Into the Fog of Psychosis Part 1

Reality isn’t fixed. It bends, shifts, warps—sometimes so slowly you don’t notice until you’re too far gone to claw your way back. At first, it’s just a feeling. A whisper. A pattern hiding in plain sight. And then, suddenly, it’s everything. The world rearranges itself into a puzzle only you can solve. The messages are everywhere. The connections are undeniable.

Except… they’re not.

In this first part of Into the Fog of Psychosis, I take you inside what it’s like when your mind turns against you—when certainty replaces doubt, when fear becomes fact, and when the very foundation of reality starts to slip. Psychosis is terrifying. It’s surreal. And it’s not what people think it is.

This is Beneath the Noise. Welcome to the fog.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Act 1
• 11:00 Act 2
• 22:44 Act 3

Transcript

Welcome to Beneath the Noise

Before we get started I have to make one thing clear, my story is a sanitized one. I am a white woman in middle America still on her mother’s upper middle class American insurance at the time of my psychotic break. My experience is not the norm for many who go through psychosis. Many of those who find themselves psychotic end up incarcerated and/or taken advantage of.

I have also eliminated or changed many details to protect my privacy and the privacy of those involved. Please also know that while I attempt to tell this story as linearly as possible, my memories are severely disjointed and fragmented which reflects heavily in my writings.

This next part, I’m not saying this for shock value. I have nothing to sell you. But the truth is—this could happen to you too. I really mean it can happen to anyone. Psychosis affects 15 to 100 people out of every 100,000. It mostly strikes in the late teens to mid-twenties, but it can happen at any age. An unchecked UTI, under the right circumstances, can send someone into psychosis. It’s not some distant, impossible thing—it’s real. And it’s closer than people think.

Psychosis is a break with reality. It is when someone loses touch with what grounds them in the world we live in. It can cause someone to act or speak very strangely and without reason. It has the potential to be dangerous for both the psychotic person and the people around them due to the subject lacking understanding of the true circumstances of their situation and therefore the consequences of their actions.

I had a warm home and sensible people who loved me and could dedicate time to me. I got to have my episode mostly in private. I am not on the streets and I am not in jail. I spent two weeks in a hospital over Christmas. Some would argue that psychiatric hospitals function as carceral systems—I won’t explore that argument yet, but it’s worth acknowledging. I am a lucky and privileged person who went through something horrible. But it happens to people every single day- I am not special because of my psychosis. 

Still, I will tell you my story, because that’s all I have to give. 

Psychosis doesn’t hit all at once. It creeps in, slowly at first, like fog rolling over a road at night. At least, that’s how it was for me. It’s insidious- flowing deep into the corners of your mind before you even realize it’s there. 

For me, it began when I couldn't sleep. I would spend hours trying and sleep just never came. I would be up at night buried in my phone writing endless notes that made no sense to anyone but me. After about 48 hours of no proper sleep I began to take micro naps when I would sit still long enough, most commonly on the toilet if I'm honest. 

I would fall asleep without realizing it for a few minutes at a time and jerk awake with no recollection of sleeping. I would do this while staring at my phone for hours. Just me asleep sitting up staring at my phone inches from my face. I kept feeling as if the brightness was too high on my phone as I stared into it for days, but when I went to turn it down I found it was already as low as possible. 

It became four days without sleep

I began to have vivid dreams during these micro naps. I began to believe these dreams were real. At first, it was just strange thoughts. Little things that didn’t make sense but felt important. But as the days without sleep stacked up, my mind started playing tricks on me. Connections that weren’t there became undeniable truths. I wasn’t just paranoid—I was certain.

I believed a powerful group was after me, led by a certain social media CEO. I was convinced they wanted me dead. This was a psychotic delusion of course. I was slipping, faster than I could understand. 

Then, suddenly, I was in my living room, waking up from the only sleep I’d managed to get in days. In the hours before, in absolute desperation, my boyfriend Mike had given me a small dose of NyQuil, hoping it would quiet my mind long enough for me to sleep. It managed to knock me out long enough that I woke up almost lucid- and that’s the first time I remember thinking something was wrong. Neither of us knew what was happening to me.

Until this point I had been adamant about my sanity. I remember screaming in Mike’s face: 'I’m not manic. I can’t be manic.' I said it over and over, like saying it enough times would make it true. Looking back, I was drowning in denial.

