My Final Descent Into Madness

This story describes the first time I ever got drug-induced psychosis when I was 18. If you are curious as to what insanity is like, this is all true to detail:

That old familiar syrup ran into the back of my throat as I swallowed it. 3, 2, 1 and just like that the bottle was gone. I threw it in the back of the garage that I was standing in. But tonight was different, one wasn’t enough to cover up my pain. I was living in constant mental torment and couldn’t go 5 minutes without fantasizing about putting a gun in my mouth. I started walking down Main Street so I could go steal another bottle at the pharmacy. After about 20 minutes of walking I made my way to a CVS down the street. In and out, same as usual. Just like always I walk out of the store with a bottle of Delsym in my pants. Again that thick syrup flowed through my throat. It was always so calming, because I knew what came after that would take me out of that pathetic existence I called a life. At least for a few days until the DXM wore off. Unknown to me this massive dose was just too much for my mind to handle. That night I would meet my match.
I finished half of the second bottle and then threw it into the dumpster beside me. By that time the effects of the first bottle slowly started to creep up on me. The headlights rushing past me became much brighter, and the world turned askew. As i walked along the sidewalks outside of North Penn my balance kept getting worse, and my vision blurrier. Before I knew it I was in what I liked to call “The other place.” I always thought of the world this drug brought me into as some other existence, not physical but mental. One where the demons inside my head couldn’t whisper in my ear. Where I could watch my life and relationships fall apart and not care in the slightest. I could look in the mirror and not recognize the self-centered, lowlife junkie that was looking back. I could watch life but not have to be present for it. It brought me peace through numbness.
I had never taken this much before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But as I got higher my consciousness was taken farther and farther from reality. Until it was like looking through my eyes from 20 feet away. I was so very distant from myself. I started to feel extremely uneasy. I don’t know why. I had this overwhelming feeling that something sinister was at work. If I only knew what was coming my way. At that point I couldn’t feel my body, it felt like I was floating along the sidewalk as I walked. The only thing tethering me to this world was the small part of my eyes that were open. But that was not nearly enough to keep this insanity at bay. Next thing I knew I was on the train tracks, walking just to walk. That's what my life had become, existing just because I existed not because I wanted to. My feet could move forever if they needed to. To me they were my feet no longer. I saw a train station in the distance and a factory on my left. I reminisced on the good times in my addiction when me and an old friend would drink behind it. That would be the last sane thought I had on that side of the threshold.
I kept walking, wondering when I would get to those lights at the train station. After a bit of time passed I noticed the lights weren’t getting any closer. I kept on trying to walk to them but it seemed they would stay in the same spot. Confused, I was wondering what was going on. Then it hit me. Like a freight train a realization came to me. I’m dead. Like a syringe the DXM injected this reality into my mind. It was as real as knowing the sky is blue. I couldn’t escape it. Suddenly every fiber of my being was brimming with despair and anguish. “Fuck! No! NO! NOO!” I panicked, wishing with all of me that this wasn’t true. I didn’t know until that night that one could be filled with so much regret, anger, and terror. It took me a good few minutes to get a hold of myself. After I crossed the threshold of my insanity and accepted my reality, I had one question. What happens now?
All of my life I had believed in heaven and hell, and most of my life I had expected to get to one of them quite early in life. I never saw myself living very long. I looked around and knew right away that wherever I was it wasn’t paradise. I tried walking back the way I came and then I saw something. In the darkness a gray humanoid figure appeared. It had grimey burnt skin, its arms looked more like deformed chicken legs with no hands. I looked it in the face and was horrified by what I saw. There were no eyes to be seen and its wide mouth was filled with dozens of razor sharp needle-like teeth. I felt shrill terror run through my spine and started running the other way. I could finally get closer to the train station. I was convinced that the lights of the station would lead me into the beautiful white light of heaven. Or I didn’t want to believe that the opposite was true, but soon enough I got to the station and there were no angels or heaven to be seen.
