Trigger Warning – This story contains an account of drug use. I just thought I should warn you beforehand.

I feel compelled to write and share with you this account of when things were extremely bad for me. This was my dark night of the soul (or should I say dark year of the soul) and I had never experienced fear, paranoia and desperation as intensely as I had done that year. This happened in 2012/2013 when I was at university. Why did I write this? I guess I wrote it to put my current life situation into perspective – it’s not ideal at the moment but it’s not bad either and it will pass, just like this horrific chapter in my life passed. It feels once more that I am stuck, going nowhere and not knowing what I am doing with my life but I will move out of it eventually and that at least I no longer experience the extreme fear of what I felt in 2012/2013. I’ve never really told anybody the exact details of what happened during this period either. Sometimes I still feel edgy and bitter about it but not as intensely as I used to.

I was dragged into the vortex…In my naivete I used to think being dragged into a vortex was something that sounded cool – how exciting it would be to be spirited away, to dive down into the rabbit hole, to take the red pill, to escape the real world…To be the hero in my own computer game…

Back then I had this need to please other people, and to be the craziest and the wildest. To escape from the dull and boring person I felt I had been conditioned to be all my life, as a way of sticking my fingers up to all the people who had tried to control me or make me feel less than they were. I wanted to be a wild horse, a loose cannon. Alcohol. Drugs. Chainsmoking.

Creating chaos and explosions wherever I went, doing as I damn well pleased.

Even if I knew it would damage me in some way, I still wanted to do it. For thrills. To unleash this untamed beast. To show everybody that I was an absolute badass. I didn’t care if I’d crash and burn. I just wanted to add more fuel to my fire. Feeding a very hungry ghost.

One of the first times I had tried drugs was extremely unpleasant. I was with a bunch of people I hardly knew and shouldn’t really have trusted but we were all sat in somebodies bedroom, passing a joint around. I didn’t think nothing of it, I just wanted to be fun and wild and crazy, and I was also necking an entire bottle of Mickey Finn (some kind of vodka with a strong sour fruit flavour). I remember hearing the other people talking about somebody who had spiked somebodies drink and I immediately thought “Oh shit, they’ve spiked my drink.” I staggered back to my room and after being violently sick I collapsed on the bed. All my senses were magnified. I heard this really weird high-pitched humming noise and it felt like I was on the moon. I think the fire alarm went off in the student accommodation building but I couldn’t physically move (just some prat who had set the alarm off deliberately, still it could have been a real fire). I remember hearing everybody on the courtyard and people knocking on my door – “Where’s Joe?” What if they thought I had been killed or kidnapped? I think I was convinced that I had died and they were trying to find my body. My ears were ringing and I could almost hear my parents and sisters at home, arguing and shouting about me – I’d gone and really done it this time, getting drunk and stoned, they would never forgive me for that…

Okay, I was just really drunk and stoned (and possibly spiked) at the time, to my knowledge they never found out about this incident. You’d think that I would have learned my lesson from this but oh no…

I said yes to things even when I didn’t want to do it, when I knew it would damage me and it made me sick.

Opening the doors of perception. Surely the others I was with were able to perceive things beyond their own normal cognition and I was scared that they managed to see through my disguise. He’s not hardcore at all. What a loser. Why doesn’t he just kill himself? There were cracks and folds in reality. In the corner of my eye, in my peripheral vision, my friend was no longer my friend as I knew him. His once-human face hideously distorted and stretched to resemble that of a sewer rat. When I faced him, he was him again. But not my friend. There was something about him now. A cold empty stare, filled with apathy and hate.

I felt intense hatred and apathy towards him, but I couldn’t show it. I was afraid of what might happen. I hated confrontation. As I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette, I could hear echoes of laughter from the living room. My housemates were somehow consorting with people I had known from school who had made my life miserable back then, and they were all laughing at my expense.

Some times, but only on a rare occasion, it was fun. An escape, a nice distraction. One pill afforded me an hour of such bliss like I had never experienced before. I felt like I was made of light and I could feel the vibrations, that which many people describe in stories of out of body experiences. I felt pure love, even towards somebody I was not even close to. If I could, I could have probably willed myself to simply float away like a helium balloon.

I took the same again at a party – the intense love feelings happened again but to the point where I was reduced to tears. The effects soon wore off but I stayed up the whole night trying desperately to pick myself up after the chemical comedown. I must have smoked 40 cigarettes that night. I couldn’t even get drunk. The harsh brutal light of morning came, and we vampires scuttled off to bed. The dreadful feeling of the morning after. I lay in the room – there were no curtains and the harsh light made the room feel cold and chilly. At the side of my bed was a plastic toy skull which I had bought from a halloween shop a few years before. Just a silly little object I liked to keep as an ornament. It leered at me. I could tell. To another person, it would have just looked like a plastic toy skull but it was glaring at me. Mocking me. Warning me. Reminding me that I’m descending into a dark place. I remember being freaked out at this skull.