Mike wasn’t the only one who saw it. While I was still trying to convince myself I was fine, he had already called my mom. And somehow, she already knew. Before we said a word, before she even saw me—she knew. 

My mom had seen me like this before. She had seen me unravel. 

I was 12 when someone first said the words "you have bipolar disorder" to me. It wasn’t the first time I’d been diagnosed with something, but hearing 'you have bipolar disorder' at 12 years old still felt like a gut punch. I had been generally depressed and anxious for a long time but it wasn't until I started cutting myself regularly and violently that I was taken to a doctor.

At the time, I was being abused by someone close to my family. And I was trying—I was screaming—for someone to hear me. In hindsight, I wasn’t screaming loud enough. Or maybe no one wanted to listen. So, Instead of hearing me, they sent me to a psychiatrist. I won’t name him, but let’s just say he might have been the least personable doctor I’ve ever met. His lavender waiting room is still burned into my brain. The coke-bottle glasses. The glassy, unfocused eyes. The voice that never quite landed, like he wasn’t fully in the room with me. 

We barely had time to come up with a treatment plan before I started having nervous breakdowns at school. I began to scare my peers and cause disturbances in class. It was eighth grade, and they hospitalized me for the first time. I couldn’t return to class until I was evaluated. 

That first hospitalization should have been the moment things got better. But mental illness doesn’t work like that.

Because here I was again—years later, losing my mind in front of the people who loved me. And my mom? She knew. Before I even said a word, she knew.

My mom didn’t have to convince me to go with her to the hospital. She barely even had to say the words. Maybe it was the way she looked at me—like she had already seen how this was going to play out. Because we had done this before. She said it was time to go so I went. 

My paranoia began to boil over on the way there. I was outside for the first time in days. The sun was bright and the air so crisp. I remember thinking it was a beautiful day and maybe my last. 

Then we had to go through the ER. This next bit is some of the hardest for me to remember, but I will try my best. 

The ER was too bright, too loud. People were watching me—I knew they were watching me. Whispering. Sideways glances. I could see their phone cameras pointed in my direction, were they filming me? Were they doctors? Patients? I couldn’t tell. I just knew I was being observed.

I remember signing myself in. The receptionist looked at me like she couldn’t believe I wasn't fighting. 

The holding area for the psych ward was full so they stuck me in a chair in between rooms where they could watch me. 

After what felt like hours in a plastic chair under security’s watchful eyes, they moved me to a room where they could observe me more closely. Then three nurses were on me. Holding me still, waiting for a fight that never came. ‘You’re being so cooperative,' one of them said, like she didn’t expect it. Like I was supposed to resist. I could feel the weight of fatigue in my muscles, had I been resisting before? Or were they just expecting me to? 

I peed in a cup and changed out of my street clothes. Then it was time to go to the ward. They took my cell phone as they wheeled me back. Slipped it from my hands like I wouldn’t notice. But I did. I noticed the absence of it. The empty space in my fingers where it had been.

And that’s when it hit me.

I wasn’t going home.

END OF ACT 1

The first thing they do when you enter a psych ward is take your shoelaces. No belts. No hoodie strings. None of your own clothes for the first 24 hours while searching through everything you brought with you for contraband like soda cans and alcohol based mouthwash.  

Then, they give you rules. A lot of rules.

I wasn’t really listening. I was too busy staring at the fire alarm, wondering what would happen if I pulled it. I might have asked out loud. I don’t know. I remember following my nurse around. As they attempted to do their job and get me what I needed, I would not leave them alone. Eventually they turned around and were direct about my need to go sit down in the dayroom. I instead began to compulsively pace the halls. 

Someone handed me a small paper cup of shampoo before my shower. As soon as I was alone  I drank it. Not to hurt myself—no, this was survival. Maybe it was medicine. Maybe they had given it to me for a reason. After all, there were people trying to kill me. And if I wanted to make it out of here, I had to be one step ahead. 

Nothing made sense. Nothing felt real. And yet, somehow, here I was. Sitting in a psych ward, drinking hospital shampoo, convinced people were trying to kill me.

