Paranoia Pt. 2: Better And Worse

Paranoia pt. 2: Better and worse

By the end of 2004 my panic attacks had mostly calmed down, but the paranoia lingered. I continued to have symptoms of whatever it was for about four or five years. Heck, it still affects me to this day, but it's better than it was.

My main concerns over that time were things like poisoned food, brainwashing, or deadly diseases - in short, anything that could attack me from the inside and I wouldn't have any control over it. I'm still not sure what this has to do with a hurricane, which is an external force, but it somehow amplified this fear into whatever it became. Somewhere in this time frame I attempted to run away, but it was paranoia-fueled and I didn't even make it off the doorstep before turning around.

The last real panic attack I had from this incident was about three years later. My family had adopted my cousin, I mean, uh, my brother, and we had moved again to another location (which wasn't great for my paranoia either). We were once again at Wal*Mart, but this situation could have occurred at any location: I got my arm stuck in between the cart and its handle, so I panicked and fainted.

I've only fainted twice in my life; the other time was when I fell off my bike and hit my head. But this time was drastically different, because somehow I dreamed while I was out. The dream was largely incoherent and felt like it lasted five minutes, but it reality it didn't even last five seconds before I woke up to my mom and my brother staring at me as I lay on the white-tiled floor - they didn't even have time to react.

This panic attack is incredibly interesting to me for a couple of reasons, notably the fact that I dreamed. I've heard people tell me that it's not possible to dream while unconscious, so I'm not quite sure what happened. The attack itself was strange because it was instant, and managed to black me out; normally there's buildup of tension, and I don't succumb to it.

After that one panic attack, however, things got mostly better. I still worried about silly things, but I was able to tell myself "you're just being paranoid, calm down, that's not likely to happen." I'd used that reasoning in the past without much success, but now it seemed to be working. Within a year I was mostly fixed from my incident.

Then something recurred, and at a really horrible time.

Don't forget, tomorrow is Ride Your Caterpie To Work Day!

This isn't a serious display of skill, it's just my brother in a hilarious-sounding kart. He normally plays much better... but seriously, just LISTEN to it. And look at it. Makes Luigi's death stare much less threatening, no?

Ride Your Caterpie To Work Day is just a dumb joke between my brother and I. I know it's a Wiggler.

Job assessments from the deep: The repetitive redundancies.

How many places have you worked at in the past? None, this is my first job.

How many times have you been fired? None, because this is my first job...

How many times have you received a promotion? Didn't I just answer that a second ago?

How many times have you been suspended from work? Look, I know this is an automated program, but you could've at least programmed in a skip for these questions.

Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.

Randall Munroe, xkcd

"Say that again...?"

You know those moments when someone says something and you're not paying attention? My brain somehow has a fix for that. Obviously the easy way is to ask what the person said and wait for an answer, but of course I'm weird and I don't just do that. When I say "What?" I'm not always looking for an answer; it's usually buffer time so I can reconstruct the sentence in my head.

What my brain does is actually timeshift the input and play it back again within the span of a few milliseconds. I'm essentially rehearing it, even if I wasn't paying full attention the first time. I'm not quite sure how my brain does this, considering it often couldn't hear/wasn't listening at the time - where does it get the memory from? Even if I missed the whole sentence and not just part of it, it can still miraculously reconstruct it.

If the process succeeds, then, to the person I'm talking to, it seems like I just said "What?" and answered like nothing happened. If it doesn't succeed, and I end up with pieces and parts of a sentence, my brain keeps trying (usually three or four times) until the other person answers me.

I don't know why or how I do this, but it even affects repeat offenses; if I didn't hear it again, then I wait longer to ask, so that I have more time to reconstruct it. I don't like asking more than once, because I feel like it's annoying the other person, so I try harder to reconstruct so that it's not necessary to ask twice.

This is all automatic by the way - I'm not actively doing this. But I can't be the only one who does this, right? I'm not crazy, right? Right?

Paranoia, pt. 1: A tale of two hurricanes

Over the next few days I'm going to do something a little different - I'm going to tell a story about myself. It's rather dark, and certainly not my usual blog fare. However, not a lot of people know about it (it's not a story that gets brought up in casual conversation, after all). I wanted to get it out there so that people can understand me a little bit better, because it still affects my decisions today. So, without further ado:

*ahem*

The year was 2004. A tiny little hurricane developed in the Gulf of Mexico; forecasters dubbed it "Katrina." No one thought anything of it until it grew enormously in size and headed for New Orleans, Louisiana. You likely know this story, of how it flooded thousands of homes, cost many lives, and crashed the entire city in one fell swoop.

That storm did not affect my area at all. In fact, my family had just moved away from New Orleans, far from the war path of this beast of a storm. However, my dad, who was (still is) in the National Guard, was sent out with the rest of his company to rescue and rebuild. He's got lots of stories from then, about the "toxic gumbo" (aka the incredibly nasty flood water) and houses that were simultaneously flooded and on fire.

At about the same time, another hurricane came up from the Gulf toward our area. It wasn't nearly as big as Katrina, of course, but it was large enough for us to evacuate. My dad was still stationed in NO, but my mom and I left with some church friends bound for safe living arrangements. I remember riding in a truck hauling an RV, doing my homeschool work in the back seat, and chatting with the other travelers when I was done (or staring at the GPS pretending the arrow was firing lasers). I also remember arriving at our destination late at night, thunder in the distance, as it was kind of stormy there too.

...That's actually the last thing I remember for about a week's time. Next thing I knew I was at another city where my dad was temporarily stationed, staying in a trailer for two weeks, before we would head home to find that everything was okay... except for me. I was not okay. I was afraid of everything.

The whole situation snapped me in half. My mom remembers me being unable to sleep and being worried that the people we were staying with were poisoning our food. If that sounds crazy, it's because I was slowly going mad; my imagination was scaring me to death, and I developed a serious paranoia problem. Even where my memory picks up - at the other city we were staying at - it's not pretty.

The first instance that I can remember of this new paranoia problem I developed was at Wal*Mart, of all places. A lot of people were being called to the front, and I was worried that they were calling random customers up to brainwash them or kill them or something evil. I had my first panic attack because of all this, where I nearly fainted several times while simultaneously stifling screams that I was about to die.

I really wish I were making this up. Between worrying about poisoned food at any new restaurant we ate at, worrying about horrible things that any stranger could do, and finally the panic attacks that immobilized me in terror, I was a paranoid mess.

Finally, after two or three weeks of living hell for both me and my parents, we finally went home to see that nothing horrible had happened after all. In fact, a tree that by all laws of physics should have fallen on our house, miraculously landed parallel to it. But I wasn't really afraid of the hurricane itself that whole time, I was just afraid of anything - and because of that, the paranoia lingered for a while.