The good, the bad, and the insane

[Droopy]

I used to own a couple of rifles. That is until my dad came over to my house and found one loaded laying on a chair the day after I was committed to a hospital psychiatric ward. Dad took my guns then and he still has them.

I think he thought that I was going to shoot myself with one of them. That idea had been going through my head for some time, but it wasn't the case the night before he found my loaded gun. I had every intention of shooting someone else then.

I owned this big, beautiful townhouse at the time. It was in bad shape when I bought it. I was in the process of fixing it up with the idea of selling it for a profit when the bad stuff went down. A friend of the family was helping me fix up the place. He was very proud of the work he was doing there and he would sometimes bring a couple of his friends over to view the progress.

I was crazier than hell at the time, but I was good at hiding it I guess. When I was admitted to the hospital my folks were surprised. They knew that something wasn't quite right with me, but they never expected anything as serious as psychosis.

One night after I got home from work I was obsessing about what was happening to me. I thought everybody could read my mind and see my most private thoughts. Then my paranoia turned to my friend and his friends. I started having memories of them performing sex acts on me. Only it wasn't "me." It was one of my multiple personalties. I was recovering memories from those other personalities. The walls between them were starting to get holes in them. It turned out that they had actually known me from the time I was a child and that they had performed those acts since then and they had actually made me have multiple personalities. They had programmed me from the beginning to be a kind of toy for them. I laid there in bed in the middle of the night with all of that going through my head. I had to escape from them.

Then I heard footsteps downstairs. Someone was in the house. I got up and scrambled for my clothes and locked myself in the upstairs bathroom. There was a little closet in the bathroom where I kept my guns and ammo. I picked a rifle and loaded it. I was shaking horribly. I heard footsteps outside the bathroom door. Then I heard voices. They were whispering, but I could hear them through the duct work to the register in the bathroom. They were talking about how I knew now. They were discussing what they should do. I cocked the trigger and started yelling.

"I got a gun you motherfuckers! And I'm gonna put a bullet in the first person who tries to come in here!"

I heard someone say "oh, shit!" and I heard scrambling outside of the door. I stood there sweating and breathing hard for a while. I could hear more whispers. They were talking about how they should have known sooner.

I had to get out of there. I stood behind the door for a few minutes. Then I went. I unlocked the door and threw it open all in one motion. I jumped out of the doorway with the cocked rifle in my hands like a member of a SWAT team. I saw two people duck back behind a doorway to one of the bedrooms. I ran down the stairs and out the front door. Then I realized that I still had the gun and I uncocked it and threw it back into the house into a chair by the door. The I ran out to my truck, hopped in and sped off into the night.

I didn't stop until I got about 80 miles from the house down south of Cincinnati. I got a hotel room. It was about 4AM.

I wasn't able to sleep. I called my mom and yelled at her for a little while. I thought she was a part of the conspiracy to keep me a mind controlled sex slave. She talked me into coming home. I gave her hell for a little while longer, but she talked me into going to the hospital.

"Welcome to the system, Tobin. We've been waiting for you." I passed out in the emergency room.

[EFerrari]

1. Dear sweet lord.

:hug:
:grouphug:

Doug never was able to verbalize what he went through as you just did. But, his fearfulness always became attached to whoever he was living with and for 12 years, that was me. I was this, that and the other bad thing. He had me arrested, tried to end me, told everyone very earnestly that I was this, that and the other bad thing.

And because what he said sounded reasonable, mostly no one understood what he was going through.

TG for better days, Droopy.

[stillcool]

2. the good, the bad, and the insane too...

I was four years old, and it was my birthday. I went to school, kindergarten that is, on a blue bus. The school was down the street from where my sister lived, about a half hour or so away from where I lived. My dad came to the school and gave me a present. It is a memory I can only describe as pure joy. The kind that you can't contain. He told me not to open it until I got home from school, but I opened it as soon as he left. It was an inflatable duck, and it was the best present I've ever gotten.
My Dad stayed with me, in the house I lived in. He'd been in a mental hospital/de-tox/whatever. What I remember is sitting on the bunk bed, and my cousin telling me that if I told anyone my dad would go away. I didn't tell, but he went away anyway. He always did.
I was seven, and I stayed at my grandma's house in the summer. My sister and I went to church every Sunday. One week, our cousins went with us. Something happened with lighting votive candles. It seems, on the way home, I learned that I had a mother, and that she was dead.
Lots of static, mostly fuzzy with intermittent clarity. The main problem is that the picture flashes so quickly, in the midst of all that static, it's hard to perceive any sequence. I've tried to see it before, in therapy and fourth steps. The truth is covered up by a lot of the static, and the picture will not stay still for examination. It's really guess work. Maybe all life is.
Troubled water under burned bridges. Stuck on the ramp to life, or death. Watching all the passers-by. I hate/I love/I'm scared. It seems when ever my life happens I'm not paying attention. My yard-stick is too big for my life.

[hunter]

3. It's the damnedest thing...

When I'm stable I remember all that stuff and the extreme intensity of the emotions, but it's like :wtf:

Your story with the guns scares the hell out of me. I'm maybe quicker to run. I get out and go, and it doesn't occur to me to stay and fight once things go beyond the extreme verbal fireworks.

The worst firestorm of my life (which wasn't entirely inside my head since there really were some intolerable experiences leading into it) I jumped out of a moving car.

If anything can get your attention, leaving skin on the street will do it.

It's good there was something inside you to tell'm you had a gun, and again that you left the gun on the chair. Sounds awful, but that went right.