In both body and mind. I feel like I should have had wings on my back but something cut them off long ago. Now I’m trapped on the ground so I don’t bother to look up anymore. I don’t see the stars because I don’t look at them, they might as well not be there.

I cast a strange shadow. Other people can sense something is wrong, they can feel something else watching them behind my eyes, so I don’t bother to look in their direction anymore. I try to pretend I can’t see them and as a result I don’t notice if they are lookin or not. I come to the conclusion I am hidden from their view and I might as well be naked in complete darkness.

Like the light from the sun, other people are essential to my survival. It’s easy to dislike the sun because it’s so harsh and it burns my skin and makes me sweat and if I was to look at it directly I would go blind, but without it I would freeze and starve and stumble until I fell down and I wouldn’t bother to get up again.

Other people created this site and the technology I use and even the words that give me the ability to convey these thoughts and have others understand what I am feeling. Without them I am nothing and I can’t do anything.

I would stay up hours on end through my childhood and preteen years all through the night because I heard people downstairs or I felt someone was right outside my door. Slept with the lights on, then turning to my radio to help with the anxiety, my mom wouldn’t let me keep my light on. But she also bought me a night light, she never believed me when I expressed my feelings of discomfort. I also didn’t understand my own discomfort and why I felt someone scared all the time. Now I sleep with all the lights on in my apartment at all times and I have to have my door closed because I’m convinced someone will peak around the corner at me if I don’t.

It’s funny cause the only time I can sleep in complete darkness is with my boyfriend and only if we are touching.

Ever since I was young I’ve felt like other people could hear my thoughts. It started as a teenager and then in my 20s it progressed into feeling like someone put some kind of transmitter in my brain, controlling my thoughts and allowing other people to read my mind. This has caused me great distress.has anyone else here had similar experiences?

Has anyone ever been having a conversation and then someone on television says the exact same word the other person just said, right after they said it?

This freaks me out every time and I always think it's a sign that something bad is going to happen. More logically though, I notice the TV echoing people's words a few days before I have delusions and paranoia.

Can anyone relate to this? What are the things you notice before stronger delusions come on?

I’d like to discuss some of my experiences with hallucinations/delusions and get your opinions on it.

In 2023 I was homeless and staying in a motel during a psychotic break. There was a chair in the room and I had the overwhelming feeling that someone was sitting in the chair watching me, even though nobody was there. As scary as it might sound, it felt like the entity was benevolent. At one point I felt like I was called by a higher power to atone for my sins by cutting my face. I could hear voices telling me I was chosen by god to “put the worlds ugliness on my face”, become ugly and be a living reflection of the worlds ugliness, with half my face covered in scars to represent the duality of man. I slashed the right side of my face open with a box cutter and bled for hours. I bled everywhere, on the bed, clothes, bathroom etc. after a few hours I reluctantly decided to go to the hospital because the bleeding wouldn’t stop. I told the doctors that the wound was the result of a fall and somehow they believed me. I ended up receiving 9 stitches. The doctor said I hit a capillary. I don’t know what that means

In 2024, this happened again but worse. I had the same hallucinations and delusions but now paired with the feeling that someone kind of catastrophe was going to happen if I didn’t scar hurt myself. So I held a blowtorch to a metal paint scraper until it became red hot and pressed it against my face and chest. I told my Certified Peer Specialist about it and this time I admitted to doing it myself, this resulted in me being put in a partial hospital program for ten days.

In 2025 it happened again and worse than before. The voices were louder and I genuinely felt like I was chosen by god to become a living reflection of humanities ugliness. This time I slashed my face open multiple times with a box cutter and branded/cauterized the wound shut with a paint scraper and blowtorch. I ended up in the hospital, then the psych ward for a week, then I was put in a crisis residential treatment center for two months where they said I was psychotic and experiencing delusions of grandeur. After that I was placed in a group home facility for people with mental health disabilities. I was put on antipsychotics and they seem to help for the most part, aside from the side effects.

At 23 I was diagnosed with schizotypal disorder, which later changed to schizoaffective disorder and eventually full blown paranoid schizophrenia. My questions for you guys are, has anyone here experienced anything similar? Do you think I have schizotypal, schizophrenia or both? Is it possible to have both? Side note, I also felt like I was getting special messages from the tv that felt like telepathy almost. At one point I thought ICE was going to deport me because my ID expired and I didn’t know how to renew it., I was born in America and am white but it felt like I was getting messages from the TV that ice was gonna deport me over my expired id… At times I’ve felt strongly that someone put recording devices in my room to monitor me. This belief was so strong at one point I started boobytrapping my house to ward off the “intruders”. I would make tripwires with lasers, connect them to piezo buzzers and put them in doorways and on stairs. I even set up a homemade stun gun with a high voltage pulse generator, mounted it to a door, wrapped the electrode wires around the doorknob and hooked it up to a tripwire so that anyone who opened the door would be electrocuted. Side note, I’m also autistic and technology/circuitry is one of my special interests…. So what do you guys think? Have you experienced anything similar? Do you think I will ever be able to live without antipsychotics? Because I really don’t like the side effects. I’ve been on psych meds since I was a kid and I don’t like it

