Why My Biggest Fear Is Figuring It All Out

As a paranoid schizophrenic, I am very aware that things could always get worse, or just go back to how my brain was in my teens and twenties. Ages 14-30 were ROUGH, and it’s always in the back of my mind that even though things have been good, great even, for five years now, my brain is always capable of breaking down.

I’ve always considered myself as a dumb guy, and always think it’s weird when people say I’m smart, because I don’t feel like I’m smart. I guess I am kind of reflected and aware of myself, and this might lead others to perceive me as smarter than I consider myself. I also know a lot of useless information that can give off an impression of knowledge I suppose.

One time I was talking to my older brother, who has a PhD, and he was talking about what he wanted to accomplish in his field of work, and I realized he was smart, and that being smart might be a curse. He talked about wanting to develop a theory that would fix the whole field, and how he thought he might do that.

As a dumb guy, I have no plans or goals of how to fix anything, but as a schizophrenic, I occasionally glimpse The Answer, or a piece of it. I get this fleeting feeling that this thing I just saw or heard or figured out is but a small piece of the riddle that is the Universe itself, and that if I find all these pieces, I’ll have the answer to everything.

The whole “We are the universe trying to figure itself out” thing, I occasionally see parts of the answer, watching a nature documentary and piecing together something about humanity from the behaviour of some rare bird or marsupial. I can feel the weight of the universe in the back of my mind, urging me on, to grasp the Answer from the pieces I’ve seen. My greatest fear is that sometime in the future I'll have this figured out, and that I’ll be in some kind of facility away from my fiance and friends and family, lost to humanity, but completely knowledgeable about everything in the universe in my mind.

I’ve always been pretty good at spotting patterns, which I don’t have much use for as far as I can tell, but I’m sort of able to connect everything and everyone I know together by associations I have between things and people. I don’t like doing this, because if I think too much about a relationship only I am aware of, I unlock new strings and patterns between different things and people and I feel like I’m going insane.

I’m pretty good at cutting off these trains of thought when they start now, after years of therapy and actively training my brain to break the patterns of thought that ruined my late youth, but there are times where something triggers a sort of inner eye that can almost FIgure It All Out. Like if I start to pull on this string I have in front of me, I can reveal the Whole Truth and fix everything that’s wrong with the world.

I’ve been healthy for over five years now, and these peeks behind the curtain really scare me, because it feels like a view into an alternate life where I didn’t get therapy and help and was just left to myself and my madness. It feels like madness is right behind a thin veil, ready to break out and ruin me again. It is pretty scary.

We have these large language models now, so called “AI”, where people talk to themselves and go mad. I personally don’t mess with “AI” at all, other than the stuff that’s forced on me, and us, but it’s so easy to see an alternate life where this technology became mainstream ten or twelve years ago and I would’ve embraced it, using a dumb machine as a therapist and friend, completely losing my grip on reality and never breaking out of the rut I was in.

There’s the knowledge that if I was born in pretty much any other part of the world, I probably wouldn’t be healthy today, perhaps not even alive. I was saved by the social safety net we have here in Norway, and I honestly probably wouldn’t be here today without it. If I’d been born in the United States, best case scenario I’d be homeless and crazy somewhere, but most likely I never would’ve reached 30, let alone 35. I used to think about killing myself all the time when things were bad, and with unrestricted access to guns like they have over there, we know the most likely outcome.

I know I am extremely privileged to have a pretty normal life, a steady income, a fiance I love and who loves me, lots of friends and a rich social life and a now-quiet mind as a schizophrenic. It is rare, and I have no right to have it this good when so many others are suffering around the world.

Anyway, I’m sort of getting off track here. I just wanted to write a little about these glimpses of The Whole that I see and fear. If I continue to write and maybe even have some success, I can see a future where young people hear of me as a crazy old author that’s institutionalized due to madness. It is a possible future for me that I am not excited about! Alternately, things could just continue to go well, or some things could get worse, but I don’t lose my grip on reality either. The future is unknowable!

So this is the second blog in a week, looks like I might be getting back into the groove! Time will tell! I’ll be back.