A lot of delusions come straight from the movies to you. To be fair, you need to borrow ideas from somewhere, so why not steal from the best? One show that had a massive influence on me during my second psychosis was Dollhouse by Joss Whedon. It centered around a shady corporation that ran underground “dollhouses” with active dolls who were given temporary personalities and skills. These dolls were then rented out to wealthy clients for purposes like heists, sexual encounters, assassinations, and all sorts of other unique experiences. At the end of the episodes, the doll would lie down in a special chair where the experience was wiped from his or her memory and so went their lives. The show primarily followed one of the dolls, Echo, who remembered snippets even after the personality wipes and gradually developed self-awareness.
I became convinced that I was a real-life Echo who had woken up which explained all the fragmented memories I had of experiences that weren’t mine. They included sexual abuse, being locked up in chains in a basement, and being hunted naked through the woods by a group of wealthy men while watching my friends being shot and stabbed to death around me. Of course, none of this makes any sense, but when you’re in mid-psychosis your mind is running on overdrive, and you have no way of telling the difference between truth and fictional memories. The brain just keeps fabricating experiences, so anything you can imagine becomes a possibility.
I entered dollhouse hell and to make it worse, I became convinced that my boyfriend was also a sleeper, who once hypnotized participated in the raping and killing of women for fun. Living with him became increasingly difficult as my psychosis escalated and the fictional memories became part of my altered personality. I was terrified that he would snap into serial killer mode and take me out. I would cry over my dead friends, who became more real over time with names and personalities as imagined events came to dominate my reality. In the end, it was unbearable. The problem was that there was no way out. How did you stop the carousel? I wanted to get off. But the world just kept spinning, and everyone went about their day as normal. My friends were still dying in the hands of beasts.
The solution came to me one morning after another sleepless night. I thought that if I could smash all the technology in the house, it would be the first step towards taking down the sinister dollhouse network. It started with my Wacom graphics tablet, one of my dearest possessions, which I repeatedly smashed into the brick wall while crying until it finally came apart. After that, I threw $20,000 worth of computer equipment out of the window. I sat on the floor shaking with the apartment door wide open. Surely someone would come. After what seemed like an eternity of silence, I got up and ripped all the books out of the bookshelf. I then, with superhuman strength, also tossed it out of the window. I can still see it fall and smash the windscreen of a blue car parked in the street below into a million pieces. That’s when I heard the voices, and a moment later, I felt cold steel against my wrists as I got handcuffed. The room filled with policemen, and I was once again safe. Help had arrived.
“Thank you,” I called out. “Thank you so much for coming.” That’s when it hit me. Shit, I’m wearing the wrong earrings. Today was a silver ring event, not diamond studs. As they led me down the stairs to a waiting ambulance, I couldn’t stop thinking about those earrings. What a stupid mistake. Hopefully, it would not all have been for nothing now.