I held the blade of my nail scissors to the fleshy part of my thumb, tears streaming down my face as I debated whether or not to cut myself. Even though I badly wanted to, I wasn’t depressed, and I didn’t hate myself. No, nothing of the sort. My illness had started months earlier, with a single fleeting thought: Are those drivers stalking me?

I was standing at the front of my house, about to leave for an evening walk. As I waited for the electronic gates to close, I watched cars drive by in a blur of blue, white, and red. I live near a main road, so streams of cars pass by my house every minute.

The thought itself wasn’t intrusive. It didn’t expect anything of me, except to decide whether to believe it or not. But lately, I had been starting to believe I could be special. Professors at university were complimenting me, and my grades were high, making me think I was a genius. If I was special, then logically speaking it was likely that people were stalking me, right?

I nodded to myself.

Yes, I was being stalked.

I felt a shift in my brain, as if neurons had spontaneously formed new connections. Within a split second, I saw the world through a different lens, one where I noticed details I would have normally ignored. My eyes darted around, taking in everything around me, like the facial expressions of drivers passing by, the tessellation of the brick tiles I was standing on, and even patterns formed by the bark of nearby trees. Drivers seemed to slow down as they passed my house, looking directly at me, and shadows began to dance out of the corners of my eyes, following me wherever I went. That night, I had trouble sleeping, feeling as alert as a soldier, and I woke up the next day convinced that I was being stalked. Most people might think that conspiracy theorists are paranoid and delusional, but I would come to learn what it really meant to feel this way.

It was the end of my second year of university, and I was about to turn twenty. Ironically, I was majoring in neuroscience. I was studying hard science, and yet I believed people were watching me as I walked to and from university and my bus stop each day. Everywhere I went, people looked up at me from their phones and scrutinized me as I walked by them, their beady gazes making my skin burn with self-consciousness. Some people even made coded conversation with me.

“It’s amazing how these traffic lights are like clockwork, isn’t it?” one lady remarked to me as we both waited for the pedestrian lights to change.

I forced a smile, but couldn’t help think: Yes, clockwork, exactly how the people following me act, all mechanical and robotic. Obviously, her comment was a sign. Little did I know it would be one of many signs to come.

I watched YouTube and listened to music daily, and soon the YouTubers and singers started giving me personal coded messages. I remember one particular YouTuber talking about his showering routine, and I realized I had the exact same showering routine myself, down to the order of when I would wash the bottoms of my feet and cleanse my face. I couldn’t help but ask myself: How does he know what I do behind closed doors? And why is he broadcasting it to the world? Everything he said or sung about directly related either to my life or my thoughts—thoughts that I now realized other people could hear, which horrified me.

Next, the people stalking me began to camp outside my house. I knew this because I started to hear them speak. Hearing their voices, I discovered that the majority of them were men, and they laughed and swore using the foulest expletives, which was extremely disconcerting for me because I don’t swear. I would lie in bed at night and listen to their crude jokes about women, wishing I could get them to shut up. But every time I ran to the window to see where they were, no one was there.

Soon after, another thought popped into my head, one which explained how the YouTuber knew my showering routine: If they’re watching you from the outside, there’s a good chance they’re filming you while you’re at home, too.

This thought frightened me more than the others. My safe place was no longer safe. I went to my bedroom and casually looked around, conscious that I was being filmed but wanting to make it appear as if I didn’t realize it to have the upper hand. I “accidentally” knocked over my lamp and various items in my room to see if they were bugged with spyware. I didn’t find anything, but that didn’t mean there was nothing. My stalkers had to be professionals, after all. When I showered, I knew there were cameras in the bathroom, so I hung my towel over the shower to block the view and dressed before I even fully dried myself because I believed men were watching me.

By this point, I was frustrated. Where were these signs coming from? Who were the men camped outside my house, and why weren’t they going away? Most importantly, why were people even following me in the first place?

It was then that I realized what was going on.

The defence force was stalking me because I was too intelligent. They were going to weaponize me, or use my future findings in neuroscience to create weapons to kill millions of people.

This revelation shocked me like a dive into the winter ocean. This had to be it. It was the most logical explanation for everything I had been experiencing. Of course, I couldn’t see the men I was hearing or find where they had placed the cameras; they really were professionals! This explained why I saw so many of them on the streets—the defence force was a massive organization!

I lived like this for a few months, blinded by a haze of confusion without even realizing I was confused. But as the days wore on, it became too much.

I sensed that something was wrong. Being a student of neuroscience, I knew I needed evidence to support theories. And my logical mind had no compelling evidence to support the theory that I had stalkers.

I tried to gather evidence like a good scientist would. I talked to the stalkers, since I knew they could hear me through the microphones they had planted in my house. I typed what I wanted to tell them on my laptop, which was a viable option since they had hacked into it and were monitoring it. I even tried to bribe them by saying I would bake them my much-loved cookies, or any other treat they desired, if they gave me a hint that they were truly out there.

“I won’t be mad if you’re out there,” I promised to them one night. “I just want to know I’m not going crazy. I know you’re trying to keep it a secret, but anything from you, even a text from an unknown number saying ‘Yes,’ would be appreciated. I need to know for sure.” But no one texted me, and all attempts at communication ended in failure and disappointment.

I wavered between believing and doubting that I was being stalked, but when I doubted they existed there was always that voice at the back of my mind that told me, “You’re special. You’re being stalked. It’s your life now, you just have to accept it.” Once I realized that I truly didn’t know what was going on, something inside my brittle brain snapped. I began to have episodes where I would sit catatonically and cry, my blurred reality becoming too much for me to handle.

