Felt gaslighted all my life, and now it's finally over.
My whole life felt like I was going crazy. It was a constant questioning of my sanity. It was an eternal, pointless struggle. I couldn't be understood. No matter how didactic I where, how many facts I presented, how much I studied something, people kept saying that the things I saw didn't exist (not in the schizophrenic sense, but things like social situations and nuances), and that I was creating a fuss with completely mundane and normal things.
For years I isolated myself, unable to maintain social relationships because it always reached the point where people considered me crazy and ostracized me. This led me to try to kill myself three times in the past 5 years. I was even hospitalized and life had no meaning anymore. I was certain I was crazy.
That's when I started treatment last year. I began by reporting mental noise, a racing of intrusive thoughts that were initially mistaken for ADHD. I started treatment with bupropion (because Ritalin could make me kill myself) and it didn't work. There were many back-and-forth visits to the psychiatrist that never led anywhere. It was my psychologist who, taking the time to listen to my anxieties, began to identify what he called "intellectualization."
Finally, today, after years of mental decline, I received this diagnosis. My psychologist and my psychiatrist spent 3 hours talking to me, explaining in more technical terms everything I was feeling. That this madness I was seeing was real, and that most people didn't have the necessary cognitive ability to understand me, and that I needed to work this out.
My relationships never worked out, my friendships never worked out, I never managed to establish myself in a job because people would start attacking me, as if they harbored a secret resentment towards me. I lived in eternal cycles of humiliation in my personal relationships, which I internalized thinking I was crazy, that I wasn't good enough for society.
In practice, nothing changes, I will continue being who I am, with my very few friends (who are mostly autistic or have ADHD), but now I'm starting behavioral treatment to relearn how to live, like a rescue animal, learning not to absorb the craziness of the world and not to think that I'm the crazy one, learning not to place so many expectations on people, and etc.
I just wanted to share this, in case someone felt the same way. I would love to hear your experiences, so I can feel less gaslighted by the world.
Ps.: If this text feels wonky, is because I translated it from my language and didn't had the time, or energy, to patch it up, so please, excuse the confuse writing 😄