Diamonds From Lucy

Hours have passed as if they were seconds and the days have changed... yet the moments remain the same, withered and morose. Every attempt to reach out to strangers in hopes of further grasping the friendship experience has returned void... most just ignored the requests, rather than relishing in spewing forth hurtful accusations and judgement. Thank the stars for small miracles. Perhaps the cat was right, this is a fruitless expedition... for the time being, we shall pack away the tea and biscuits. Even the ants have had their fill in this delicious torment.

After years of being ill, I've discovered something new about myself... misunderstood symptoms and new understandings arise, arise. I've always told my doctors that I rarely suffered from visual hallucinations... just the normal internal negative running commentary and external voices. Recently, I was in the kitchen eating some cereal and lost in thought as I casually watched insects of some origin, scampering across the counter-tops. This is nothing unusual... it's become commonplace to see things that aren't really there. So much so, that I have to count things repeatedly to make sure I'm seeing things correctly  as a form of a security / safety checking process. You see, I've always thought these "hallucinations" were actually LSD flashbacks... least that was my understanding. Many years ago, one of my routines was tripping on acid every other day for a total of 9 months... in that time, ingesting over 400 hits of acid. In a recent conversation with my therapist, he told me that it was his impression that an LSD flashback was seeing something that you had seen before while under the influence of LSD... for example, if you met a Leprechaun while tripping and it came back to visit you at a future time while you were lucid, that would be a flashback. I always thought a flashback was a hallucination that one would experience while they were sober... kind of like seeing something that wasn't there and saying to yourself, "Wow, am I fucking tripping or what?". As if the chemicals and toxins had stored themselves permanently in your spinal cord and for a moment you actually were tripping again briefly. It's now my understanding that this isn't the case at all... they are visual hallucinations directly related to my schizophrenia. So it appears that I suffer from visual hallucinations quite frequently afterall... every day, several times a day, as a matter of fact. I was then asked how I felt about this and if I found it upsetting to become more aware of my illness and symptoms. Honestly, it didn't upset me at all... I found it interesting. I've been dealing with these images and checks for a very long time, so it's nothing new to me... if anything, it brought me clarity and one step closer in learning how to live with this disease.