunned. I was even kicked out of a wedding over it. I was consumed with shame. Like, this can't even be a private affair because everyone saw it. I don't have the luxury of explaining myself when the conclusions have already been drawn. Even now, what little I have left lives in the shadow of psychosis. It’s like I have to be handled with care. Like a child.

I've noticed that people don't take me seriously at all anymore. My successes are products of extreme mania. I must've been on drugs. I was dangerous.

Well, let me tell you something. I think that it speaks to my character that, when I thought that I was experiencing something dangerous, my immediate reaction was to protect others. I posted these things on my social media to protect myself and warn others. I was never a danger to anyone. Even when I was out of my mind, I was never dangerous. I made exclamations of extreme empathy towards these people, that they just needed help and were victims themselves. I wouldn't have ever harmed any of them at any point during my episode. I wasn't on drugs, either. I was extremely triggered and stressed and confused.

Coming down from psychosis, being twenty-four hours away from home on a travel contract, and being all alone made me want to die. I didn't know, at that time, what was happening to me chemically. Nobody ever took the time to explain psychosis at all, never mind the science of it. It's always been a buzz-word. "Psychopath." "Psychotic". Things people think about me now. I was experiencing one of the worst withdrawals possible for the human brain. My support system was obliterated. I was left to make sense of the wreckage on my own. My husband was the only one who stood by me faithfully throughout that period. He knew that I was scared. He knew that I was trying to protect people. He knew that I was sick, but that I'm still me.

Our love and relationship is sacred to me. He did not falter at any point to support me, even though it was difficult for him to see me so sick.

I digress. Everyone else is gone.

So, this is kind of life right now. I am just now getting comfortable with talking about my episode in this way. I hope that this makes a lick of sense to whoever reads this. Even if it turns out that this interaction was just two disillusioned people talking to each other, then that's fine too. At the very least, I am now able to educate people on the importance of internet safety as it relates to online human trafficking.

All of this is to say that I have had a very turbulent go of life. I have experienced a lot of trauma from the same friend groups/social circles. I have experienced so much violence at their hands. I watched them treat other women this way. I had an exacerbated trauma response because I thought that one of them wanted to hurt me again.

I refused to let that happen. I fought so hard to get out of that community. I never wanted to return to it, in any capacity, ever again.

It was awful to live a trauma-riddled life the first time. It was even worse to be experiencing it like it was happening all over again. It felt like they won. All of these horrible fucking men that would say "oh, she's crazy." I guess they are right. It feels like such an unjust thing, you know? In my episode, I let all the grievances out. The shared nude file. The rape in the hospital. The time he choked me against his car. The utter inhumane treatment of women as a whole. None of that was met with much credibility due to the juxtaposition to psychosis. Those things were real and I had to relive being afraid of them all over again. God, it was fucking awful.

Yet, they will get the last laugh.

They're right. I am crazy. I did temporarily, for all intents and purposes, lose my mind. I guess that would make me crazy.

They will never receive justice for what they've done, still, and that's very upsetting.

It's so crazy to me that someone can assault your significant other and you can still choose to protect them. The band never said why they were breaking up. Turns out, their drummer is a total creep and they felt that it was unnecessary to tell anyone about it. Protecting this person and their behavior is inexcusable to me.

That pretty much sums up my hometown though. If it were a woman that had done this, fuck, they would be up in arms. Instead, it's a man who gets to hide behind a self-diagnosed sex addiction. The problem isn't being addicted to sex.

The problem is having so little regard for women as people, as friends, that you think it's okay to assault someone when they are vulnerable. The problem is a chronic history of treating women like shit.

I mean, think about it. He clearly felt comfortable doing that to someone that he knows. Who's to say that he hasn't done this before? Who's to say that he won't do it again?

Now, he gets the opportunity to. He gets a slap on the wrist and an excuse to feign the victim.

So, it would seem, poetry is my only platonic friend. It allowed me to have an outlet to all of that trauma. I could express it whenever and however I wanted to. All of this to say... It would be a damn shame if I was bad at it. Every poem is worth its weight in heartache. In trauma. In love.

It feels good to talk candidly about my episode. I spent hours crafting this website and, if you're gonna hang, then you're gonna hang. Get to know the inside of my head, sure, but I'm going to show you my soul.

This blog is about to be pumped choc fucking full of bullshit.

I can't wait lol