One evening as I cried in confusion, I tried to cut myself to test whether life was real or not. Everything was so hazy. I figured if I cut myself, the pain might wake me up like pinching yourself to end a dream. But when I held the nail scissor blade against my thumb, a man’s voice screamed out, “No!” scaring me into dropping the scissors. The cloud of my chaos was momentarily broken, and I didn’t try to cut myself again.

Finally, enough was enough. I was seeing a psychologist for anxiety, and I decided I would discuss what I was feeling at my next appointment.

On my way to the appointment, I couldn’t help but reflect on my situation and the invisible men I could hear. A new thought popped into my head, which at the time I didn’t realize would be the one thought that would help me recover the sanity I hadn’t realized I’d lost: What if you’re hearing things? What if the voices are just voices, and not men following you?

I came to a stop in the street. This here was a logical explanation, the first one I had thought of in months. And yet I didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it. If I did, then it meant that I had been living the past five months paranoid for no reason at all. I tried to ignore it, but the more I thought of it, the more it made a cruel sort of sense. In retrospect, that thought now feels like it was a God-given gift. It led me to get the treatment I so desperately needed.

To say I felt like an idiot is an understatement. I felt like I was stuck in a game of Snakes and Ladders, where every roll of the dice, every move I made, forced me to slide back to the beginning.

As I sat in the psychologist’s office waiting to be called up, I heard the voices tell me, “You can’t tell your psychologist, a mere civilian, about us. If you do, it will ruin our covert operation, and endanger not only the defence force, but also the nation.” My heart began to race and I wrung my hands, trying to decide what I should do. It wasn’t just about me. Act for my country or for myself? The decision wasn’t made lightly.

I went back and forth in my mind. Tell her, or don’t tell her? Is it really worth endangering the nation? But what if your thought was right? What if they really are just voices, and you’re sick?

After much deliberation, I told the voices, “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to play games with my mental health anymore. I have to see if there’s something wrong with me.”

I remember sitting in my psychologist’s room, cold hands sandwiched in between my legs. I told her everything I had experienced over the past few months. The voices were surprisingly silent as I talked to her, probably in shock that I had the audacity to go against their wishes.

My psychologist explained to me that hearing voices had many causes, and that schizophrenia and psychosis aren’t the only possibilities. “Sometimes people with high levels of anxiety such as yourself can experience it,” she said. “But I would like to make sure there’s nothing more going on. I know who can help sort this out, and I highly recommend that you see them.” She referred me to a government-funded youth psychosis program to rule out the possibility of a psychotic episode.

When I first went to the treatment facility, I swore that everyone there, including the patients waiting to be seen themselves, were planted by the defence force to stalk me. I was interviewed by a psychiatrist while a mental-health nurse sat nearby in the room. I watched every time their eyes darted away from mine and figured that they were looking into a hidden camera the defence force had set up. Although I didn’t trust them, I answered their questions honestly. I trusted my psychologist, and if she trusted these people, then I had to trust them too. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this trust helped me get the diagnosis and the treatment I needed. Without it, I believe I could have easily masked my state and lied about my condition, like I was doing to my family, who remained unaware of what I was experiencing.

They asked me questions such as “Do you think people can hear your thoughts?” “Do you see or hear special signs on TV or in music?” and “Do you think that you’re special?” They gave me breaks between rounds of questions and praised me for doing so well. My answer to most of their questions was a resounding yes.

Within a week, after two visits to the facility, I was diagnosed with having my first episode of psychosis, and they put me on an antipsychotic drug. Although I was perplexed by the diagnosis, I knew deep down that something was wrong with me, and so I complied and took my medication. To this day, my compliance still surprises me, because I know that many people who have similar experiences have trouble staying on the medication.

A year later, this past April, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia during the COVID-19 lockdown. I had asked my case worker in our previous session about a diagnosis, and was promised that in my next consult with the psychiatrist I would finally have the answer to my confusion.

After telling me the diagnosis, my psychiatrist asked me, “How do you feel about the diagnosis? It’s important that you don’t let this define you. You’re more than a label.”

I answered honestly. “I was sort of expecting this, and in a way I’m relieved that I know what’s going on. And don’t worry, I definitely won’t let this thing define me.”

And ever since then, I have been determined to do just that.

 

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Do I still hear voices? Occasionally. Do I still think I’m being stalked? Sort of. But would I change what I experienced? No, I don’t think I would. And not because what I went through wasn’t traumatising, because it was.

Now, I have reached a level of empathy for people with complex mental-health issues like mine that I don’t think I could have ever achieved without experiencing the same myself. I have a deepened understanding of mental illness, more than what words can describe. While I don’t believe you need to experience mental illness to empathize with someone suffering from one, I know I am no longer ashamed of my illness and will no longer treat myself like crap for experiencing things beyond my control. I may be uncertain of what the undulating road ahead holds for me, but I know that everyone has their struggles, and this one happens to be mine. It is an issue that I share with millions of people worldwide, and I’m not alone.

Most importantly, I’ve realized this: I may have schizophrenia, but it’s okay. It’s not my fault, and I still deserve as much love and respect as any other person.

Self-love can be difficult when you have a mental illness, but we need to learn to love ourselves for who we are, because if we don’t, how can we expect the world to?

Like receiving a mental-illness diagnosis, self-love with mental illness is a journey. It starts with the first step: seeking help, because that is the truest expression of love for ourselves—treating ourselves like we matter.

And we do matter, every single one of us.

Martina Kontos is a new writer who is trying to help the world understand mental illness, one piece at a time. She has had creative nonfiction and fiction published in The Nonconformist Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and the anthology The Swimmer and other stories of life. Martina lives in South Australia, where she is working on her first novel, an #ownvoices story about a woman with schizophrenia and anxiety.