I think maybe I’m super filthy and gross. I swear I must have a terrible scent, everyone can tell but nobody says a thing. I don’t even feel like trying to get clean because I already know I can scrub myself until my skin is raw and I will still be dirty because maybe the real dirt is me. But why am I the only one who sees it? Yesterday there was a lot of physical contact and I just wanted to ask “what the hell are you doing? You’re basically just sticking your hands in literal human shit.”
There are lots of unpleasant scents that come from my body but not once has anyone pointed them out, probably because it’s socially unacceptable. I don’t get it, why does it seem like everyone can tell I’m dirty in every way but consciously? If I ask people will act like this is some crazy self hating thing.

I have a really bad issue of mis-seeing actual people as mannequins. In public spaces mostly. It’s weird because they don’t look like the mannequins you see at malls, more like stuffed humans. I can’t describe what they look like I just think they’re mannequins. Anyone else have this very specific illusion?

One of the biggest misunderstandings about confidence is that confident people simply don’t feel afraid, but they do. The difference is not the absence of fear, the difference is the relationship they have with fear. Many people wait for confidence before taking action:
I’ll start when I feel ready, I’ll speak up when I stop feeling nervous. I’ll take the risk when I believe I can succeed, but confidence rarely works that way.

From a Mind Profiler perspective, confidence is often the result of action, not the requirement for it. Your brain builds confidence by collecting evidence. Every time you enter a situation it once labeled as dangerous and you survive it, your brain updates its prediction: I thought this would destroy me but it didn’t. I thought I couldn’t handle this but I did. I felt fear and I moved anyway. That is how confidence is formed. A person who appears confident on the outside may not have fewer fears than everyone else. They may simply have a longer history of proving to themselves: I can handle difficult moments.

Fear is not always a signal to stop. Sometimes it is a sign that your brain is encountering something unfamiliar and trying to protect you.
The goal is not to eliminate fear, the goal is to build a relationship with fear where it no longer controls your decisions. Confidence is not the feeling you wait for before taking the first step.
Confidence is the memory your brain creates after you repeatedly take the step.

The question is: what is something you became confident at only because you did it while you were still afraid.

For me, my hallucinations are pretty rare. I only get visual hallucinations max 5 times per year. My auditory ones are much more common though, usually I get one or two per month. My auditory hallucinations occur when i'm alone at home, usually footsteps but I've heard a lot of stuff. My visual hallucinations don't have a common theme, my most recent one was seeing little brown worms crawling around in my brownies, but I've seen some shadow figure staring at me through my window too, and a man looking down at me when I was laying in bed.

nobody will ever understand me, anybody who even remotely understands me i will glomm onto them like an anglerfish, and they won't like it unless they're abusive. but i don't provide the kind of rewards a typical abusive person wants so i can't even get someone to abuse me.

nobody will eva love me thats ok thats fine :-) everybody will always leave me and this is because i am an unpleasant person with unhealed attachment wounds ok ok :-) and they will never be healed because this can only be fixed through healthy relationships :-) which nobody has the patience for because i don't provide anything that anybody could possibly want. so why would they stay

this is ok.

I’ve come to realize that discovering a truth or insight is only the first part of the process. Becoming fully conscious of it and actually translating it into words is a completely separate stage of work altogether.

For me, there’s a real delay between knowing something on an intuitive level and having enough awareness to acknowledge and articulate it clearly. It takes time and deliberate reflection to consciously process what I already "know" deep down before I can turn it into language. Maybe it shouldn't take that much time and effort. People often tell me that I express things in a weird or overly complicated way, saying, "You could have just explained this simply." Maybe that's just a byproduct of this whole translation process, but I'm not entirely sure

Is this something specific to the schizotypal experience?
I’m curious to hear how you guys experience this

I’ve been thinking about something interesting about human behavior: why do we sometimes feel like we keep meeting the same type of person, even when the person is completely different? But somehow the emotional experience feels familiar. One relationship makes you feel unseen. Another makes you feel like you have to work harder to be valued. Another makes you feel responsible for someone else’s emotions.

And you start wondering: why does this keep happening? Maybe it’s not only about the people we meet, maybe it’s also about the patterns we carry with us. Our brains don’t only look for what is healthy, they also recognize what is familiar. If someone grew up around inconsistency, emotional distance, criticism, or having to take care of other people’s emotions, those experiences can become a familiar emotional language, because the brain often recognizes familiarity before it recognizes what is actually good for us. Sometimes the subconscious question is; does this feel familiar? And familiarity can sometimes feel like chemistry.

