I went through TWO bouts of psychosis in 2026. I want to document
some of the outrageous theories and assumptions my mind
was spinning up during those times.
Some are funny, some are scary, but my brain believed
whole-heartedly all of them to be true (at the time.)
Now that I am on the other side of it,
I can look back and unpack the absurdity of it all.
My Grandma gave me this single red glass jar on one of my maniacal visits to her house in Palatine. The Maker’s marks said NJ (New Jersey) and CHURCH BRAND. Inside the bottle was some kind of plant that when I fed it through Grok said it was an invasive plant species from Florida. I was convinced my family were satan worshippers and were trying to HEX me. I had a beautiful glass bottle collection and was sure my fiance was replacing the bottles every time I left the house. So, all of my bottles were being replaced with replicas that had been hexed or altered magically in some way to harm me. I began rearranging and tossing the bottles in the trash. Some of them made it with me to my new, demon-free apartment in Colorado, thank goodness.
The name alone was triggering. Why did they spell SUPER wrong? Am I some sort of moron here? I felt the nightmare of the movie ‘Idiocracy’ had come to life. I demanded workers in the store tell me where ‘all the eggs were coming from’ along with their work schedules because I felt everyone around me in my new town was an actor. An actor meant to taunt and placate me into insanity, and it worked. I began to think everything I thought and said was being recorded by some imaginary movie studio production agency and that Broomfield, Colorado was a fictional place created just for me. And ultimately that they would blow it up Oppenheimer testing-site-style the moment I let my guard down. So I vehemently stayed alert. Too alert. I again, was afraid to sleep and so further down the rabbit (or shall I say prarie dog) hole I stumbled.
Once home from the King Soopers nightmare, I got in my car and headed into the desert. Suddenly it felt like I was in the show WestWorld. Nobody seemed real. The prices and products on the shelves of gas stations were changing by the minute. Prices seemed to be in another language. I was sure my credit cards would be declined any moment, since everything I did was under surveillance. It was the wild west, and I had no idea where I was going. At one point I pulled into a private ranch with a large wooden archway that said something along the lines of “DESTINY” or “GOOD FORTUNE” and I saw it as an omen. You see, everything was a sign to me. License plates, names of products, radio commercials, everything was speaking to ME. I pulled in and then hesitated, “What if they have guns?” and quickly reversed, where in doing so I broke off my right side mirror. So with my mirror dangling on by a few threads, I pulled out and kept driving further into my wild west nightmare land.
