How My Schizophrenia And Science Worked Together To Convince Me I Didn't Exist

The first time I thought about writing as a young adult was back in 2012, and I set myself a writing goal and I stuck to it. I have those writings on a USB stick somewhere, and my old computer might still work, so there should be a way for me to read those early writings again somehow.

Two of those book ideas have stuck with me, and they have of course evolved quite a bit in the years since I first conceived of them, but I do plan on writing them eventually, now that I have started writing again, and publishing.

Those ideas still live in me, and continue to evolve, but the document I’d be most interested in reading again is a diary of sorts, where I wrote a page or two every day for a month or so, about various topics that interested me at the time.

I was still a few years away from being diagnosed with schizophrenia at the time, but it was starting to develop in those days.

What I want to talk about in this essay is something I know I wrote about in that diaryish document.

Back then Gawker and its sister blogs were still around, and I used to read the science blog io9 from that network. It’s now owned by Gizmodo, Wikipedia tells me, but I haven’t read any of those blogs since Peter Thiel killed Gawker proper anyway.

One day I came across a post of theirs about microorganisms and a quick internet search now doesn’t help me find it for quotes, but the general stats are these (from BBC Science Focus): in any human body there are around 30 trillion human cells, but our microbiome is estimated at 39 trillion cells.

That really messed with me. I was also reading stuff at the time about depression being a result of our gut health, not our brain. The gut-brain connection a quick search tells me it’s called.

These two pieces of new information played wonders on my depressed, increasingly paranoid and schizophrenia-developing brain. If there are more foreign microorganisms in my body than there are human cells, I don’t exist. If my gut decides that I’m depressed, I don’t exist.

The me I think of as me exists in my brain, that’s where I live. But I also consider my body my own, and as me. Yet science tells me that my body is less human than non-human, and my mental health issues aren’t even happening in my brain!

It would be really fascinating to read what I wrote back then, now, and I still have my old computer so I might try to turn it on once we get settled in our new home.

I mean, I still think about not being real and not really existing today, but not in a debilitating way like before. Now it doesn't really matter to me that what we think of as our reality isn’t technically real, but it is real to me, and I live my life as if it matters.

I’ve had experiences that have proved to me that our level of existence isn’t “real”, but it doesn't matter, because I have people I love and people who love me, and that’s what is important. I’m not the main character in this universe and I can do what I want, it doesn’t matter. And that’s fine.

Not many people are reading these blogs, so I don’t see a reason to get too in the weeds and explain too deeply about how my schizophrenia has shaped my worldview and personality now, but I might write more about it in the future I suppose!

I think I’ll end here for now, and I’ll probably be back with a new post in a couple weeks, if life works out that way! About to move so I might just be too busy!