I’m anxious to even call it a mental illness because everyone is saying they have something and everyone is so quick to shoot down anyone that says they have anything. Anyways, this is inside my thought process and possible reasons why I am they way I am. I’m doing this so I can have some insight towards characteristics of myself I normally try and ignore, and I’m doing this to try and have a deeper understanding of myself. 

So I’ll start by saying my brain is a bit scattered, I had a car accident several years ago and suffered brain damage from it. On top of that, I also suffered an addiction to hard drugs, which I think further affected my mental. About a year ago I was working an unhealthy and draining job. I found my mental well-being slipping to the point I felt as if I would entirely lose control of myself. One time I was at work and I was just talking to somebody and then my memory cut out, next thing you know I snap to, and I have a knife pointed directly to my forearm. I would be driving home and I would feel like I absolutely had to drive off the road, there was a voice in my head telling me that I had to do it, so I’d always call somebody to help me feel safe and awake and In control. I felt as if I never knew when it would come over me, and I would have a full blown panic attack and feel like I was going to snap and kill myself. I got so worried with it, I finally went to see a doctor. He diagnosed me with schizophrenia, and put me on meds for that and bipolar, although he said he wasn’t sure what was exactly “the matter with me”. Mine goes a step further I feel like though, and it plays together with my brain damage and shortened memory. I have an EXTREMELY difficult time differentiating reality from my own imagination. Anytime I go into something, my own head sort of plays out the whole situation before I even enter it. So I’ll have about 3 different scenarios in my head, but where I always get thrown off is remembering what scenario actually happened, I can’t even decipher whether I’m actually doing or have done something, or if I just thought I did. It leads to a lot of feelings of insanity, invalidation towards my own thoughts and feelings, as I’m never sure I’m in the right or wrong. Sometimes I’ll feel like I’m having moments of clarity, where I feel like the world is dim, and I’ll look around and everything will literally brighten up around me, and I’ll come to some sudden realization I’ve always been doing everything all wrong. I have voices in my head, and it’s weird because whenever I say schizophrenia people always ask me “well do you hear voices”, and I don’t really, it feels more like thoughts, but the thoughts aren’t my own thoughts, they’re always people speaking to me, I can tell because of how they’re worded, they’ll say things to me like “you should do this” versus my own thoughts are more of “I want to do this”. They know all my insecurities and things that make me hate myself no matter how minuscule they are, they tell me everyone realizes my flaws and nobody really likes me, basically every horrible scenario I can imagine on my own, it feels like somebody else is imagining for me, then forcing it to me, telling me it’s reality over and over and over to the point I don’t really know whether it actually is or not. I’ve been struggling lately, it’s hard not knowing what’s real and what isn’t real, it makes you wonder why you’re even doing anything if you won’t remember what it is in a week.

As of right now, I’ve been completely off my medications for about 9 months now, my doctor took me off all my pills cold turkey when I told him about my drug addiction. I don’t expect reddit to have a bunch of doctors to tell me what’s wrong with me, but any insight or help is more than appreciated, support is always appreciated, or even just acknowledgement. Regardless, thanks for reading and have a good day.