u/Correct-Ad4723

I'm Brazilian, so some of the words are in pt-br, and will be transated as best I can.

Yesterday, smoking (shitty) weed, I had what I can only describe as an Allsvenskan-based, spying-betting, Truman Show-style paranoid psychotic break...

I don't know where to begin.

I was high, like... weird high, and I knew it, so I decided to read some of my dream journal. Bad idea. I started seeing words that were, to me, writen in a different handwriting, and that's when the paranoia started to grow.

I saw "hidden messages" in words, sentences, and eventually full pages that I was sure someone else had writen. I freaked out and stopped reading. So I decided to look at my art instagram.

I had a couple of new follower notifications and wanted to see who they were, where they were from. I clicked on the first one: att-kif-svart-och-ivvet (or semething like that). Then I saw his first photo, and looked (to me) EXACTLY like a distorted, black and white photo of my living room window taken from the outside. My heart started to pound.

Then I looked at the username again. And then I read it backwards: "tevvi-hco-travs-fik-att" Or, as translated by my schizoid mind: "Te vi hoje travs (travado), fica atento." (I saw you shitfaced today, beware)

Someone was watching me, taking photos of me, drunk. I went on scrolling their photo feed, and every single one confirmed and added to the narrative. In the I lost my glasses outside when I passed out on the grass, they had a photo of glasses identical to mine. They had a photo that looked almost exactly like my building complex blocks from the outside. Photo of the stairwells, the bridge close by, the fucking trees. They all looked horrifyingly familiar.

I started reading the captions. I translated them, and some seemed to have an eery message, like "Hoje te vi no espelho" (Today, I saw you in the mirror) or "Vi ele do ponto de ônibus" (I saw him from the bus stop), but most of them were poetic stuff. Not much there besides a couple of scares.

My big mistake was when I had the grand idea of reading Swedish/Norwegian backwards. After that, the wholeI thing escalated into a shitshow inside my head. I started seeing threats in the messages. Words like "fran" or "bild" were names of my neighbors followed by words that I read as "vem ver isso" (come see this) or "vocês tem que ver isso" (you have to see this).

Other words I don't remember where descriptions of me doing stuff while drunk out of my ass. It was the whole block, maybe the blocks around me. They were all in cahoots. They were spying on me, registering every single thing I did.

Who are these fuckers?

I searched the people who followed this account, there weren't many. But I was looking for hidden meaning, and one of the names caught my eye: orebrofotboll

Ore (pray)... bro... futebol...

Recently, the guys from my church started playing footy on tuesdays. They even invited me, but I'm not a big fan, plus I'm... kind of on a binge. And they know that, because I tell them. Because I trust them.

"Ore, bro..." (pray, bro)

They're in this too! Wtf????

The shit hit the fan when I went into their page. At this point, I was full-blown DaVinci Code Robert Langdon, Matrix, batshit-enigma-machine-crazy. The thing grew in my mind like a giant paranoia cake.

The games were about me, and about the things I'd do when I got shitfaced. "Sandviken nu" meant I got naked (nu = naked). "SK" meant I was pantsless (sem "kalça", no pants). "Hacken BK" meant I ordered food and listened to rock. "Norkkoping" meant I drank vodka (pinga is a strong drink here), and "Llungstrik" meant I smoked a lot.

"Varnamo" was a play with my middle name.

Some of teams were people who banded together to spy and take pictures of me. They had a whole fucking system, with the Church team, Work team, Female teams, Young teams, rosters full of people who followed a schedule to register what I'd do on my bad days, which were as frequent as two or three times a week. It all matched like a perfect puzzle.

When I saw the amount of followers I had a tiny heart attack: over 20.000. This wasn't just a thing in my vicinity. This was huge.

How did I miss this? Who had started this shit? They were all watching my life, betting on the things I'd do, the fuck ups, the drugs and drinking, the shame. They turned my life into a fucking game of roulette.

It was one of the weirdest, most terrifying experiences I've ever had. And there nothing, NOTHING, you could say to me at the moment that would make me not believe in it.

Thankfully, I didn't do anything drastic. I just lied down, and things started to clear up. After a while, when I realized the nonsense spaghetti that I created, I just laughed.

I'll never forget this.

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