thereality

The reality is that I am lucky to be alive.

The reality is that the only reason I am alive is because of immense force-of-will in breaking the aripirazole addiction.

The reality is that the effort has nearly destroyed me. I have gone from being one of the most high-functioning people around to being someone who needs to sleep for 3 days to recover from an emotionally charged conversation which he wasn’t able to navigate adequately in the first place.

The reality is that I may never be the same again. This guesswork-based mental health industry, which I went to in a time of need, labelled my ptsd+audhd as mania and gave me drugs which made me depressed, and then more which made me insane.

The doctor prescribed aripirazole at low-dose for too long, despite the literature specifically warning about slow titration being dangerous, and this resulted in a chemical enlightenment which could never be replicated due to the activation curve of the drug. This in itself is a recipe for suicide.

The reality is that I am still here, somehow.

And the reality is that my world is more beautiful and real. I am more engaged in the moment than I ever have been.

I am more attuned to who I am and how I feel and I recognise my limitations and strengths and no longer criticise myself for them, though they still frustrate me.

The reality is that nibbana was my only option. My *only* option. The chemical state that drug placed me in, and the fact that it bound directly to my dopamine receptors with a metabolite half-life of around 92 hours, meant it was addiction in-and-of-itself. Inescapable. It was stronger than every single addiction I have had in my entire life all rolled into one and raised to the power of ten.

The reality is that love for my family is the only thing that brought me back. Nothing else. I was delusional. From day 4 of the medicine I knew that we were living in a sim and none of it mattered because the sim was broken. I knew that if I killed myself I would live forever in heaven. I knew that everyone and everything was an illusion, including my own self.

My family were terrified and ran away. I had to call the police to stop them leaving the island because I knew that if they did, I would die. The police called the psychiatrist to tell him how dangerous my situation was. He ignored them and increased the dose, while laughing off my wife’s concerns about potential suicide.

The reality is that my wife saved my life. Many times over. She held me in this world just by staying by my side. 

My children too, just by being there.

The reality is that finding out that my birth family have viewed me as unempathetic for this whole time was one of the major reasons I spiralled so hard. I could never quite figure out my ‘empathy supersphere’. I still haven’t.

The reality is that I empathise with them about how hard this has all been, but I don’t express it in an acceptable way.

And the reality is that this is because our experiences of the world are too different, and always have been.

I am alone in this.

I was alone in the delusion for 3 years, getting pulled deeper and deeper. There were shreds of truth in there, but it was mostly a narrative my brain concocted to make sense of how much better the world was; of how terrible I had realised my world was to that point. I had no idea how much repressed trauma I was carrying around, and it suddenly opened the gate to all of it. This drug which makes normal people feel bland and dull but placed me in utter ecstasy.

The nibbana-protocol is a recovery protocol for a brain which was broken by prescription drugs.

A brain which managed to see a way out, thanks to the teachings of the buddha, but which needed to bodge together its own approach that was suitable for a neurodivergent mind that had been sent utterly manic and completely delusional by well-meaning doctors.

But the reality is that *this is the system*.

The young doctor who labelled me manic at the start was saying what he saw and going for the safe option to slow me down. The old doctor who guessed I had adhd had no idea what he was prescribing outside of guanfacine and herbs and was overwhelmed by questions about neurotransmitters which he couldn't answer, so he gave me a drug he didn't understand, just so I'd stop talking science.

The reality is that the mental health industry nearly killed me.

It has left me broken.

I had to save my own life.

My family had to be there for me to do so.

And now I have to rebuild, from a broken brain to a better brain.

And the reality is I no longer fear death. I know it is coming.

I am lucky to be here.

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