I swear, there’s a logical series of events that led to this farcical scene—my personal breakdown formula: unmanaged stress, CPTSD, compulsive pattern recognition, and a healthy dose of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

Also, there was the poster. The Social Network, hung on my bedroom wall since Christmas of 2013. A gift from a close family friend. It was and still is my favorite movie.  It had been in the background of photos, videos, memories. Always there. By the time I took it down after my hospital stay, it had seeped into my psyche in ways I couldn't have imagined. But right now, none of that mattered. Right now, I was pacing the halls of a psych ward, trapped in a reality I couldn’t make sense of.

Eventually, I stopped pacing. I sat down. The dayroom was silent, except for the occasional shuffle of grippy socks on tile. The fluorescent lights hummed, too bright for nighttime. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever sleep again. I thought maybe I’d feel relieved. Maybe the chaos in my head would slow down now that I was somewhere safe. But instead, I just felt… suspended. Like I was watching myself from the outside, stuck in a place I couldn’t escape. 

I have very little linear memory from this time but the times I do remember are frantic. Like my lucid self is attempting to claw to the surface and overcome my delusionary state. 

A nurse handed me my first dose of meds in a tiny paper cup. I hesitated. Were they poisoning me? I took them anyway. What else was I supposed to do? Turns out it was multiple thousands of milligrams of antipsychotics. And my love-hate relationship with Depakote began. 

I don’t remember falling asleep. I just remember the feeling of my body giving up before my mind did. The next thing I knew, morning had come. And I was still here. I knew this feeling so well having done this before. But yet I feel the tears come to my eyes. 

The next few days passed in a blur. I don’t remember much. Just fragments. The shuffle of socks on linoleum. The murmur of staff conversations at the nurse’s station. The weight of sedation pressing me into my mattress, making it impossible to tell where my body ended and the bed began.

The first person I remember telling me I had bipolar disorder—again—was Mike.

Apparently, the doctor had tried the night of my intake, but I wouldn’t hear it. I still wouldn’t hear it now.

"No. That’s not true. You’re lying."

My voice cracked on the last word. The euphoria of mania had been the first time in months—maybe years—that I had felt good. Now, it was gone, ripped away, and in its place was nothing but exhaustion and despair. And he wanted me to believe that this, this emptiness, was the truth? That the light was the sickness?

"No. No, you don’t understand," I begged. "That wasn’t mania. That was me. That was the real me."

He shook his head. I could see it in his eyes—the hesitation, the pain. But also the certainty.

"I’m sorry," he said. "But it wasn’t."

I felt something rising in my chest—rage, grief, something unbearable. My hands balled into fists. I cry out, the sound echoing through the dayroom like a gunshot. The staff turned their heads. A nurse stood up. I felt a sting in my throat as I screamed at him. He was wrong. He was lying. He was trying to take something from me.

The staff came. They pulled him away. He didn’t fight them.

And yet, the next day, he was there. And the day after that. And twice on Christmas.

After Mike left, I sat there, staring at the floor. My hands were still shaking. I wanted to cry, but even that felt impossible. The others barely reacted—no one rushed to comfort me, no one said, ‘Are you okay?’ or ‘That must have been hard.’ They had seen this before. To them, I was just another psych patient having another psychotic break. But then—

"Hey. Are you alright?"

I looked up. A nurse stood in front of me, crouching down slightly so she wasn’t towering over me. And for the first time since I got here, someone was looking at me like a person, not a case number.

Somewhere in the haze, I already knew who she was. Middle school. A face that belonged to another life. I couldn’t pull her name from my mind, but the familiarity was there, unsettling and strange. And yet, right now, it didn’t matter. Right now, she was just the only person in this whole place who seemed to care. I nodded, or maybe I didn’t. Either way, she didn’t press me. Just gave a small nod back and sat beside me for a moment, as if to say: You’re still here. You’re not alone.

The Depakote crept in like a slow fog. At first, I was just exhausted. My limbs felt heavy, my thoughts blurred at the edges. I still wanted to fight, to yell, to tell someone they were wrong about me. But the fire was fading. The meds wouldn’t let me hold onto it.

For a while after that time stopped making sense. Days blurred together, melting into one long, stretched-out moment. Maybe it had been hours. Maybe days. I couldn’t tell.