Another pill took me into a vivid nightmarish scenario where it seemed like the others were once again able to see through my disguise. At first, it felt like the euphoria of what I felt, but it soon turned to brutal shivering. This intoxicating realm of violent neon chemical purples, greens and oranges was cold and uninviting, and I shivered violently. More cold empty stares from my space companions. Why was it they were having great experiences and I was going through hell? We were watching a film and the colour cyan/teal featured prominently in that film. I perceived that as having some kind of significance.

Another brutal morning after where the effects had worn off. I had enough. I didn’t want to go down this road after all.

I don’t think I was the same after that. The crappy terraced student house I had been living in was now a haunted house. A portal, a gateway into hell. The house mates who resided there were now nothing more than parasites. Vampires. The living dead. More soulless stares.

“Aren’t you going to join in anymore?”

I hated them. I fantasized ways to bring about their downfall. I wished them dead.

Outside the haunted house, it felt as if the world was different. I felt as though I was now in a parallel world. It looked exactly the same as the one I had left but it was devoid of feeling. The people I knew and saw were merely clones, doppelgangers of their real counterparts that I had known in the real world.

There was no going back to that world. Nothing I could do could change that.

I’d notice cyan/teal coloured things and remember the state I was in that night. This was significant somehow and I was somehow scared by it. Why is this teal? I could have sworn that this was red before.

I would watch late night cartoons where the characters would be joking about sausages. I’d switch the channel to another cartoon and they are also joking about sausages. Is this connected? Why is this significant? I felt uneasy.

Strangers would give me more soulless stares in the street when I walked past them.

Classmates I barely spoke to making light-hearted banter but to me it seemed like a vicious attack.

The landlord phoning me to tell me that he didn’t receive the rent money when I had gave it to the letting agent (luckily he did find it), there was a sharp jolt as it felt like I had been shot through the heart.

The preacher who had taken it upon himself to approach me in the street, a scared confused 20 year old goth with black and red hair, piercings, black leather jacket and large combat boots, and tell me that if I didn’t renounce my lifestyle choices and taste in music I would be going to hell. Looking back now, I thought it was ironic because I was literally in hell already. I walked away quickly, telling him I wasn’t interested.

Somebody else in the subpass who was as equally freaked out as I was when I walked past.

Some old acquaintances of mine who had uploaded a photo to Facebook of the time where I had gotten so drunk, I had been violently sick everywhere. They were laughing and reminiscing about this incident at my expense.

My bank balance going overdrawn from all the times I sought solace in junk food, alcohol and cigarettes. I didn’t want to stay at the haunted house, I would go to restaurants and pubs just to get out of the house. I would go for long walks to the petrol station to buy cigarettes and whiskey.

The time the bathroom door had gotten jammed and I panicked.

All of these occurrences were somehow connected, it seemed. I was only going to attract more bad luck. I was cursed, somehow. It soon started to increase and it became more insidious.

An innocent lunch at the cafe with my friends where one of my friends joked that the cake I was eating was poisoned. Shot through the heart again. Was I really being poisoned?

Making out faces in clouds, in trees from a distance, in the stony texture of the wall. More soulless faces staring. Offering no comfort whatsoever. I was surrounded by Roarsch blots and they were soulless faces staring at me.

Walking to the bus stop at evening. I could see the hills. I could see street lamps. More Roarsch blots but this time they were rabbits. I thought they were all the shapes of grotesque mangled rabbit ears.

Rabbits. I had always made an association between rabbits and a descent into madness. Harvey the imaginary rabbit in that film. Lennie hallucinates that a rabbit is talking to him at the end of ‘Of Mice And Men’. Frank, the man in the rabbit costume in Donnie Darko. And of course, the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, leading Alice down the rabbit hole into a bizarre, surreal, screwed up world.

Rabbits would just follow me everywhere. On TV. In books. On the internet. On advertisements. In shop displays. Every time I saw a rabbit, the feeling of being shot through the heart occurred every time. Oh no, I groaned. I’m going mad.

Intellectually I clung to this notion that it was nothing, but I was scared for my life. Scared for my sanity. I had all of these irrational thoughts – I knew they were irrational but I was still horrified.

When the landlord had misplaced the rent money that previous week, I was convinced that he and the housemates were plotting against me, to defraud me.

There were times when I overheard people talking on the bus and they would suddenly talk about something I was thinking about moments earlier. They can read my thoughts. The same would happen with the television. They are reading my thoughts. They are tracking me down.

Even small things which seemingly had no significance whatsoever. It felt like I was noticing things that other people couldn’t pick up on, like when I watched a cartoon near Christmas and there was something in the cartoon that stood out, that just didn’t seem right. “Why is that there? That shouldn’t be there! This is a sign!”

I clung to the intellectual idea that this was all crap and I was desperately trying to rationalise everything but I still freaked out.

“Everything is a conspiracy against me. They are trying to brainwash me. The Illuminati are trying to get me. There are subliminal codes and messages everywhere. Aliens are going to attack. I’ve got a microchip in me reading my thoughts and trying to control me. I have an alien parasite in my brain. They are monitoring my phonecalls and e-mails and internet browsing.”

