The 'We're not really talking on the phone' belief

I forgot to mention another kind of scary idea about the things I experience. Sometimes the voices I hear are people who act like they think they're talking to me on the telephone. I'm actually walking around the house, or lying in bed, or doing whatever, and talking to someone in my head. But I hear someone shouting 'Answer the f---ing phone!' Or I hear someone say 'I'm not going to hang up.'

So I have these long conversations with people in my head, and they sometimes behave as though they think it's a telephone call instead of a talking-to-Nicole's-head call. I have no way of knowing whether that's true or not. So many of the voices are just bizarre and impossible to interpret, that I can't really explain why they do what they do. All I can do is theorize.

(I used St. John's Wort today to help me get some stuff done, and that's the reason why I'm writing so much. This is the recognizable 'antidepressed' style of writing. I never used the word 'antidepressed' until I started hearing someone say it in my head. So if you notice that this is an unusual way of writing, you can just say 'Nicole is on drugs.')

I HAVE actually been answering the phone more and more often lately. But they are always telemarketing calls or calls for the previous owner of this phone number. It upsets me to imagine that maybe, someone was trying to call me, and they got redirected to some telephone twilight zone, and it automatically triggered the system to call me from some other place, from some automated telemarketers.

This is one of the vulnerabilities that 'they' have been taking advantage of: the belief that somebody is in danger and I have to help them, or someone needs me and I have to do something to make sure that person is okay. I don't like the idea that people are being kept away from me and prevented from interacting.

There is this compartmentalization of my life: the internet/blog world, and the real world. In the beginning of this summer, they tried to get me to join those two separated worlds: they got me to start blogging about my 'secret' experiences of electronic mind control, and to write about it under my own name so that I was not anonymous. The mental experiences had been going on underneath, all along, but I was not talking about it openly to anyone, and was just pretending to be a 'normal person' all day long with everybody. I was afraid that the harassment would get worse if I wrote about it in a public way.

And originally, I had been telling people quite openly what was happening to me, but it led to my getting thrown into the mental hospital (this was also caused by Prozac), and that was the point when I learned: Do Not Talk About It. The mental hospital doesn't teach you what they allegedly, supposedly are meant to teach you: On the surface, they pretend that they exist in order to convince you that your delusions are false. That's what everyone thinks the mental hospital is for - to help you get better. You're supposed to go into the hospital, get better, and leave the hospital after finally learning that yes, I was wrong, the whole thing was a delusion, I was crazy but I'm not crazy anymore. That's what they think you're supposed to do in the mental hospital. But in reality, nothing changes - you leave the hospital, and you still believe everything you believed originally (but you've lost your trust in people), and all the problems are still happening just as badly if not worse - and the only message that you learned was 'Do Not Talk About This Or We Will Lock You Up.'

My mom used to be a nurse. She told me that she sometimes worked with mental patients. I see my mother as a nice, kind person. She believes that as a nurse working with mental patients, she REALLY WAS trying to help them 'get better' or 'get well,' or at least just survive day to day. I don't actually know what she DID in her job as a nurse. I don't know if she had to give them their drugs, or what. I know that she just took care of people in the hospital but I don't know any details. I think that the individual employees in mental hospitals have some rationale for the jobs they do, and it's not their fault that, overall, the hospital plants this 'taboo' message into the patients instead of actually helping them in any way. My mother would never have said that her job was to deliberately force people to merely 'stop talking' about their mental experiences. She would have said that she was part of the team of people working to convince them of the falseness of their delusional beliefs. She would have believed that she was helping people get better. Or just helping them survive.

Anyway, that taboo on the subject was part of what compartmentalized my life. It's the 'secret identity' phenomenon. Two separate lives. One life where you have these experiences and write journals about them, and another life where you talk about ordinary things, or nothing at all, and just go to work every day.

It was a little bit of progress towards rejoining those separate worlds when I started blogging about it. But I still have a lot to do in the real world.