Here's To Feeling Bad All The Time

Physician, Heal Thyself

In July of 2013 I hallucinated for the first time. Like many zillenial narcissists, I spend much of the quiet hours looking for the nexus point of my current neuroses. I have not narrowed it down. In fact it seems frequent reflection on the past only adds dimension to my origin, creates more inciting incidents. For the purposes of a story though, I’ll try to ride a line between the mundane and the maudlin. You can’t open a conversation or an essay with the worst day of your life, but neither can you try to weave an engaging personal narrative from the million little maladaptive responses stretched over years which ultimately serve as the sediment layer for psychosis.

So I’ll start here: a now dead media company called Rooster Teeth had just released their second trailer for the now dead web series called “RWBY”. For whatever reason I latched onto this “White” trailer. The trailer was one giant action set piece scored with the beautiful crooning of a girl who was unbelievably only a few years older than myself. I watched it for hours. It might’ve locked me in a kind of hypnagogic state. My father found me semicatatonic on the floor, entranced in front of my laptop and, questioning the future of his bloodline, sent me to bed. Maybe it was the sudden change in environment, going from bright anime girls fighting giant androids to the quiet black of my damp bedroom, and my brain fill in the gaps in sensation. I can’t know. But I heard that song floating into my room from the hallway. As a kid you’re scared of shit all of the time but that feeling, the freezing of the guts and total sensory blindness which came on me that night, was real terror. I know it’s what I will feel if I’m ever faced with my execution. The song repeated a few times, softer, until it finally reduced to a hum. That night was also the first time I was faced with insomnia.

I was not surprised to be crazy. My adolescence came with a warning. My dad said “If we’re gonna go crazy, we typically do it around this time.” In my head I saw a hundred versions of myself locked in a cell, screaming. But diseases of the mind, at least those endemic to my bloodline, rarely progress like that. You weather a thousand psychic injuries until the last one bursts you and you’re just a lunatic now. Up until then you’d been alright, in fact you’d been a model citizen so those who love you are slow to recognize that your mind is gone. You have to do something. And then they’ll call it a sudden break when really the lights have been off for years.

I am desperate to keep the hereditary lunacy off of me. In the last few years I’ve seen members of my father’s family fall to this and it is terrifying. What I wouldn’t do for one of these people to instead develop a dope habit and sling slurs at passersby. Once the sickness has set in, their life is given over to narcissistic schemes that I’m not even sure they know they’re operating. I have seen two clans demolished entirely by this blood sickness. The entire process is Freudian.I’ve seen 50 and 60-year-olds, lifelong professionals, engineers, politicians, reduced to vindictive little sandbox terrorists. I’ve often said I would rather die of cancer than psychosis.

In the weeks following that first episode, I learned what schizophrenia was, diagnosed myself with it, then cleared myself of it. It’s a cycle I would undergo yearly until after I’d finished college, each time the insomnia worsening, the hypochondria becoming more like paranoid fits, the mind becoming more frail, less able to “snap back” and function like it used to. In 2020, having been failed by doctor prescribed SSRIs and antipsychotics, I discovered Nootropics.

Nootropics. 5 years ago I think this hobby was almost mainstream. Creators like MorePlateMoreDates had the dumbest men alive talking about efficacious doses. Throwing dubiously sourced vasodilators into preworkout shakes. India’s supply of Cialis halved all so a 19yo can get the veiniest pumps. I personally felt like a fin de siècle mad scientist. Haunting forums like Nootropics reddit and Bluelight, sharing my own recipes. L-citrulline and Taurine to master physical and mental anxiety, Snow Fungus for perfect skin, Turkey Tail and Red Reishi to obliterate cancers. I really thought I could save a loved one’s life if only I could convince them to take 6 grams of this mushroom supplement.

I am not God’s only idiot. People with brains similarly beleaguered by neurosis jump into the world of research chemicals and n=1 and SWIMposting and in a few months you’ll see them on LionsManeRecovery because Lion’s Mane, which has become for the miracle seeking depressive an “antipanacea”, stole from them the ability to feel joy and the ability to get hard and the ability to see the color red. If you speak to these people you’ll find they’ve never spoken to a professional of any kind.

