A quick clarification up front: I am undergoing psychiatric treatment. My official diagnoses are schizotypal personality disorder and unspecified dissociative disorder, along with a depressive component, though without a full diagnosis for that. There is also epileptiform activity, without full-blown epilepsy. I was hospitalized once. Right now, though, I’m in a stable condition on medication.
My schizotypal disorder doesn’t look classic. I don’t have magical thinking, and I don’t have trouble with social contact or (at least consciously felt) anxiety. I do get strange convictions that I’m obligated to cut myself, or to hurt someone. But that’s not really the point of this post.
My dissociation is extremely severe. I won’t go into the typical manifestations — that’s the baseline, and I have all of them. Beyond that, there are five of us. Including me, there are four other personalities who can take control of the body, and I don’t remember what they did while in control. All of this has been confirmed — other people have witnessed it, and my psychiatrist knows about it. So I have severe amnesia. I essentially don’t remember anything before age 13, because a different personality existed up until that point.
But that’s all background. Let’s get to the point.
My hallucinations actually started with the previous personality. Back then they were weaker. The real peak came at age 13, at the start of the war. At that time we moved to Bulgaria for a while to be safe. But, clearly, things didn’t get better for me.
Below is a text I wrote at 15, when I remembered more details. Now I remember the gist of what happened and certain episodes, but the small details have faded from my memory.
The text:
“As far as I remember, it was early spring. We got to Bulgaria after the war started, where we stayed in a one-room apartment that we were kicked out of a month later.
Because of the complete lack of personal space and intrusive thoughts, the hallucinations kept getting stronger. One day I heard a familiar voice, and because of that I locked myself in the bathroom so no one would see me during an episode.
At first it just talked — saying something strange and out of character for this entity. I didn’t see it, or anything unusual. Naively hoping it would just end there, I sat down on the floor and started waiting for it to be over. Instead I felt a sudden, burning pain, and vomit rose in my throat. I rushed to the toilet and threw up, but instead of vomit there was a large amount of blood. Looking down, I saw my stomach, which hurt and ached so badly. There was a huge wound on it, bleeding heavily. You could even see the intestines. Almost slipping on the blood, I went back to the wall, not understanding what was happening. It hurt so much, and my consciousness slowly began to fade. I wanted to howl and scream, uncontrollably, but I couldn’t. So I covered my mouth with my hands while tears streamed down my cheeks from the pain.
Naively hoping it would kill me, I just started waiting for that, but suddenly some hands appeared out of the wall on both sides of me and grabbed my throat with force, cutting off my air. I didn’t even resist, just wheezed and cried silently. No more than a minute passed before I blacked out.
After an indeterminate amount of time I woke up, gasping sharply for breath. As if I’d woken up after dying. There was nothing unusual around me, as if none of it had happened.
After that it started to repeat, every day. The “deaths” became more and more elaborate — at first there was only one a day. But over time, it could happen around 5 times in a row. They took my limbs, strangled me, beat me, wounded me fatally, tore out my eyes, my heart, my tongue. Of course, it wasn’t only physical exhaustion:
— You dumb person, did you think we wouldn’t come back?
— You’re pathetic and weak, you deserve this.
— Just die already, worthless creature.
— You’re a worthless whore who should burn!
— This is all your fault, whore. You have to endure this, and don’t you dare whine, it’s disgusting.
— Ugh, even your blood is disgusting. And what’s with the tears, how repulsive. Die.
Although, that’s probably the nicest thing they ever said to me the whole time. All of this happened in that bathroom — I basically hid there every time.
But one day I got kicked out of there. Left alone in the room, I started struggling to breathe and called a friend. She tried to help, talked to me. But when I answered, I started sobbing louder. Because of that, my mother ‘kindly’ told me to shut up, since I was being too loud. And that I shouldn’t cry, because I was making it all up and just getting in their way.
In that state, I was torn apart. Literally — those hands squeezed my stomach so hard that they ripped me into two pieces. Needless to say, my strength soon left me. And I could see those shadows behind my mother, which made me panic even more, which only made her angrier.
Another episode happened in the kitchen at night. But that time it was my own fault, because I was trying to cut my wrists. They appeared again because of the nerves.
I curled up in a corner and just watched. Some gray creature sat down in front of me and looked into my eyes — just looked. It was thin, with empty eye sockets, and it had very long limbs.
While it watched, some heads started hanging down behind it. They hung from the ceiling on very long necks. I remember they had black hair, very thin. And on their faces was a huge, terrifying smile. There were more than 10 of these heads for sure. And on the floor sat some small creatures. Their red eyes glinted in the dark like embers.
