Livestreamed Anxieties (or My First Psychotic Break)

Shortly before my trip to the Hoover Dam to cover the Rebelle Rally, I ate a gyro in Seattle with some friends—downtown, just somewhere a friend of mine knew—and because of the deadly pandemic going on, we had to eat outside. There was a park nearby we headed towards, and we ate overlooking a handful of soccer pitches and baseball fields; a lone green patch in a rich neighborhood crowded with multi-million dollar townhouses. We ate at Capitol Hill.

With the benefit of hindsight, I have realized my SNRI-withdrawal induced psychotic break was not actually my first complete fracture from reality, but my second. During 2020, I was a software engineer working on projects no one cared about at NASA. I distracted myself from my meaningless work with anxiety about the entire world falling apart outside my house, the one place I sequestered myself because none of it could get me if I just stayed put. I worked from home, I ate at home, I barely went for walks, because the outside had become terrifying and I didn’t know how to cope or help with any of it. Out there, I understood more clearly than at any point before in my life, would kill me.

My first psychotic break, it turns out, was during the most hectic monotony of my life. During the protests that broke out last year, when all of the basic assumptions of American life that I had come to understand as fact turned out to be nothing more than convenient lies, I watched footage of Capitol Hill. Of black-clad protestors clashing with heavily militarized police, of gray rental Dodge Caravans scooping people off the streets for no apparent reason other than to instill paranoia and fear in people marching for justice, of homes tear gassed by indifferent paramilitary forces enjoying their unchecked power. I stayed at home.

Every day for me passed in the exact same way: Wake up, check the news. Log into work. Join the daily stand-up call with updates about my programming progress. Check the news. Spiral. Lose the day in a haze of coding and following ever-more-dire headlines about cops cracking skulls and rising case numbers and flooding cities. Drink. Repeat. There was some joy to be had, for sure—I had started transition around this time, and there were some wonderful notes of progress to be had—but the overwhelming mood was one of stifling boredom and intense panic. There was nowhere to vent this pressure; it was my ex and I on an island that we didn’t dare escape from. This was where we were safe, and we were not going to leave; we were lucky to be safe, and we needed to enjoy it.

During this time, I remember when I finally broke. It was after another week of intense protests—I couldn’t even tell you which week, at this point, but I think it was around the time that the National Guard tear-gassed that church in DC for the President’s photo-op, right around when martial law seemed like it might be coming—and the talk of what was real, what was controlled information, what was pure falsehood spread to control whatever narrative was desired that day had finally seeped so deeply into my consciousness I was unable to separate even a modicum of fact from fiction.

This was not a conspiracy wormhole; it was vastly worse. I wondered who among the people I loved were fictitious or conniving to mislead me. I wondered if my girlfriend actually shared the same fear as I did, or if she was there to deceive me into being more calm or more scared or more suspicious than I should have been. I could not tell what was happening outside the four walls of my life because I was sequestered from it all, relying on others to tell me what was happening, and I finally could no longer trust anyone. The cognitive dissonance between the ever-intensifying Outside and the almost surreal monotonous repetition of the Inside had broken me. All through this, I watched as people braver than me actually at least tried to do something, because it was right to do, and I sat inside and panicked. Everything had blended into a miasma of paranoia, self-hatred, and boredom, with just enough legitimate fear sprinkled in to make distinguishing the psychotic bits from the justified ones a real challenge.

The only way out was through. I had to get outside, even if it fucking killed me; I needed to view the real world with my own eyes and restore some semblance of basic fact and fiction to my life. I did this by attending a protest and forcing myself from the most safe place I could be to the least safe place I could find on short notice, to do something that actually mattered. I have never been more scared to do anything in my entire life; by the time I went to march, I had watched probably three or four hundred videos of cops straight-up attempting murder on anyone who stood in their way, and because I trusted no one and I had severed all of my connections, I basically went alone.

It feels selfish to even write about how an event of this magnitude—one focused on justice for Black lives, who are still waiting for this country to give them justice—affected me, but I didn’t choose to have a paranoid psychotic break, and I didn’t know what more I could do. This felt like the most I could possibly offer in solidarity. It wasn’t, of course—it was a suburban milquetoast event. No riot cops, no tear gas, no APCs; they don’t use those on white people marching around an oil-and-gas-money suburb in Houston. I didn’t do anything of importance and it was a generally ineffective protest, even by the standards of the time, although now it appears virtually all of them caused no actual, lasting change. I still have no idea how to change things for the better in a country dead-set on keeping them as rock-bottom shit as they have been for eternity.

And then over a year later I sat on Capitol Hill while I ate a gyro and looked at the graffiti that is still left from when it was an autonomous zone. As we walked to the benches we ate on, my friend pointed out where barricades had been erected, and where events of last year had transpired, all in this little green patch of Seattle. I walked past the police station that I saw federal agents leap out of to black-bag random people, and all of those feelings that had faded in that year since the chaos of pandemic and election and transition and career change and heartbreak all snapped into focus immediately. This is the place I watched on live streams. It is real. I have friends that were tear gassed by goons inside this building. This is a place of power, and it is an evil one, and I am standing in front of it.

And it gave me another reason as to why I left everything behind, got out of all that I had held familiar. Change careers, relationships, abandon my home. I had to remind myself what is real, and what is not, and the best way to do that is exposure. Pure shock therapy. Expose yourself to the entire world and then you can determine what is truth and how to help and where to go. I have no idea if these stories will ever amount to anything—my sinking fear is no, they are just an overly dramatic trans woman’s musings written from the back of a 90s van—but maybe, if I see enough with my own eyes, I will find the path to actually amounting to something and to the truth.