The Lie We Tell Ourselves

I worked at a pet shop in high school, and we had a frequent customer who would come in and mumble about the FBI and how he was being watched, while recording himself. I didn’t really know what he was doing or feeling at the time, I just knew I didn’t want to go near him! Years later, I got myself a microchip in my hand, then learned about people who believe they had been implanted with things against their will that speak to them, control them, and generally make their lives nightmares: “targeted individuals”. Not all of them believe they have been chipped, but they do all believe that they are being harassed or controlled by a person or organization. Sometimes this is through “normal” technology like GPS trackers and cameras, sometimes it’s through things like mind control implants or psychic powers, and sometimes there’s no technology involved at all, just everyone focusing on and harassing them everywhere they go.

99%+ of the time (all of the time for experiences involving nonexistent technology like implantable, tiny GPS trackers or mind control chips), these are symptoms of schizophrenia or related mental conditions. When you tell this to a “targeted individual”, they are usually thankful that their problems are solved, and immediately make an appointment with a psychiatrist.

Nope.. you’re actually just adding to the pile of people who have already told them that they’re “crazy” and “losing their grip on reality”. Maybe you’re even in on the harassment, trying to stop them from seeking real help so you can continue to torment them. Their doctors definitely are- they won’t believe a single word about the undeniably real harassment that you experience when you’re targeted. Why won’t anyone listen? The whole world must be in on it. Maybe they’re even making a TV show about you.

But.. Can you blame them? The essence of “mental illness”, “mental disorder”, and “schizophrenia” is crazy, and crazy is a very bad thing to be. Bipolar, PTSD, even more common things like depression and anxiety still don’t mean a whole lot more than crazy and wrong. How can you be crazy when you have friends, go to the bar on weekends, and work out every day? Those are normal people things, not the actions of a crazy person. Would you believe someone that told you that the abuse and damage being done to you is a figment of your imagination? I don’t think I would, I would probably tell that person to fuck off. What if that’s all that anyone ever tells you, even your loved ones?

There is a lie deeply ingrained in our culture and that we all have to tell ourselves at some level, and it is that our experience of the world is equal to the objective, external world that everyone experiences; basically, that we can ever fully “trust our senses”.

But it’s not, we can’t, and the “external world” is foreign to us (if it even exists!).

Close your left eye and look at the circle below with your right eye. Move towards and away from the screen until you find the distance at which the cross disappears, probably between six inches and 2 feet depending on the size of the screen you’re reading this on.

You might’ve heard about it, but you probably never noticed this blind spot unless you’ve already seen one of these tricks to make something disappear. The reason for that is that our brains are extremely good at masking these vision dead zones (one per eye), and other impediments to our sight and other senses. The point is: the brain, our mind, is an unreliable narrator of the “external world” even for completely healthy, normal people. Our senses are based on incomplete information, and our experience is a reconstruction of those senses that is unique to every person, and assuming that it is a completely correct reconstruction would cause you to believe that the cross blips off your screen for everyone when you move your head a certain way. It would also cause you to believe in other “reconstruction errors”: that everyone is judging you because of your beat-up shoes, that your keys were stolen by the gnomes because you can’t find them right now, that you’re bound to hit the next jackpot because you’ve lost eight times in a row, that there really are things moving in your peripheral vision whenever you go a very long time without sleeping, or that your mind is being controlled by a microchip that someone implanted in your brain.

Experience is reality. No one can know what the world is like outside of their senses, or if there even is a world at all. As much as we like to trust our experiences, you have no actual way of telling whether you’re in the matrix, or whether anyone in the world has a mind like you do. Even the most normal people have no idea what reality really is (and can never know). Colors, sounds, and all of our other senses are translations of something (electromagnetic radiation, vibrations of air molecules, etc) into terms that we can understand, and the original text is completely hidden from and foreign to us, by the nature of what we are.

People that experience gang stalking and being targeted are actually experiencing those things, they’re just not reflected in other people’s experiences. No doctor or scan would be able to find advanced technology in their bodies, but they are still being spoken to by the microchip in their brain, in exactly the same way that you are spoken to every day. And they are being harassed by nebulous and shadowy groups, but a thorough search of the entire world for those groups would come up empty-handed. It just happens that the resolution for these problems is not fighting back or implant removal surgery, it’s probably psychiatric medication.

The only reality that exists is perception. I think it’s natural and a simple consequence of being human to feel that the reality we perceive is the external world - our perception evolved to let us interact with the external world as easily as possible - but it’s very helpful to also know rationally that it’s only a representation of a few aspects of it. A very lossy compression.

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The following is meandering and somewhat repetitive thoughts on mental health as it relates to the above.

I think mental health destigmatization is pretty important. If “I have poor mental health” - basically, “I am crazy” didn’t have any connotation (just like “my leg is broken” or “my head hurts” - you don’t really think of any type of person when hearing it), a lot of people would be suffering a lot less. The core thing that needs to be acknowledged is that our realities / experiences do not necessarily align with others’, and sometimes differ by amounts that cause anguish in suffering, as in schizophrenia. (Arguably, all human-caused suffering is caused by a misalignment between experienced realities, but that’s for another post..)

On the other side of the coin, sometimes mental health “issues” aren’t so much issues as just non-typical (neurodivergent). Schizophrenia has a clear negative impact on the experiences of most of its sufferers, but things like autism and ADHD are much more difficult to make a determination on. How do you decide when someone’s experienced reality is sufficiently different from most people’s as to be considered a disorder and treated, when you don’t and can’t know what their reality is like? When it starts having a negative impact? How do you judge that, especially if the person doesn’t want their reality to change? When it starts to harm other people?

“Reality” discussed here includes everything that we experience: senses aren’t at all separate from feelings and thoughts, it just really feels like it (this is why you might see a word or phrase everywhere for a few days after learning it for the first time). “Normal” people have an astounding variety of hobbies, opinions, likes, dislikes, habits, and feelings, and the only reason for that wonderful diversity is different realities. Some mental “disorders” can have positive effects, or at least the person doesn’t nearly think of it as a disorder. Also, all mental conditions only present in a spectrum, it’s just that labels can be pretty useful. That said, I definitely think that mental health treatment has a positive effect on the experience / life of most people that it is administered to, and the proportion is higher the more severe the condition is. Even if nothing is inherently negative or an “issue”, there certainly are conditions that cause a very large divide between your reality and others’, and that tends to cause grief unless you decide to go live in a cabin in the woods. On the most extreme end, there are conditions that cause injury or death even if you do live in a cabin in the woods. (If I wanted to type more, I would ask if that’s actually inherently bad, but I’ll throw that in the “think about this later” pile.)