Onset of Schizoaffective Experiences (Post 3)

Imagine if you will, the radio in your car. If the volume is low, you can only hear the murmur of voices. As you slowly turn up the volume, until the words are legible, until suddenly you can make out the words. This was my experience while still in the early onset of my disease. I want to briefly describe these words, as they tie into my story with extreme importance.

At first the voices were mostly male, and said they were from a fraternity. They would talk about how lazy I was, how I was struggling in my courses, and they were very insulting. My paranoia leads me to believe that my phone had been hacked somehow, because the clarity of the voices was unmistakable.

Soon I started hearing a female voice, and it was unmistakable: the same girl from that ‘dream’ I had, whom shook me awake, only for me to rebuff her advances. So clear were the voices, I started to talk back to them when I was alone.

Eventually I started looking for reasons why these men hated me so much. So, I called a lawyer I knew, and he stated it plainly. He said “Nate, people stalk other people for three reasons. Money, sex, or drugs.”

After a few hours, it started to dawn on me. The girl that woke me earlier that week was in fact somehow related to those Fraternity members!

The clarity of the voices started to compound my paranoia. I started to walk around campus to my courses, seeing the same faces, only to conclude that I was being followed. At the end of one class, I waited for the room to empty out, only to tell my professor that one of his students was stalking me. A local police officer met me outside of the building, only to conclude that no, an iPhone cannot be hacked or cloned.

There was a hub area on the campus where people sat and ate lunch. I would sit there with my daily salad, listening to the voices, hoping that perhaps that girl would reveal herself again. Such was the cloudiness of my mind, I hoped and prayed I could get to the bottom of this mystery.

Later that week, I was sitting alone in my apartment, completely shrouded in the sound of men talking at and to me. I got a text from my girlfriend saying she needed to talk, and I knew what she was going to say. A few minutes later, I was single. I didn’t blame her, I had been so absorbed in the voices, she did deserve better. My stressors kept mounting, and I was on a crash course to a full-blown episode.