I arrived at the station very nervous to find that all that was waiting for me was the North Wales train station. After I crossed the threshold everything took on a different hue. Everything I looked at, the world in front of me all had a malevolent feeling to it. Even the moon and the sky all looked like it stood still in an eternal twilight. It started hitting me that maybe I wouldn’t see those pearly gates after all. My mind was racing a million miles a minute and that's when the possibility of being in hell came to mind. I remember staring off into space getting lost in my thoughts. I thought hell was supposed to have fire and torture. That has always been what I imagined hell to be like but the DXM was in control of my mind now and it forced a new reality into my head. I am going to walk around lansdale high for all of eternity. Never to speak to or see another living soul again. To be in a forever twilight, with no sun. Only night.
I could remember thinking of my family, I’ll never see them again. My friends, never again. Anybody that I’ve ever met or could’ve met would be no more. It's only me and my demons now to walk in eternal darkness. I imagined what my funeral was going to be like or if it already happened. I had a vivid image in my head of my mother finding out that I was dead, and having to tell the rest of my family that I was dead. All the pain and suffering I caused in life would come to a grand finale with my coffin being its resting place. I deserve this. After the initial shock of this was relatively manageable I kept walking. I figured that's what I’d be doing forever. I thought maybe I could find a doorway to heaven somewhere, I refused to believe this dark, lonely, macabre place was the end of my story.
Then I remembered that I must have had my phone on me when I died. I checked my pocket and sure enough it was there. I wasn’t sure if calling anybody would work but at that point I would do anything to even just hear another human voice. I scrolled through my contacts and found myself calling my ex-girlfriend Sarah. The dial tone ended and I heard her voice on the other side. It worked. “Hello?” She asked, confused as to why I was calling at 3 a.m. “Are we still on Earth?” I noticed it took a lot of my effort to speak coherently, “I don’t think we’re on Earth anymore, I think I might be dead.” My voice sounded like someone else’s, everything was so utterly alien to me. Even her voice sounded like she had been replaced with someone else. “What are you talking about Billy? What did you take?” I explained what I took and she told me to call her in the morning. But that never ended up happening.I couldn’t get it out of my head that the voice I heard on the other end of that phone call was a demon mimicking her voice trying to mock me. Make me think I was alive only to have that rug ripped out from under me.
What seemed like days had passed with no success in finding this doorway. I was standing in a car dealership and saw a car in the distance. As it passed by I saw every occupant wave to me. I waved back to everybody thinking they might help me but each car just passed on by. I felt deserted and alone, like god had just left me here to rot. But despite that, much of the night I felt a female presence with me, I don’t remember much about her except that she may have been trying to help me. In fact after the dealership much of the night is lost to me. My memory blacks out except a few small parts after that. What I do remember is standing in the middle of Stony Creek Park talking to some old friends of mine, thinking maybe that they were spirit guides disguised as people that I knew in life. But after that I don’t remember anything.
Everything is starting to feel more real. That was the first thing I could remember thinking as I walked down Hancock rd. It was early morning at this point and everybody was going to work. The sound of cars rushing past me was music to my ears. I was starting to realize that the night before might have just been a drug fuelled nightmare. But I wasn’t getting my hopes up. Something changed when I crossed that threshold of insanity. That nightmare was now my reality no matter how hard I tried to fight it or deny it. I turned into a parking lot and out of nowhere a police officer pulls over next to me. From his window he asked, “Have you taken any drugs today sir?” I knew for a fact I was still much past the point of being able to hide my intoxication, “Yes I did.” After he heard that he stepped out of his patrol car and sat me down on the curb. All of the questions he asked were so hard to understand. Everything still seemed very distant to me. Push came to shove and he sent an ambulance for me to take me to hospital.