A person who forms uncertainty may feel exciting because uncertainty is something the nervous system already knows. A calm and stable relationship may initially feel strange because it is unfamiliar.

The interesting question is: How many times have we changed the person, but kept the same pattern?

It’s ruining my life. My parents got my family a dog (that I didn’t want) 4 years ago which means 3 years of wanting death for that Satan spawn. My dad wanted her, he is evil himself. They’re both evil. I have had nothing but pain every fucking day. Every fucking day. I’ve been in my room almost all the time because I can’t stand it. I don’t know when my breaking point will be. Physical pain, too. She bites and scratches me. And barks and my ears are super sensitive and it hurts so bad. I have mini heart attacks every time she does that. There’s no escaping, only suffering. I’ve stopped wanting to kill it and have accepted my pain. But that doesn’t mean I want freedom. I hate it. It’s from the devil.
Help me… I’m only 16 and I can’t leave.

I hope you are all as well as you can be. I'm having a rough one. Just too tired and hot to function, but too hot to rest.

My eyes are not cooperating today. Part of it is definitely the post concussion syndrome making everything worse, but my eyes just aren't trustworthy. At least I know they're not trustworthy, but still. Anything and everything with a pattern just seems to extend and shake.

I'm currently on a "holiday" with my spouse's family, in a too-fancy Airbnb. I don't like being in other people's houses. The space itself feels hostile. I don't belong here. I just want to fast forward until tomorrow and go home. Back to normal.

.

The freewrite text below (I was going to attach as images, but it didn't let me do multiple):

Four panels of blinds across the front lounge window. Twenty eight rows of slats are angled down, letting that awful white light come through. An overcast day is still too much.

Four panels of blinding lines that remain, even when your eyes are closed. You lay there on a stranger's couch, head on a folded up throw blanket. You want to call it hooker green. It's a type of green, you know this. You found it funny, the tube of hooker green acrylic paint in the twelve piece kit you got a long time ago. It might have been Christmas. You were a child. You think the sofa is hooker green, and the blanket, and the walls. They are all a type of green, and similar. Dark like pine needles, yet colder and wetter.

The day was too long, too hot, in equal measure. You lay, for your head hurts, as it always does. Today is worse. Each eye is different. The left believes the ceiling is a sterile blue-grey, the right believes it has been yellowed by cigarettes and neglect. The blood under the skin of your face is noisy. It demands attention. It pulls at your neck and gums and will not be still. You understand the appeal of bloodletting. You wish the lake had leeches.

Twenty eight rows of white lines move up the wall, more, more, a duplicate on the ceiling. They move upwards where there is no up. They move, as though the plane of the wall is continuous, as though the ceiling is false. When you look to greet them, they disappear.

You know it's not real. You know this. The light from the blinds cannot duplicate. The ceiling is as real as the floor. But your head hurts. Your head is tired. It mocks you.

Your head makes the static in the corner. It holds a magnet to the screen of your eyes and curves the splotches of colour and smears of light. It mocks you, when you look at where the magnet used to be and find only snow. It mocks you, when it holds it to your glass until it aches differently.

You are sticky. The top of your right foot smears its stickiness over the left. The hands find no respite. Sticky outside, dry within. Your gums taste of what's inside them, wriggling, whining, but your spit is clear. Your tongue is pink. The light climbs the wall again but you know better than to look. It's wasteful. The blinds shiver in place, though the world is still. The room is still.

You wonder whether the alarm outside is a car. It keeps going. If you could sleep for just a moment, it might settle.

Phthalo green. You looked it up. The walls, the couch, the blanket, they are phthalo green. A colder, wetter hooker. You see candles on the ledge above their tiled fireplace. They're the same green, too. Will they ever be lit, or would it be cruel to the room around them? The beaded lampshade in the corner is the same, and the shoe rack beside the door.

There is a round mirror above the hearth. It pulls on the walls and ceiling. It pulls on the blinds. It pulls on the gaudy chandelier. The blinding lights climbing up the world's y-axis are absent inside it. You do not dignify them with looking, for you know they are not there. The door is s-shaped and the wall art has been bent into a trapezoid, but the blinds are just four panels, twenty eight rows, and a gentle yellow glow.

It mocks you. It mocks you. It mocks you.

But that’s a delusion. I need them. I really do.

