My Christmas Eve Eve

So, I've always been a "good" child. Whatever it is that your parents tell you makes a kid good, that was me. Anyway, in November I turned 25. Being that I'm not really a child anymore, I felt like I could start to rebel against some of the archaic notions of "good."

Thursday after work, to quote the person who introduced me to my first experience, we went to "see the Grinch about a Christmas tree." Well, I'm not really really sure when the person met with the Grinch, but the tree was in tow on Thursday when we went out. The person drove around town and we smoked the tree. The first few puffs were pretty anti-climatic because I wasn't doing it "right" (or, in other words, it wasn't actually getting into my lungs.) I didn't feel any different, either, so I figured I'd try differently. I exhaled, and deeply inhaled to fill my lungs. I held it for a couple of seconds, then coughed for the next 5 minutes like this was the 19th century and I'd just caught something from the factories. Once I could breathe again, I guess I took two more hits. Now, the person I was with was telling me to stop before I went too far, but having never done it before, I didn't really know what "too far" was. I remember, though, that things were funny as shit when the effects first set in. I mean EVERYTHING was giggle-worthy. I knew that the person I was with was cracking up at me, laughing more often and more easily than normal, which was cool. I thought in that moment that it was a great experience. We stopped and got gas, and I was still giggling when the other person got out of the car to pump. I don't really remember what happened after that. It was like all the lights went out in my mind and everything rebooted without me actually losing consciousness (which reminds me, I will probably have to ask the person what happened in that time since apparently I was still awake and talking.)

When I "woke up", we were still in the car. But it was the fact that I woke up that freaked me out. I couldn't remember how long we'd been driving, but it seemed like anywhere between 4 and 6 hours. So, I completely panicked when I woke up, and the panic only increased as I realized I couldn't talk as fast as I was thinking, the fact that I kept coming in and out of "reality" (which, apparently, I referenced MANY times in the evening and how there were just times where I "understood" it), and the fact that whenever I looked at the person talking, it seemed like everything said was being echoed by the outlines of squirrels or chipmunks spreading to infinity in every direction. I hadn't been warned about what, specifically, to expect--and even if I had, I'm not sure I would have remembered it then anyway. I was terrified and beyond hysterical. Actually, I'd been like that one other time in my life, and that was when I was on my antidepressants in the spring and had briefly experienced a psychotic episode which only lasted a few hours and wasn't nearly as bad. So, all out with the hallucinations, panic, hysteria... I heard myself on a feedback loop screaming and saying, "I just wanna go home. Take me home. I wanna get in my bed." :D The thing that freaked me out the most was that I knew I wasn't dreaming, but I knew I wasn't awake. Everything would record to my memory before I consciously perceived it, so I kept thinking that things were repeating themselves. As we passed the church by my house I was not only panicking, but felt a little pissed and betrayed because, I claimed, "We already passed this. We already passed the church. Why are we passing the church again? Let me go home!" Then I looked at the clock and saw, with horror, that it was 12:58 and that's when I pretty much snapped. I just "knew" that it had been that exact time for HOURS and the fact that the clock wasn't changing, time kept repeating itself, there were squirrels on surround sound in the car, and my brain kept "itching" meant that there was actually some kind of conspiracy against me. Someone was watching me freak out and laughing somewhere. I had to "get out". I thought that if I went to sleep, I would escape, which explained my determination to get to my bed.

When I made it to my bed, I was still all jacked up with my brain racing in a completely different dimension from my body. I kept gaining and losing awareness of my skin... where my mind ended and my body began. Sitting in bed, I got on the computer because I had to record my feelings "for posterity." This is, word for word, what I wrote:

So, I have to tell you that I’ve been experiencing some sensations lately. I keep having this feeling that I am experiencing this inside and out side of my skin. My essence, I can feel it. I am it. My essence feels disconnected from my body. I knew, but I forgot why. I need to hold myself accountable. I keep realizing that I am slipping into and out of reality. Or, into and out of the realization I have about reality. The realization being my ability to know that I’m in the situation. Like, I understand that I experience that I AM a situation. My mom hates me. And she hates me so much, that she tells my dad to hate me. And my dad hates me so much that he wants me to hate myself. I don’t care about my dad, so his hate doesn’t bother me. I keep having these memories of something that happened earlier in the evening. I won’t tell you how I got there. But I had an incredibly long night that lasted because it slipped us into and out of reality. Why am I following the word count? I understand autism. I understand what autism is. It is being aware of things happening as they’re happening, and also lucidly remember them in dreams. It’s hard to filter out what to pay attention to because you can’t pay attention to only one thing. The itch on my back, my stomach, the word count, because it’s increasing. My itching. I don’t know what to pay attention to. I thought that I had typed more than that. I can type faster than I can think right now. I love that I’m not making any mistakes in my automatically correcting brain. I feel things, but I don’t know if they’re real because I perceive they are happening, or if they’re real because I know they’re real because they are. I need to save this right now. Tomorrow will I care? Will I care that I know all these things happened?