In the Lowest Times of My Life

Which times came early on, in my adolescence and then sporadically into my twenties, I felt an isolation from other people so deep that it skirted the edge of madness.

I did not hear voices that were not there, but the actual heard voices, even of loved ones, passed through a filter that made them sinister, malevolent, without regard to what was actually said.  It was a phenomenon that you couldn't walk or run away from; after all, you take your broken mind with you wherever you may go.

Happily, these incidents were rare and short lived.  When they subsided, I felt as if I had been welcomed back into a zone of comfort, but I told no one about it.  To be permanently in such a place, in those days when treatment might consist of blunt-force drugs and physical constraints, would have been a horrible fate indeed.