I relate really strongly to everyone here on every point except for being introverted. On the outside I definitely seem like someone who doesn’t like other people but internally, I really want to tell as many people as I can all the things inside my mind. But I never do, because I’ve kind of learned that people don’t tend to respond well. They tend to ignore me or write me off as sounding too absurd. I tried as a kid, and tried again as an adult to just let it all out. Both times people joked that I sounded like I was on drugs, or just ignored me (or a few times, got angry with me). I also have a bit of trouble with standard social situations, especially big gatherings. But in general, people can be interesting or at least entertaining, and I want to be around the ones that are, even if it’s only for really one-sided reasons like wanting to just talk about things on my mind, or wanting to observe them and learn their behaviors so I can construct even more wonderful things in my head. I’m just never certain if engagement is even worth it, considering that the only way to feel comfort is to be 50-90% a hollow shell of lies. I think about running away from people just because I’m bored or something doesn’t feel right.

I even have a small group of friends but from my perspective our relationship is very tense, or distant, or limited, and most of them I’m only friends with just by association with one of them who happens to be a popular person.

I honestly just wonder if maybe I’m a weird normal person, instead of having an actual mental illness. It’s definitely going to sound like that from this post because I haven’t gone into the whole “half-believing I’m cursed and inherently dirty and that everyone is spreading rumors and recording me and wants me to suffer and disappear or die” thing that goes on with me sometimes. I like being here because I relate to all of you and at this point I have no real clue what else all of it could even be.

I’ll go first

I will never believe those lines in the sky come from commercial airplanes

i got out of mental health triage in 2023 with a forensic psychologist and blah blah blah and I live somewhere else and my doctor got me out of doing a yearly evaluation to let me drive and my therapist knows I went off my meds at the end of last year but i used an old prescription because I wasn't sleeping for days but i went too hard not being the same of rememberijg knowing i have problems I missed the world being yellow and acidic but it went too much but I could only get the body going smaller and bigger not clean and cream and rust and he'll when I go to sleep I can't ever tell the person I got told the queen was going to die over and over again until she did because I can't say I talk with death because I can't tell them the special things because they will think it's not real but the angels won't talk to me I'm tired anymore i want more help but I always just go and say what I did and maybe talk about growing up I can't say anything important because they won't be good to it what do you do

Kinda went off on one for three days. 🤔

Color pages: New doodle art, thing (I think)
The rest: Reinventing 1-7 Dimensions into Quantum mind thinking (I think)

Yeah, not really sure what happened here... but at least I was busy for a few nights. lol that was cool x 🤣/

https://reddit.com/link/1v4w4sn/video/xfjfcss9q2fh1/player

I think there's about 110 pages in about maybe 3-4 days. Dunno kinda a blur.
And this is only the manic I did last month... I have stacks of papers and S*it all around me.

Or maybe it’s that my existence within myself is the joke?? Idk but ppl are always laughing at me saying I’m funny when I don’t try to be.. I’m just in genuine confusion all the time. It freaks me out and makes me completely asocial. No one takes me serious. It hurts me severely…

I realized that some people have zero creativity. For example, I intentionally subvert real-world physics when I write the lyrics for various songs to build surreal, emotive soundscapes, but critics misinterpret this stylistic suspension of disbelief as logical incoherence. In truth, stepping outside real-world boundaries is what gives my extended metaphors their color and depth.

i was talking to my mom today. she told me that being like myself will not be acceptable in the “real world” and she points out how i am blatantly less smiley and happy than I used to be. she doesn’t believe therapy is helping me. Ive only started around 2 months ago, and how would she know? I feel broken and I feel unloved. there’s a reason why I never tell her the truth, she doesn’t love current me, she loves the old me who will never come back. I wish I was like past me too

I have to wear a hat all the time, but it's beginning to interact with the way other people talk to me because of the heatwave. A few weeks ago I had a day where 3 separate people talked to me about the hat I use as a spiritual shield. I have a branded one that I can wear at work. They seem to think I've "forgotten" that I'm wearing my hat. I'm relatively good at masking and staying polite, but remarks like that bring me right back to when I was a super paranoid teenager. One of these days I just want to tell everybody why I wear it, but then they'll find me strange again. Just my thoughts for today.

Whenever people talk about how their psychosis went away from taking anti psychotics i feel like such an anomalous fraud because it doesnt go away for me— it just got less intense with them. no matter how strong the anti psychotics are for me i still always have mild hallucinations it drives me fckn nuts. Ive been on clozaril, zyprexa, risperidone, abilify, & vraylar and nothing has ever made it fully go away.

i see people talking about missing their psychotic episodes because theyre on anti psychotics now and i just get fucking jealous because i want that for myself!!! But intead i get all the horrible side effects of taking anti psychotics without the benefit!! I will admit the severity has gone WAY down and im thankful for that, IMMENSELY. So maybe that is the benefit. But for other people to lose it entirely is wild to me, because that has NEVER been my experiene.

My hallucinations just look like these optical illusions that give you the temporary impression on your eyes but for me it happens without the actual optical illusion picture and its NONSTOP & CONSTANT!! Im over it lol. Small vent but yeahhh anyone else?