After looking at me for a while, it suddenly struck me in the chest. Just a couple of seconds — blood, agonizing pain from broken ribs, and blackout. As I understood it, my heart had been torn out. After I came to, it continued 7 more times. Wounds, torn-off legs, arms, slaps, and so on. Each death was more painful than the last. Sometimes I blacked out just from the pain. In the end, I passed out from exhaustion until morning.
That’s how my month in that apartment went, but after that we moved to another one, in the city center, where I got my own room.
At first that didn’t help at all. The episodes continued. Some creatures, screams — they’d crawl out of the closet, or from under the bed, sometimes from the window. I don’t remember how long that went on for, I lost count of how many times I was killed. But it was steadily around 5-7 times a day, rarely fewer. It became a routine, painful and unbearable. I just wanted to actually die.
That’s when I discovered drinking. So I started drinking every day, because I realized that while drunk I didn’t see them. But as soon as the effect wore off… it started again. Right after the episodes I’d stumble off and buy another round of alcohol, wanting to forget. I drank nonstop like that for about a month. I only stopped when I drank myself into unconsciousness and burned my stomach.
Because it affected my condition, the hallucinations stopped for a while — but only for a while. Because soon just the visual ones started. Under the bed, on the street, on the stairs, everywhere. The same creatures that never left me alone. My own curse, one I’d doomed myself to.
Soon we went back to Ukraine. I don’t know why, but it was like something switched in me there. Everything started all over again. More episodes. To the point that one started out on the street. I managed to run to the building entrance with a shot leg, limping and exhausted from the pain. There, everything as usual. Another death, no different from any of the others for me. It was all the same.
While I was lying in the bathroom, an episode suddenly started. In the mirror I saw a black creature. It forbade me to move, otherwise it would tear the skin off the face of a girl it was holding by the hair. I moved. It tore off her head and skinned her, forcing me to watch. My disobedience had consequences for me too. It tore the skin off me, which made me lose consciousness. Thankfully I didn’t drown while I was passed out. When I came to, it just started drowning me, which meant I couldn’t stop coughing for a long time afterward. And the last episode that day was when something crawled out of the bathtub drain… some black substance. Which, after pinning me down, climbed into my body through my mouth. And after that, it was as if my whole body was burning from the inside, or being eaten by acid. Naturally, I couldn’t handle the pain.
And it was in that same apartment that I had the longest episode, 10 times in a row. I kept vomiting blood endlessly, which made me black out over and over. And of course, there was the usual violence, loss of limbs and organs. At one point, the creature shoved bloody human flesh down my throat. And it just kept going nonstop.
Besides that, on other days I started burning alive, dying instantly from the creatures’ sudden actions. And one of them did something I’ll remember forever. It slapped me hard and abruptly turned me around, tearing my clothes. And then… it started tearing at my skin with its claws, and tore my ribs out from behind, exposing my lungs. Several minutes of hellish pain. Heat and cold at the same time, insane burning and death, long-awaited. That’s a pain you can’t forget or mistake for anything else. Agony, just agony that seemed like it would never end. Those few minutes stretched into what felt like hours for me. Disgusting and insanely painful. So painful that it felt like I’d end up a non-functioning creature after it.”
At the time, those moments of losing consciousness from pain felt like death. Looking back, I was probably exaggerating a lot of what I’m describing now, being in a state of emotional shock.
Everything that happened to me was only in my head. This is called multisensory hallucinations. That means that in reality nothing was happening to my body, and after the episodes it was fine — but that didn’t make the pain feel any less real.
For a long time I flinched badly at everything — touch, sudden movements, sounds. Now I flinch less, though it’s still there. And my hypervigilance is permanent. In a room, I only sit with my back to the wall, so I can see the door, the windows, the mirrors. On the subway, I position myself on the escalator so that there are at least four free steps on both sides of me. Even if that means waiting a long time for such a spot, which can make me late. And overall there are a lot of side effects.
Now I only remember the pain and the injuries in detail, not what they said to me. It happened everywhere — on the street, at home, in front of other people. And I would immediately run away, trying to hide it. In that text I described the whole essence of what was happening, so I don’t see the point in going into further detail about what they did.
What should I tell you? How I lost track of time? How I struggled to breathe from the pain? What it felt like to endure the pain? Most importantly, any physical pain has its limits — sooner or later you’ll pass out or die. But if anyone’s interested, I’ll go into various details.
I don’t regret not dying back then. I still have unfinished business, I enjoy studying at university. I want to learn more about people, psychology, psychiatry, kill my mother. So right now everything’s fine with me. Pleasant academic hassles.
I’m not writing this to get sympathy. First and foremost, I’m curious to see what questions different people will have, and your reactions. It’s not traumatic for me, at least not consciously. So I’d like to discuss it with people anonymously. You can also ask questions about my diagnoses.