Wake up. Bed. Dim lights. The murmur of voices outside my door.
Wake up. Dayroom. TV is humming with activity, but I can’t focus on the screen.
Wake up. A nurse handing me a paper cup of water. ‘Drink.’ I do. I don’t ask why. She asks when the last time I took a shit was, I answer her. 
Wake up. Someone is talking to me. I think I respond. I don’t remember what I said.

I’m in the dayroom again. The Big Bang Theory is on TV, I fucking hate that show. I laugh. Who am I? 

Everything feels slowed down, like I’m moving through mud. Words reach me a second too late. Someone asks me a question. I nod, but I don’t know what I’m agreeing to. 

There’s a woman on the ward with me who I think is my friend. She tries to take my jacket. I don’t think we are friends anymore. 

I go into the quiet room and cry, I feel lost and out of control

I lie in bed. Stare at the ceiling. Try to trace the cracks with my eyes, but my vision won’t focus. I think I will fall asleep. I think I wake up. I think I do it again. And again.

At some point, I stop fighting it. Let the days roll over me, let the meds dull whatever sharp edges are left. I am here. I am nowhere. And for now, that’s all I know.

As it turns out, no one was sure I was going to make it out of this. I had been psychotic for 10  days or so and at this point it was anyone's guess where this will end up. Mike was there every single day and they still couldn’t tell him how long it would be until I was stable. 

I am tired of this. He is tired of this. Hell, I'm tired of writing it right now. I wish I could tell you that I was suddenly lucid again. I thought the fog would lift. I thought one day, I’d just wake up, and it would be over. But I was wrong. It wasn’t over.

I wasn’t just recovering. I was becoming someone new. And for the first time, I started to wonder—maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. After everything, after all the fear and the loss… I was still here. And maybe—just maybe—that meant something."

END OF ACT 2

Recovery is not linear, a cliche you will hear constantly in mental healthcare. Mostly because it’s true.

The paranoia was still there, thrumming under my skin, but for the first time in days, it was quieter. Not gone—just distant. Like I’d stepped outside of my own mind for a second and realized how far I had gone.

Recovery didn’t happen all at once. At first, it was just a few fleeting moments—tiny cracks of light breaking through. A full night’s sleep. A moment where my thoughts didn’t feel like they were running ahead of me. The first time I laughed, really laughed, after everything. But for every step forward, there were setbacks. The meds slowed me down. I didn’t feel like myself. And I kept asking—who even was ‘myself’ now? A cocktail of depakote and seroquel was keeping me sane but at what cost?

I had dealt with Seroquel before. It was one of the medications I was put on for maintenance after my first hospitalization when i was12. I gained 80 pounds on this medication and became a severely overweight 5’9” middle schooler. I felt like Frankenstein's monster among my petite peers. Obviously I wasn't a fan. 

After about a year on that medication, and soon after taking custody, my father told me I couldn’t have bipolar disorder, and I believed him. What else was I supposed to do? I went along when he took me off these medications because honestly I didn't want to take them. I felt awful on them- and I slipped back into the cycle of hypomania and depression that ruled the first 25 years of my life. 

But now, sitting in this ward, surrounded by people who refused to let me disappear, I started to wonder—what would have happened if I had been believed back then? Would I still be here? Would I still be me? My mom, my brother, my best friend, Mike—they all held onto me, even when I couldn’t hold onto myself. They showed up. Every visit, every phone call, every quiet moment where they just sat with me, reminded me I was still here. That I was still me. Even when I wasn’t sure who that was anymore.

One visit, my mom brought me the original copy of my favorite book as a child, “The Prisoner of Azkaban”. The thought of it now even makes me cry. Its worn pages are bound more with intention and love than its original glue. I treated it like gold- I couldn’t focus long enough to read it so I just flipped through the pages. Hold it, smell it, cradle it while I slept. 

My best friend even visited me once. In all the years and times I had been hospitalized I had yet to ever have a friend good enough to visit me in the mental hospital. To see me at my worst. She tells the story of the visit like a war story, which it kind of is. 

When she walked in, I could see she was nervous. Her shoulders were tense, her eyes flicking around, taking in the chaos of the ward—the shouting, the pacing, the woman in the corner making obscene gestures and eventually flashing her. I don’t blame her. If I had been in her position, I would’ve been nervous too.

