Psychopathology

I write this hoping someday someone else can benefit from knowing my experiences. Actually, maybe I'm just writing this so I can try to make someone understand what's happened to me. I know I can't be the only one who has experienced this. I wish to God I could find the other. But no, I will believe that there are no others. I would not wish this on anyone else in the world. But if our travels ever bring us together, friend, maybe in the brief moments before we run from each other I can give you this record. Maybe it will help you in some way. And maybe it will help me just to know you exist.

I don't remember anymore exactly when it started. Was it that night I woke up screaming? Was it when the dreams I kept having wouldn't leave me alone, even when I was awake? I can't remember. But it did happen.

I hear minds.

You're probably thinking I mean telepathy. Maybe some form of clairvoyance. No, I mean what I said, I hear MINDS. Not the thoughts you solidify enough in your head to become coherent ideas, but the entire jumbled mess behind it. How many images/feelings/fragments/words/ideas/memories flash through your mind even in the space of five minutes? You aren't even aware of most of them for more than a split second. The few that make their way up to the surface of your mind are only a tiny fraction of the babbling roiling mass of... of mayhem that constantly shifts under the visible portion of your brain. And I hear it! All of it! All the time! Do you understand?? Every face, every body that passes by me is just a rubbery shell for the hideous constantly shifting liquid of emotions and images that swirl through them. And for that moment when we pass I see through the shell, I am thrust into the maelstrom. The woman who is wondering if her lipstick is still on while she remembers her father holding her and tries to forget the loneliness she feels and the song she heard a second ago on the radio plays and oh god how am I going to pay the hospital bill... And all that is just the visible part of one second of her mind.

At first I could not help but feel their pain, their joys, their hopes, their fears. All of it blasted into my defenseless psyche. I no longer know who I am or what I feel because it cannot compare to the immenseness of the emotions of some of those I have seen exposed. All those dull faces... you would never think that they were capable of some of the things I hear. Every one leaves their mark on my mind. There are hundreds of marks now. Even as I am here, so far from everyone and everything, I can't keep the still life photographs of each person from resurfacing almost constantly. It has been months at least now, I am certain, though I cannot remember how I got here or when. I just recently have become capable of seeing through my own eyes again. Perhaps you, friend, have found a way to adapt, to shut off or seal yourself against the invasion. I pray you have, or that you have been able to find solace somewhere alone as well. Perhaps one day we can return to the world, able to use this gift/curse with more finesse. Until then, I hope you are well, even as I hope that you do not exist.

But if you do...

Please.

Find me.