High functioning folks, what's your experience of life like?
I wanna get the chance to talk to as many of you who are managing to appear totally okay in conventional reality. Some regular parameters for that are - maintaining higiene, physically fit, holding down a job (or having savings/investments so not depending on someone else financially), able to socialize and/or date, having friends and/or a partner. I'm sure there's more but we all get the point.
I'm curious because I, even though undiagnosed.. well, with anything, if I were to be completely honest with my experience of reality with a psychiatrist, they would probably look into the direction of one or more of the following: autism, schizoaffective, schizophrenia or whatever else exists in between those. To clarify: I am NOT looking for a diagnosis from the subreddit, this is just for context.
Very short context - always been weird and sensitive, got into meditation early and never stopped, also had a phase of 5 years where I did an ungodly amount of psychedelics and empathogens. I've had hundreds of experiences where, while sober, I've tripped my face off during mundane activities and events, a lot of them including other people. In most of those I managed to remain completely functional and maintain a facade of normalcy as far as others are concerned even though my internal world and subjective reality were anything but "normal". Auditory and visual hallucinations, distortions of reality, distorted thinking, a subjective sense of extrasensory perception, etc. Also I tend to feel pre-psychotic if I am chronically stressed and overwhelmed and look to retreat and downregulate asap.
I've often wondered if and how much overlap these experiences had with what a schizophrenic experiences on the daily. I have to note that I think people diagnosed with this get too much flack from society. From what I've observed over the course of my life, most "normal", "well-adjusted" people are batshit crazy and delusional because we live in a diseased insane system but we've been indoctrinated into believing it's a normal way to live. However, they hold the badge of normalcy because they inhabit the collective shared delusions so there's no disruption or friction in their day to day. Meanwhile, the schizophrenic, when gone into dysfunction, inhabits delusions which have no overlap with the shared delusions of the collective and hence, becomes labeled as.. delusional and insane and with enough time... goes insane. That's the way I oversimplify it to myself anyway.
I don't want that to be the focus of this thread though. I'm more curious about what your subjective reality looks like on the day to day as a high functioning schizophrenic.
Is anything I wrote from my end relatable to you? Are you esentially tripping out a lot of the time but have enough intelligence/awareness/impulse control/luck/whatever to be able to still do stuff and behave in a way that's labeled and accepted as normal?
Does your pattern matching still notice the inconsistencies and crazy stuff of others? Do you ever feel like not everything about this diagnosis is bad, do you ever feel like you have some perception about valid phenomena that is unavailable to the average well adjusted person or do you see it all as delusion and a product of suboptimal brain chemistry? In what way do you feel your perception differs from the perception of normal people - or rather - how do you perceive a normal person perceives reality and which part of the normal perception do you feel to be lacking?
Are you ever fully aware of being delusional in comparison to others and how do you handle that? How often do you feel fully lucid? What's the difference between lucidity and delusion for you? What happens to you on your bad days - be it from high stress or anything else - does your way of coping with the demands of conventional reality change, if so, in what way?
What are the things about your private experience that you would like to be able to talk about but have nobody to share them with? What do you feel is commonly misunderstood about you as a person and your point of view? What would it take for you to actually feel understood by another human being? What is happiness for you? When do you feel your best and happiest?
Thank you all for your time and attention. Wishing you a peaceful morning, day or evening, wherever you find yourself while reading this and hopefully while replying :)