Teenagers and Twenty-somethings hit the forums with questions like will Amanita Muscaria fix my rumination? can I microdose Prozac? will a threshold dose of MDMA help me focus? Ketamine for Kratom recovery, Kratom for anxiety, anxiety because they feel their heartbeat in their fingers when they’re trying to sleep.

I tell you, any sort of power you exert over yourself in these times is intoxicating. I understand teenage girls who slit their wrists. Whenever I find a problem with myself and then fix it with drugs I feel like I’m fording new rivers. The first good night’s sleep after finding Ganoderma Lucidum produced a euphoria in me that I have never again experienced. I fixed breakfast the next morning feeling for the first time like a man who had mastered something. And I don’t think anything can be as mentally satisfying, not for someone who has been estranged from himself. How ridiculous is it that dominion over your own body should often be so far beyond reach?

A friend of mine has compared our social group to a kind of pirate ship. I’ve always claimed the role of doctor in this allegory. And why shouldn’t I? I know a lot. And sometimes I’ve really helped people. I’ve counciled women on antipsychotics, prescribed the synergistic herbs and nootropics. I can source (almost) any drug anyone’s ever needed. There’s essentially no substance that I’m not intimately familiar with. However, there’s essentially no substance that I’m not intimately familiar with. Someone will post an article about some drug and of course I know about it, I used to inject it into my thigh but I don’t anymore because it might have caused varicose veins.

I’d like to write a theory of mind for the zoomer who pops pills like their parents did but instead of having fun they microdose LSD to write code faster. But ultimately, I would just create another lens through which to view my own psychology. So why bother with the framing device? I would like to be in a Beat novel maybe, I would like to wander, I would like to put the first boot prints on new land. But all the YMCAs are closed, there are no ten cent lockers and 25 dollar hotels. Or maybe I want to be a wise elder, a pillar of the community, and so I scramble for any kind of territory? Guy who knows which powders give you better erections. Maybe I’m wiling away the hours until I crack or I die.

And perhaps the crack is near; this hobby invites so many private crises into your life. How can I tell anyone that the reason I’m panicking is the FDA has moved on imports of a research chemical I have been using since last October to lower my pulse and blood pressure, and should I suddenly discontinue this substance my heart will most definitely explode? It’s so embarrassing. But what am I supposed to do, die? Explain my predicament to a doctor, beg him for a blister of Clonidine? No, too far. I say I’ve earned a healthy mistrust of doctors, but to say this is to say the inverse: I’ve earned a healthy trust of myself. But this isn’t true. In fact, I have made so many disastrous missteps in my journey of “self-healing”. I mixed an herbal MAOI with a prescription SSRI and fainted on the way home from the gym. I mixed about 3 different stimulants with a nicotine habit and gave myself afib. I spent two years so desperate to be rid of insomnia, I intentionally dosed myself with a mushroom whose effects on the mind can only be likened to a neurotoxin. When I ditched Red Reishi I related suddenly to the protagonist of Flowers for Algernon. For so long I had been trying to live my life with a heavy stone sitting on my brain. And for what reason? Months on, I can’t justify it. I've spent 6 years inflicting my own psychic wounds and I cannot tell you why. Is this a conclusion?

I understand now that I have all the risk factors for developing schizophrenia and every manner of psychosis. I also understand that somehow I have remained on the cusp of total psychosis for over ten years without breaking through. I say “somehow” instead of “through the power of thousands and thousands of dollars spent on nootropics, stimulants, supplements, and injections” because I no longer know if I believe in any of it. I don’t know if the months and sometimes years of lucidity I’ve managed is due to substances or just the power of good vibes, and the force of true belief in a thing, anything, to have an extraordinary and profound effect on me.

John Henry Davis is a writer, editor, and educator. He was the lead editor for Tales of the Unreal volumes 1 and 3, cohosted The Unreal Press Podcast, and is currently Editor in Chief for Unreal: The Magazine.