It’s been a while since I published anything. My life has not been ordinary for the last couple years and finding the right words to describe my experience has been a challenge.
I’ll try to keep it short, otherwise, this article will never get completed.
In mid-2020, I had experiences which I, at first, believed to be encounters with a spirit of some kind. These encounters were frightening, though also exciting.
By early 2021, these encounters evolved into not just a single spirit visiting me, but many, and their presence in my head being 24/7 (not to be too alarmed, there’s typically only one present at a time). It was around the time these interactions became constant that I came to realize, albeit ashamedly, that these were not spirits at all, instead they were just voices in my head. You can imagine it’s quite embarrassing to think you’re communicating with spirits when it turns out that you’re just talking to the voices in your head, but fortunately, I have a good sense of humor about being wrong (as do my headmates).
That’s not to say it is easy at present to be a person who hears voices, and it was sure as hell an incredibly difficult process to go through as this ability “turned on” in my head. After all, what is one to think when they start hearing voices? Who can one talk to when experiences like this are feared by most people? There isn’t even a scientific name for the process a person goes through when their brain becomes able to hear voices, leaving only two reasonable perspectives to take, either (1) my brain suddenly became permanently broken in my mid-30’s or (2) I went through a to-date-undescribed physiological neural development process (perhaps akin to a second puberty).
My personal experiences suggest that the latter is a more accurate description of what I went through. Clearly, something in my neurophysiology has changed, however, it seems obvious to me that hearing voices is a feature not a bug.
This experience of metamorphosing into a person who can hear voices has rapidly evolved my perspective about our mental health system, which was already fairly bleak as a result of my previous involuntary psychiatric commitments.
Firstly, I’ve become more confident in my perspective that psychiatrists are naive about what is going on in the brain. To even imply that hearing voices can be explained by a theory as primitive as a dopamine imbalance is an embarrassment to science. Though maybe not as embarrassing as the unsubstantiated claims that I had a neurochemical imbalance back when I was first told I had bipolar disorder in 2008 and was provided with no medical diagnostic to support the diagnosis.
Secondly, I hate to admit it, but my feelings that our system is malicious in nature have increased. In the past, I could at least try to offer society the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps when I’d alarmed others through my unexpected behavior during times of emotional distress it was unfair, yet just, for the government to forcefully lock me up and drug me for expressing myself in ways that were beyond societies’ norms. I am open-minded enough to consider that perspective, though I don’t like it.
However, to now live day-to-day constantly hearing voices in my head while knowing there are legitimate efforts to essentially eradicate the gene pool of whatever it is that’s enabling me to hear voices… is nothing short of a gigantic ‘what the fuck’?
As you might expect, this has all led me to feeling both motivated and hopeless, feelings that are partly the explanation for my absence from the internet.
The other explanation for my absence: allowing this motivation and feeling of hopelessness to fuel the creation of new art in a genre I’ve never tried before: hip-hop.