During my second breakdown, I was avoiding my family, feeling that we were too close and that the closeness was oppressive. I didn't like being told what to do or not having the emotional privacy to be settled - it was unsettling feeling I was expected to call home everyday, knowing that some people call home once a week or less.
My breakdown was discovered when my family came to my home, where I had spent about six weeks in solitude, never leaving the premises.
My brother refused to close the door and sit down, so I became aggravated. Clearly he had detected that I was ill and became frightened. But I felt he had no need to be frightened. He looked scared. I became furious, silently motioning for him to sit down. He left and called the police.
That he called the police was all he could do, but it feels like betrayal [yes, present tense, feels like, still feels like].
I can say that my lucidity was underestimated throughout, although I was also 'raving mad', gone off the deep end in my beliefs. All the time I felt I had one foot firmly in clarity. As this is my blog, my brother isn't here to interrupt and contradict me! My family believe they literally saved my life in rescuing me, I say I was not going to kill myself and I would have left the flat soon to get more food (that angers me too, that they disagree with me.
But still, looking back, if I had been sane enough, I should have called the police myself much earlier and said I was having trouble, please take me to hospital.
All this must still have been bubbling under when I was hospitalised. When I saw my family, before treatment had got well underway, I bubbled over with resentment, talking 'at' them not to them. I voiced my concerns, that we were too close. The relationship stress had contributed to my breakdown.
I am normally a peaceable person, but here was all this anger coming out in an uncharacteristic way. Psychologically speaking, a remarkable change. I calmed down though with the longer I received the antipsychotic medicine.
I was speaking about self-harming when I entered hospital. I wanted to self-harm within the framework of a higher sense of purpose. I thought it would be good for the Earth; I thought it was right; I thought it would make me more powerful. I was quite happy with the fact.
I was very ill. Though I maintained lucidity, [I knew what day and date it was at all times] I was also delusional and communicated that frequently. Even after five weeks of medication I was still displaying some irrational obsessions.
Gradually though, my obssession with 'self-harming' passed away. This did not stop me having, because of my mother's and the ward sister's concern, someone sitting in my doorway at all times for the first week of hospitalisation. I was peaceful, there was no way of me harming myself, I had become ill through privacy issues... and there was someone removing my privacy. But they had the right intentions. It was psychologically painful. Fortunately, though I was aware of being supervised, I didn't know this was down to the concerns of my mother, or I would have been even angrier.
Back to my extraction from my home: my brother said I tried to hit him with a guitar. I know I feinted half a strike. I was angry, in a primal state - I was very sensitive to the fact that he and the police were intruding on my territory and I wanted to frighten them off. Yet still I could be reasoned with, though my speech was often delusional in content.
My main point in this post is not to communicate my frustration with the police or the hospital or my family, but to remark on the change of character I went through. I was given cause to be angry. I had been harbouring cause to be angry too. Then when my self-awareness was released by the psychotic break, out came an aggressive subpersonality to frighten my family. Never physically violent anger, just the interpersonal emotion. That undercurrent of anger was keeping me in my home all that time, was keeping my family at arm's length while I locked myself away.
Most hurtfully, my mother and brother came with flowers and gifts for me and I rejected their show of kindess completely. Thankfully this all was soothed away by medication, as I became more me again.
I could still do to have a more normal family life, with less contact, but that's for me to negotiate in a reasonable, and not resentful way. Only because I get tired out travelling backwards and forwards to meet up for family events, and this and being away from home for long periods is very disruptive to me. But I'll sort it out.
I am back on good terms with my family, but we all still remember and carry emotions about that time.
Thanks for reading.
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