Mike had brought her. He had been my anchor through all of this, and now, he was bringing in reinforcements. I wasn’t sure if he had prepared her for what she was walking into, but still, she stayed. She sat across from me, trying to act normal, trying to meet me where I was. And for the first time in what felt like forever, I was just happy to see her.

Even in the chaos, even with her nervousness written all over her face, she stayed. She talked to me. She treated me like I was still me. She drove 90 minutes for 15 minutes of conversation, and that meant everything.

And for a moment, I let myself believe that maybe things were getting better. That maybe, with enough time, I could claw my way back to something that resembled normal.

But clarity is a double-edged sword. At first, I thought I wanted the fog to lift. I thought I wanted to see again. But when it finally did, all I could see was the wreckage.

The things I had said. The things I had done. The people I had scared.

And worst of all, I couldn’t take any of it back.

After two weeks inpatient, insurance was done with me and I was out of the hospital. It was new years eve of 2018. I was still buzzing with that electric, post-manic energy—too lucid to be fully psychotic, too wired to be stable. The hospital had let me out, but my mind was still catching up. The world felt too sharp, too real. And I was terrified to go online. But, somehow, Facebook felt safe. Familiar. A place where I could explain myself—where I could make sense of it all.

So I posted.

At the time, I thought it was insightful. Raw. Maybe even profound. Looking back… it was a mess. A stream-of-consciousness rant, half-coherent, oversharing in a way only a person fresh out of psychosis could. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember how it felt—like throwing myself back into the world before I was ready.

At first, the comments trickled in. A few supportive ones, a couple of confused messages. Then silence. The kind of silence that feels like judgment. My heart started racing. My skin prickled. Maybe this was a mistake.

I re-read the post. And that’s when it hit me.

What the fuck was I thinking?

I deleted the post. It didn’t matter. People had seen it. People knew.

I wasn’t manic anymore. But I wasn’t okay, either. And for the first time, I started to wonder if I ever would be.

The problem with psychosis is that you don’t get to forget. The memories don’t come back all at once, but in flashes. Little things. A vague post I didn’t remember making. A voice message I could barely stand to listen to. Sad songs that I would scream in my car before this that now feel too real, too close for comfort. 

Every day, I remembered something else. And every day, I wished I hadn’t.

So, I stopped trying. Stopped posting. Stopped talking to people. What was there to say?

I spent the next 9 months unemployed and watched all of MTV’s Catfish.

At first, it was just something to put on in the background. Noise to drown out the silence. But soon, it became a ritual. Entire seasons blurred together, day after day. Strangers on a screen unraveling in real time, caught in their own delusions. I watched them with a strange kind of detachment, like their mistakes were easier to witness than my own.

The days were slow, heavy. I slept too much, but I was always exhausted. My body felt different—sluggish, weighed down by medication, by grief, by something I couldn’t name. My mind wasn’t racing anymore, but it wasn’t sharp either. Just dulled. Blunted at the edges

I barely left the house. The thought of running into someone—someone who had seen my Facebook post, someone who knew—was unbearable. Even when people reached out, I didn’t answer. What would I say? Sorry I lost my mind? Sorry I scared you? Sorry it turns out the disability I was diagnosed with as a child was for real and I’m undoing more than a decade of mind fuckery?

I didn’t just lose my job—I lost my sense of time. Some days, I’d wake up at noon and feel like I’d barely moved before the sun was setting again. Other days, I’d be up all night, staring at my phone, scrolling endlessly without really seeing anything. At some point, my mom started asking if I had left the house that week. I lied. Maybe she knew.

The thing about coming out of psychosis is that no one tells you what to do next. There’s no guidebook for shame, no checklist for rebuilding your life. You just sit with it. And I did. For months.

But shame isn’t sustainable forever. At some point, it stops feeling like a punishment and just becomes another thing you carry. It settles into you, loses its sharpness. Becomes a part of the landscape.

And then—without realizing it—you start moving forward.

Not all at once. Not in some dramatic moment of clarity. But in tiny, almost imperceptible ways.

A text I actually responded to. A joke I didn’t just smile at, but laughed at. A morning where getting out of bed didn’t feel like a monumental task. A moment of vulnerability that doesn’t make me feel like clawing my skin off.

I wasn’t better. Not yet. But I was still here. Maybe it was the start of something new.

And for now, maybe that was enough.

TO BE CONTINUED