I prayed for all of this to stop, even though I don’t belong to any religion but nothing I prayed seemed to make it go away. Before this point, I think I maintained that I did believe in some kind of god but now it felt as though he/she/it/whatever had abandoned me and dumped me in this parallel universe.

I remember watching and reading The Secret religiously at this time, wishing and praying for things to be normal. Nothing seemed to work as usual. I remember going into Waterstones to buy ‘The Magic’, the latest book by Ronda Byrne in the hope that I could follow the advice and get out of this nightmare. This was in the self-help and spirituality section in the bookshop. Next to ‘The Secret’ books were select titles by David Icke – books detailing that we were all holograms being controlled by shapeshifting lizards and that all the world’s most prominent, richest people were also lizards. That only freaked me out even more.

Everything seemed grey and pointless, and I just lost all joy for everything. Nothing seemed to satisfy me anymore. I would buy books and computer games but I just got bored of them after a while. I tried reading “His Dark Materials” by Phillip Pullman to take my mind off things. In the second book, there was an instance where one of the main characters’ mother was being pursued. That freaked me out. Even watching or reading about people who were being pursued or conspired against, and they were made to feel like they were going crazy would trigger the feelings of intense fear and panic. Watching or reading accounts of people going insane. People who suddenly started wearing hats made of tinfoil. Conspiracies. Even watching ‘The Matrix’.

Everybody seemed grey and pointless. I just felt a deep bitterness and anger for everybody. People who didn’t give a crap about anybody but themselves, they just want to drag you into their own twisted dramas and agendas and darkness. Everybody seemed to love drugs. I wanted annihilation. Especially on the vampires who had pressured me into this mad alternate reality.

I was still rationalising and I knew that it was all crap but why did I still feel paranoid and freaked out all the time?

I was scared that I was really losing it. I would obsessively google the symptoms, trying to figure out what was going on. Schizophrenia? Psychosis? Multiple sclerosis? No, I couldn’t be any of those things. I needed to check the symptoms every day to validate the fact that I wasn’t schizophrenic (for the record, I’m not schizophrenic). I thought the loud internal dialogue that I have with myself would constitute as hearing voices but there is a difference between inner dialogue and auditory hallucinations, which I knew I wasn’t experiencing. I still needed to check the symptoms every day. It became an obsession. I couldn’t allow myself to end up like that, I just couldn’t. I felt that I’d bring shame on myself and my family, and everybody would look down on me even more. My life would be over.

Nobody knew about this. I couldn’t tell anybody.

Some nights I couldn’t sleep, and it literally felt like my thoughts were driving me mad. In the dead of night. It felt like they were zooming around my head like a Formula 1 race car and there were no brakes to slow down. They felt loud. Loud thoughts. I would confuse that with auditory hallucinations.

Around this time I was desperate to feel better without assistance of any kind. I couldn’t bring myself to tell anybody what I was going through, I felt as though I had to keep it locked away tightly and keep myself together. I couldn’t go to the doctor. I’d research supplements and herbs I could take and I would self-medicate. Garic. Gingko biloba. Valerian hops. St Johns Wort. After all, natural health supplements would have been better than being on medication, I thought. Nothing seemed to work. I had temporarily given up smoking (but I was still indulging in junkfood, takeout, frozen pizzas, caffeine, alcohol and chocolates).

The feelings of fear and paranoia were at their worst when I hadn’t slept, that’s why I tried to self-medicate with some valerian hops tea I bought from the supermarket. It worked for a while but then it seemed to have the opposite effect – because I was relying on it too much, had I developed a tolerance to it that it wouldn’t help me sleep? The loud rapid thoughts returned, once more it was the middle of the night and I was in bed frightened. I had even tried taking a prescription painkiller with codeine, I think that only seemed to make it worse.

I reached for the phone to once again google my symptoms. This episode was probably the most severe that I experienced and I think I decided at that moment that enough was enough. This time, I found a web forum and there were descriptions of exactly the kind of things I had been through but from other people who had done marijuana, ecstacy and other psychoactive substances. I remember reading the words ‘De-personalization’ and ‘De-realisation’. Had I finally found the key?

The feelings of paranoia subsided after that night, I haven’t felt them to the extent of what I felt that year. That’s not to say I no longer feel anxious and edgy at times because I do, but that year was the worst. Sometimes I still worry that those feelings will all come back to haunt me further down the line.

After all this, I felt more at ease with myself, and I didn’t feel the need to be as wild or crazy afterwards. I feel that this was a major turning point in my life, and that I had to make changes (it’s still taking me a few years to make the changes I need to). I used to think being edgy, f****d up and dark was cool but I don’t think it’s cool any more – why is it worth being cool and edgy if the cost for being those things is your own sanity? This was the closest thing to a dark night of the soul as I can imagine and I don’t want to descend down this path again…