Delusions are pretty confusing, too. One Friday night I came home and instantly knew my boyfriend had been replaced by an alien doppelganger. He looked the same ... but somehow off. I knew it was impossible and screwed up and wrong. That's one of the things about mental illness they don't show you: You can know what you're thinking is abnormal as you're thinking it. Here's the other thing about mental illness: That doesn't help one fucking bit.
If you suddenly hear a voice telling you that your neighbor is Satan, you don't go "Well, golly gee, time to kill him with a screwdriver, I guess." You'll fight it and disbelieve it, until you start seeing Satan in everything your neighbor does. By the time you confront him, you have tons of evidence. The evidence doesn't make sense to anyone else, but your brain makes it make sense to you. So when your neighbor ignores your hello, it's clearly because he's Satan and not because he didn't hear you.
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Those damn horns he keeps wearing sure don't help.
And my alien delusion? How would I disprove that? My boyfriend would say he wasn't an alien, but that's exactly what an alien would say. Eventually, I got over it ... by ignoring it. My thought process went something like this: "If he is an alien and I blow his cover, he might beam me up to the mothership right now and whisk me away. If he's not an alien, he'll get upset that we're having this argument again. If I act normal until the alien leaves, I'll be fine."
The only way to fight your delusions is to ignore them. Not that this is a comfortable thing, since my brain is now convinced that I've had sex with an alien.
Hymn Herself has written a novella about her time spent inpatient in McLean Hospital. It's called House Full of Insects, and you'll buy it if you're cool.
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