My Journey Back to Me
The Life That Looked Like Success
On the surface, my life looked exactly how I thought it was supposed to look. I had my own business, a beautiful home, and weekends filled with champagne, dinner parties, and the right people saying the right things. It was loud, bright, and full. From the outside, it looked like success.
I was proud of what I had built. I worked hard for it. And yet, even at its best, there was a quiet emptiness inside me that I never spoke about. I didn’t understand where it came from. It didn’t make sense. If you have everything you’re meant to want, why does something still feel missing?
The First Split
There was no moment where I thought something was beginning. I didn’t feel lost or broken. I simply learned how to manage the strange feelings by distraction. More work. More fun. More movement.
If something hurt, I pushed through it. If something felt wrong, I ignored it. I trusted thinking. I didn’t trust feeling. At the time, it felt like control. Looking back, it was the first split.
The Night Everything Shifted
The real shift came from a night I didn’t understand then and still struggle to fully make sense of now. Someone laced my drink with acid while I was out. I didn’t know it happened. I had been drinking heavily, and marijuana was already part of most weekends.
This wasn’t a clear or intentional psychedelic experience. There were no visions or awakenings. It was subtle, quiet, and layered beneath intoxication.
The Internal Collapse
Something began building in the background of my mind, like pressure. Paranoia didn’t arrive all at once. It crept in slowly. Thoughts that once felt neutral developed sharp edges. I started judging myself for things I had never cared about before.
Old memories surfaced without context. Emotions arrived that didn’t match reality. I didn’t know what was happening. I only knew that the ground beneath me felt soft, unstable.
As the days passed, the internal collapse deepened. Boundaries inside me dissolved. I became confused about identity, morality, and meaning. Shame and guilt rose from places I didn’t know existed. It felt as though something ancient and buried had been given space to move, and I had no tools to understand it.
Fear, Love, and the Hospital
I was fully in love with my wife, and at the same time, terrified of her. That contradiction shattered me. There was a growing belief that death was necessary for transformation. Not as a desire to die, but as a distorted conclusion my fear kept returning to. It wasn’t insight. It was paranoia feeding itself.
Eventually, I was admitted to a residential hospital. Some days I could tell myself none of this was real and breathe. Other days, I was consumed completely.
In the hospital, I felt less like a human being and more like a problem to be managed. Heavy medication replaced conversation. Silence replaced understanding. I tried to explain the fear, the collapsing identity, the strange thoughts, but there was no space for meaning. Only charts and diagnoses.
I stayed there for a month. During that time, I received treatments that left me feeling further disconnected from myself. When I was discharged, I was told there was no cure. That this would be lifelong. That I would be back.
6. The Beginning of Returning
The Beginning of Returning
I begged to leave. My wife believed in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. She helped get me out, even as the system insisted this was permanent.
Outside the hospital, nothing magically healed. The fear didn’t disappear. But something subtle shifted. I experienced moments that weren’t dominated by terror. Small moments. Quiet moments. Enough to remind me that something else was still possible.
That was the beginning. Not of fixing myself, but of returning to myself. Slowly. Gently. Without dramatic transformation. Just learning, moment by moment, how to sit with my own mind again.
Looking back now, I see that the journey was never about becoming someone new. It was about remembering who I was before I stopped trusting what I felt. It was the beginning of learning how to live from the inside out.
Are You Ready To Continue Your Journey
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