20

I lay in bed, waiting to hear voices.

My psychiatrist has asked me if I have heard voices, and told me if I do I’m to ignore them, so hearing voices must be a possibility.

I’m nineteen, and new to anxiety, panic attacks, and everything implicit. I don’t know what I’m facing. I don’t know what might come. I don’t know anything, so a mental health professional is logically my guide.

I’ve never been so conscious of my thoughts. Like everybody, I think about what I might have to do, but only inasmuch as how it connects to do what I need to do in the world around me – going out, looking for a job, my writing, and all that.

Everybody has things like this. Everybody has their own shit in life.

You think about what needs to be done and externalize to do it.

Most of the time, we’re on autopilot. For example, we don’t really think about the act of making breakfast. We might think about what we want, but it doesn’t go much deeper than that.

That’s so much of life – routines that serve as programs that kick into action when required, like phone apps designed to handle each of our needs. They’re so enmeshed in who we are, our whims and obligations, that we become servants to their parameters.

But this is different, because my mind’s retreated from the world, if not recoiled, and is now exhaustively examining every sensation that goes through my body, and every thought that pops up in my head.

Is that cramp in my left arm just a cramp? Or is it a symptom of a heart attack? What’s that tightness in my stomach? Could it be appendicitis? Do I need to get that checked? What’s that lump on my hip? Is it cancer?

Things that never once would’ve rated a mention become all-consuming.

And the thoughts are worse.

Why am I suddenly nervous around knives? I worry I’ll seize one, snap, and stab somebody. What is the fixation on the number 6? Why is there a fixation? Am I still who I’m meant to be, or have I lost grip on my reality, but just don’t know it?

Because that happens – I know it happens. I’ve seen it happen. A friend, Pat, is schizophrenic, and hears voices telling him that some people are vessels for the devil. This is his reality. He’ll sit there, listening, lost to a world nobody else can enter, listening to voices only he can hear.

That’s what I dread most – losing myself and never knowing it.

These fears are fireworks, whizzing around, exploding spectacularly, a light show that highlights the boundlessness of my mind, and just how terrifyingly unexplored it is beyond the territory that has so far governed my life.

It’s not just becoming self-aware, but hyper-aware.

And, right now, I’m scared I’ll hear voices, that they’ll call to me, coax me, say the most unconscionable things, but worse than that is the madness they’ll introduce me to.

Then what happens?

I think I would embrace losing myself so wholly I’d never know any better, and that the rational part of me will become trapped forever, a prisoner in an obliterated consciousness of irreconcilable insanity.

All it takes is that one voice, that first voice, and I’ll be underway.

I listen.

I listen.

I listen …