My mindset starts changing and I start thinking that maybe the police office was an angel trying to get me to the right place. My trip to the hospital were the angels helping me get to heaven. Laying in my hospital bed I fell asleep, I was very tired from walking for 13 hours. When I woke up I had no sense of time. I could've been in that room for one hour or one month, I had no idea. But I kept seeing these disfigured people looking through the hospital room blinds. They looked concerned for me, my mind had started imagining that those people were my parents. Maybe I was in a coma and that my mom and dad were waiting for me to wake up. Although my mind had better footing in reality I was still completely and utterly insane.
That’s when he walked into my room. I still remember his face very clearly. He was a middle-aged man, with a shiny bald head and a pair of glasses resting on his face. He had blue hospital scrubs on and looked like he had some very important news for me. “Hello are you William?” He asked,“ Yes I am.” I replied as quickly as my mind would let me. “I’m from the church-” I interrupted him not expecting what just came out of his mouth,“the church?”
“Yes, the church thinks you’re ready to leave this hospital.” It seemed like I was just read my last rights, that made it very hard to deny this reality my mind kept pushing onto me. Some time after that I left the hospital and I couldn’t get this whole experience out of my psyche no matter how hard I tried.
I went back to walking and an old friend of mine from AA had seen me walking and pulled up next to me. Apparently no one, including my family, had known where I was for the past two days. He ended up calling my mom and reluctantly, I decided it was time to get help so she took me to the same rehab I was in not even two weeks before that. The admissions process was long and I was still incredibly high. I remember having severe mood swings, they were symptoms of something else that I wouldn’t know about until the next day. The night ended with me finally getting a full night sleep.
I woke up in my room covered in urine the next morning. It's quite hard to control muscles in your sleep when you can’t feel them very well while you’re awake. After I got that taken care of I started getting myself comfortable. There were people that were there the last time and they weren’t very happy to see me in there again, especially in the shape I was in. My mind was shot and my cheeks were sunken in. We had a few groups that morning, the first was group therapy. For the first time I had explained my experience out loud, like it was already over. But it had just begun. The whole time I had been there I had sensed that something was off, I couldn’t put my finger on it but something was very wrong. I started believing it was everybody else. They all seemed to look at me strange, like they knew something I didn’t. I kept on looking at people’s tattoos and everywhere I looked it had something to do with hell or the devil. On one man’s arm it was the word “Forever” covered in flames. Another it was the devil himself engraved into their skin. It was all as real as the computer screen you are looking at right now. This was when my anxiety started becoming more prevalent.
Our next group was a music therapy group. At this point I became more and more suspicious about everything and everybody. I started becoming convinced that I had never gone to heaven and I wasn’t alive. I’m still in hell. As they passed out the lyrics of the song my heart was pounding out of my chest. I was trying my best not to panic. And then they started singing, “You’re a fuck up, you’re a fuck up. You deserve this for all that you’ve done. You’ll never be anything...” As soon as they started singing I couldn't believe my ears, I kept thinking I was mishearing them but no matter how hard I listened it was this horrible song about why I deserved eternal punishment. I looked at the lyrics and the title that I saw was “You Deserve This” It was like the devil himself was singing to me. It was on a loop, they all just kept repeating it and that's what the lyrics said over and over again. I had to leave the room or I thought I was going to have a heart attack. When I walked out of the room I looked up at this motivational poster of a kitten. But when I read it all that it said was: “Don’t you wish humans were as innocent as kittens?”
That was the last straw, my mind could take no more and I thought my heart was about to explode. I felt my body go limp and I collapsed. All I heard right before was “He’s seizing!” I fell to the ground and my whole body started shaking violently. I came to on the floor practically screaming that I was in hell. The rehab director was stood over me assuring me I wasn’t but for all I knew he was the devil trying to trick me. I left rehab on a stretcher that day. I don’t remember the next week except small bits and pieces. They had to shoot me up with heavy duty anti-psychotics to bring me back to real life. The night I took the DXM started a process called serotonin syndrome. One of the symptoms of that is psychosis and insanity. I returned to normal after about a week and a half but brought back with me a very real experience of going insane. I know some people might be curious as to what it's like and that's why I wrote this.