Hello,

I am a twenty-five-year-old musician. At the age of sixteen, I became socially isolated. The only people I communicated with were my parents. I left school and devoted my attention to books, music and philosophy, practicing fasting and meditation, was a strict vegan, adhering to an ideology–originally encouraged by my father–that indirectly espoused hermitism. Consequently, I thought it was wrong to have friends and even worse to have romantic feelings or inclinations.

As time went on, I became more and more withdrawn. I went to live in a succession of isolated rural locations with my father. Philosophy was our main topic of conversation. He discouraged me from getting a job or joining society. I spent a lot of time with nature and had zero contact with other people. It was a stark, unemotional existence with moments of beauty, silence and clarity.

By the age of twenty-two, I had started to experience an almost debilitating sense of loneliness. I had never had a job, never held anyone’s hand, never been kissed, had no friends, had never been to a party or owned a mobile phone. I felt all of these things made me so much less than my more experienced peers. It was easy to avoid comparison when I was completely isolated, but when my father and I moved back to the city, I started performing my music publicly as a soloist.

I found out there was an entire scene of young musicians who appreciated the the same kind of art and music and literature as I did, things I never imagined others my age would know about. This instilled a longing to know them… coupled with sorrow at the impossibility of my being accepted, because I knew nobody would be able to relate to me. That is how it felt. I was so shy I could hardly speak. I knew nothing about ‘normal’ things.

But one of them did accept me–or, at least, he tried to. We started playing music together and doing some recording. We loved all the same writers. His friends showered me in praise. I had never experienced such happiness. For others, it would have been very ordinary. For me, it was a kind of miracle–to be liked and welcomed by people my age. I walked around in a daze of joy.

He acted as if he had romantic feelings for me. The feelings I developed for him went against everything I had been teaching myself. It felt wrong and forbidden to ‘fall in love’ with someone. Therefore, I suppressed it. I never reacted to anything he did. I was friendly but indifferent. Inside, I was a conflict of devotion and terror. I kept trying to sever ties with him, but returning to my former isolation frightened me.

It all went terribly wrong after he invited me to my first ever party, where I tried alcohol for the first time and he introduced me to something else, marijuana. I had been so strictly against any form of alcohol or drug use, but my newfound feelings seemed to annihilate my common sense, and I discarded my views for the chance of being accepted. It was the biggest mistake I’d ever made. I only used it that one night. Not longer after, I had my first ever psychotic episode.

I thought he had tapped my phone and bugged my mother’s car; I thought he had hacked into my laptop, that he had sent people to follow me, that he and all his friends were against me and perhaps even wanted me dead. I even began to think he had turned my parents against me. I thought everyone was acting and that cameras followed my every move. At my worst, I became prey to a kind of maniacal solipsism; I thought the entire world was fake, something akin to a movie set, created solely for the purpose of punishing me for a crime I had no memory of committing (but felt sure I was guilty of).

This went on for many months. It was sickening. I never had any peace. I spent most of my time crying, sometimes unable to speak, other times speaking so fast nobody could understand me. I threw away my laptop and phone. I no longer had contact with him; he had cut me off, unable to deal with the sudden change in my behaviour. Thus, I was isolated again, but it was different this time, because I never, ever felt alone.

I was hospitalised and tried on various antipsychotic medications. I even ran away from the hospital at one point because I thought the staff were involved in the conspiracy. I had gone from being the most mild-mannered, stable, sane, meditative girl to someone very mentally ill. What I discovered is that there is considerable stigma attached to mental illness; when you have it, it seems like nobody likes you. That does nothing to help the pain.

When the episodes lessened somewhat, I made the decision that changing my lifestlye would help. I moved out of home and went to live in a new city on my own, sharing a room with another girl. It was a completely different way of living, with no privacy, and I found it hard to adapt. I didn’t know anyone, but I was used to that. I started playing gigs again and felt like I was getting better. For the first time in over a year, I was almost happy, even though I was more isolated than I had ever been in my life (I was not friends with the girl I shared with, having no communication with her). I was still a little paranoid, but nothing compared to what I had been.

Then, I met a boy. He was also a musician. We became very close, very quickly. He was like a salve–he didn’t use drugs at all, hardly ever tried alcohol, spoke French, loved books, was studying classical music. I became attached to him in a way I had never become attached to anyone–and, as the entire basis of the philosophy on which I was raised was about destroying attachment, this made me feel very bad about myself. More than that, I felt unworthy of him; I felt unworthy of everything. He gave me my first ever kiss. I loved him and life was beautiful like it had been back when I knew nature and simplicity, back before the mental illness, before I lost myself.

But I destroyed it, little by little. The stress of worrying that he would suddenly leave me–like the other musician had–sent me into psychosis. I started thinking this boy knew the other one, that they were both in on the conspiracy, that this boy had been sent to make a joke of me. I became increasingly clingy, to the point where I literally couldn’t let go of him when he was in the room; I sent him a barrage of text messages that made me feel sick, but I couldn’t stop. I hated myself for all of it; I felt possessed. He had said he loved me, but retracted it later; this made it even worse. I became suicidal and kept telling him I was going to kill myself. I was ensconced in self-hatred and immense sadness. I was not myself at all.

As of today, I have decided I have to cut him off, for his sake. This means I will be completely alone again. I don’t know what to do with my life. I don’t know how to get better. Sometimes I still believe there is a conspiracy and my phone is tapped. I want to disappear. I have no friends, but long for them. I spend every hour alone. I feel like I have lost what little intelligence I used to have; I can’t even write very well anymore. Everything feels pointless. It’s like there is no escape. I don’t want to lose him; he is the only friend I have ever had in my life. But I can’t stand the way I have been with him, the way I am. I feel reprehensible. It’s as if there is no way out, because I am still so behind my peers; everyone I meet thinks I am only eighteen or nineteen, when in truth I am twenty-five. I am shy and socially awkward and feel myself to be a hopeless case.