The strangest part about losing your mind is that you don’t feel like you’ve lost anything. If anything, you feel like you’ve finally found the thread that has been tugging at the back of your consciousness your entire life. When psychosis comes for me, it doesn’t announce itself with some dramatic cinematic collapse. It arrives quietly—like a shift in the weather. A small off-ness in the air. A sense that something is “different,” that symbols mean more than they should, that strangers are glancing at me because they know. For a few days, I can still tell something is wrong. I’ll even say it out loud sometimes: “Something feels off. Something is happening.” But the people around me can’t see the machinery turning inside my head yet. It’s all internal at first.
I stop sleeping. That’s always the first real crack. Three days without sleep and I feel electric, euphoric, chosen. My thoughts race so quickly that I begin speaking in torrents, jumping between ideas, patterns, symbols. Suddenly everything around me has a secret message embedded in it—billboards, street signs, numbers on receipts. It’s as if the entire world has shifted into a different frequency, and only I can interpret it.
During my last psychotic break, I believed I was Lillith—yes, the ancient mythological demon. I felt it. Not metaphorically. Literally. It was the most intoxicating, terrifying kind of certainty. I thought I was meant to free the world from bondage, that interdimensional beings were communicating with me, guiding me. Their messages were everywhere; I just had to decode them. I walked for days, talking to strangers, recruiting “followers,” most of whom were homeless and willing to entertain me long enough to swindle five thousand dollars out of me. I didn’t notice the sunburn. I didn’t notice that I hadn’t eaten in days. I didn’t notice that my skin was crepe-paper thin or that I was falling asleep standing up. All I could feel was the mission.
My body was collapsing, but my mind was euphoric.
What’s hardest to describe is this: I wasn’t thinking. I was doing. There was no introspection. No “should I?” No inner narrator. Just action. My memories from those days are snapshots—blurred, intense, surreal. I remember moments, but not the “why” behind them. I wrote on walls. I stole things and hid them in my clothing. I spoke about quantum mechanics to every question the ER doctor asked. And in my mind, all of it made perfect sense.
My friends eventually tricked me into the emergency room. They told me, “Just talk to someone.” I agreed because I was so sure they’d see I was sane. My conviction was absolute. That’s the thing about psychosis: certainty becomes its own kind of prison.
The memory of what happened next is clear, even though I was out of my mind. The doctor listened to me ramble, and I thought I was impressing him. I thought I was proving my stability. When he stepped out of the room, I told my friends, “See? He believes me.” And then the security guard walked in. He stood by the door. I tried to leave. They didn’t let me. I yelled. I gave them my work credentials as if that would prove I was sane enough to walk out. They held me down. I felt hands on my shoulders, my legs, and a needle in my arm. And then everything went black.
When I woke up, I was strapped to a gurney, halfway to the mental hospital.
The hospital itself wasn’t abusive—not like in movies. Most of the nurses were kind. A couple were snotty and dismissive, which made everything worse, because when you’re psychotic, every tone, every glance gets interpreted through paranoia. But the good ones listened. The good ones recognized that the simple act of treating me like a human could de-escalate me more effectively than any sedative.
I remember one moment vividly. I was convinced another patient wanted to kill me. I was screaming that either he went or I went. One nurse snapped at me. Another led me to my room, sat next to me, and asked, “What do you need right now to feel safe?” That was the difference between panic and calm.
It took about a week for the medications to settle me enough to leave. But even then, the delusions lingered. Psychosis doesn’t turn off like a switch; it fades like a fever dream. I could still feel the old beliefs ghosting around the edges of my mind, but they no longer held power over me.
The hardest part comes afterward. The depression. The crash. The unbearable heaviness that follows the mania. For me, the depression is more dangerous than the psychosis. It’s the part where I feel suicidal. Where the guilt hits. Where the awareness returns—awareness of what I said, what I did, who I scared, who held me together while I was gone.
My loved ones don’t realize how much their guilt weighs on me. They say things like “I wish I’d noticed sooner,” or “I should’ve known,” or “I’m sorry, maybe I upset you.” But psychosis doesn’t need a reason, and it doesn’t need a villain. My mind villainized my husband once, convinced myself he was trying to hurt me, and I slapped him—more than once. He forgave me. He said he knew it wasn’t really me. But I still replay it.
I’ve apologized for things I barely remember doing. Once I left a voicemail for my best friend, apologizing in advance if she didn’t want to be friends with me anymore. She said she cried when she heard it because all she wanted was for me to get better.
Here’s something people don’t understand unless they’ve lived it:
Once you’ve lost your mind, you can never fully trust it again.
That uncertainty becomes part of you. You learn to build anchors outside yourself—family, friends, meds, routines. You cling to those anchors even on days when your brain insists you don’t need them.
I’ve been hospitalized three times. Twice after childbirth—postpartum psychosis misdiagnosed as severe depression. And once after Adderall triggered a manic psychosis because I had undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Now I’m medicated correctly. Now I know the early signs. Now my loved ones know what to watch for. But I still worry about a fourth time.
If I were alone in the world, I don’t know how I’d survive this illness.
But I’m not alone. And that’s what saved me.
Not the hospital.
Not the meds.
The people who refused to give up on me—even when I wasn’t really “me.”