Perceived: Losing and Finding my Mind

EPISODE 1: PART 3

The next day, my mum and dad told me they would have trouble taking the day off and that I should stay at my grandparents’ house (they lived close by to us). Mum and I sat in silence as we took the 20-minute ride to their house. I think everyone was a bit shocked and sad at this point. When I got to my grandparents’ house, they didn’t know what to say. They offered me cereal, and because I was starving, I had two serves. I felt like they were acting a bit funny too. My grandmother started talking about how she had asked me to call the doctors for her and make an appointment, and that I had forgotten. I started thinking that maybe it was all karma and this was all happening because I had forgotten to make her an appointment. My grandfather went for his daily morning nap, and I sat with my grandmother. I started to hear noises like the door opening, and the blinds opening and closing. I thought somebody was in the house. I tried telling my grandmother this, but she just laughed and said there is no one in the house.

I heard some motor bikes on the street and thought maybe Rohan was inside the house and had brought a bikie gang with him to hurt my grandparents and I. I was so petrified that I ran outside, to seek help from one of the neighbours. My grandmother (I call her ‘Awwa’) grabbed me and held on so tight. She begged me to come back inside and I tried to get her to let go so I could proceed to the neighbour’s house but her grip was too strong. I started thinking that this scenario was facilitated by the evil entity to cause my grandmother to have a stroke, and harm her without laying a finger on her. Because I didn’t want to further stress her out, I reluctantly went back inside with her. I thought that at least that way, I could try to save them if anyone tried to hurt them as well.

My grandmother put a statue of god in front of me from her prayer place and gave me some religious books. But when I began to read the books, I started reading them in those three ways I mentioned before and all I could see were the negative words and evil things. I thought that this was it and that was the day I was going to die. By this time, my grandmother had called my dad and brother in law, so they were on their way to her place. I was so extremely scared that I decided to call the police. I thought there was someone hiding in the house, and the only way I could get out of this and feel safe was to call the cops. My dad and brother in law arrived just before the cops arrived, and they explained to the police that I was unwell and that my reality was morphed. The police officers asked me a few questions and I started to think they were evil too, and secretly laughing at me. I started feeling hopeless, that even if I was in trouble the police wouldn’t even help me because they were in on all the secrets around me and were watching my every move. I was, however, glad that my dad and brother in law were home, because even as I saw them as threats and were suspicious of them, I thought they could protect me from external forces.

The next day, mum and dad took the day off so I could go and get some brain scans and blood tests. Our first stop was my sister’s work, a general practitioner surgery on the Gold Coast, which was about an hour away from where we lived. Everyone entered the Pathology room where I was to have my blood test. The Pathology lady, Gina, was incredibly friendly and asked me what my name was. “Priyanka”, I said. “What a beautiful name!” she exclaimed. “Priyanka”. At this point I was so overwhelmed that I was about to cry. I felt battered down by the world, and I was exhausted. For someone to look me in the eye and tell me something about me was beautiful just caused the tears to pour down. I looked over, and my dad was in tears too. He hardly ever cried.

From there, we went to get a brain scan, as my sister was scared that sometimes, paranoid symptoms could show up due to a brain tumour. When we arrived, dad left the building as he had received a phone call. I was so on edge and worried that someone would hurt him, until he came back inside. On the television in the waiting room, the news was on and it was talking about the royal family. My brain began putting two and two together and thinking that the evil entity wanted me to get with Rohan and that there were three possible outcomes…good, evil or neutral. In the good circumstance, I would live happily ever after like the Royal family with Minnie and my brother in law being the equivalent of Will and Kate, and Rohan and I corresponding to Harry and Meghan. In the evil circumstance, Rohan would kill me and somehow strip my family of everything they had, from their qualifications to their money. In the neutral situation, my mission to save the world would just continue and I would be left to decode things forever, not coming to a happy ending or a terrifying ending.  

One night Tiana came home to visit, as she was concerned and wanted to see me. My sister, dad and her were going to go to the local driving range and hit some balls. When we got there, there was a man in a white shirt. He was walking around with his club, and I felt like he was evil and wanted to start a fight with me to culminate in a good vs evil type situation. He kept on coming near me, I’m not sure what his issue was, but I kept saying things to him and Tiana and my sister looked extremely embarrassed. My sister even pulled me aside and said that I was really embarrassing her, and that I needed to stop. I decided to ignore her, as I thought she was trying to sabotage my chances of winning the battle between me and the man. I was scared that at any moment he would get the golf club and start beating myself or someone else up, so I kept talking to him and trying to intimidate him. I am so embarrassed on hindsight, but luckily it is unlikely that I will be seeing that man ever again.

At this point, my memory had become very bad and I kept forgetting where I put things, and when they appeared back where I had put them, I started thinking that someone had moved them to play games with me or gaslight me. It was a weekend day and mum took me to see a general practitioner, so that I could get some documentation to defer my university studies, as there was no way I could carry on with them. My mind was in overdrive and I had taken my wallet with me, but forgot to take it out of the car when I went inside with mum to see her. When I went in the GP told me to stand on the scales and she wrote down my weight. I remember thinking wow, I’ve gained weight, but ironically, I have gained more than twenty kilograms since that day.

As I exited the building, I realised I didn’t have my wallet with me. I went back into the doctor’s surgery to check whether I had left it there, but the receptionist told me that I had not left anything behind. I called my dad to ask whether I had left it at home, and after checking the house, he told me that it wasn’t at home. When I got back to the car, I noticed that the window was rolled down a bit and my wallet was sitting on the seat. My brain decoded this to mean that my mum had tried to hide my wallet at home, but dad had driven all the way to the gold coast, put my wallet in the car and driven back home to show me that he was there for me and to show mum that she should stop messing with me. Little did I know that the whole time I had left my wallet in the car.

This entire time, I carried around a red document wallet with me with all my doctors documents and anything else that I thought was relevant. I believed that my legal studies to date were helping me to overcome the problems I was facing, and that I needed to keep all the so-called “legal documents” together to help solve the puzzle. I would carry it around with me in a green insulated refrigerator bag. My family asked me not to carry it around as it was embarrassing for me, and they thought I will regret it when I get better. Somehow, I listened to them.

Colours were also codes. Purple stood for family, green stood for success, orange stood for religion and pink or red was danger. My mum had bought Royal Dalton cups which were green, purple, pink and orange. Every time someone asked me to make them a cup of tea, I would make it in the green or orange cup. I believed that orange was a sign for religion because growing up, my parents had taken us to Sunday school which followed the teaching of a spiritual Guru in India. This Guru always wore orange robes, and when I was little, a family friend who was also a devotee had given me a game called “Life is a Game, Play It”, and it was about the Guru’s teachings and values. Now I thought I was living the real-life game, but that there was much more at stake than when I was playing it on the computer as a kid. I actually started believing that I might be the successor of this spiritual Guru, the next Guru or a reincarnate of this spiritual Guru, to come and bestow teachings upon his followers, that’s how messed up my thought process had become.

One day, I woke up still feeling scared and didn’t want my parents to leave me. My dad said he would stay at home because I was feeling unsafe, and his main priority was for me to feel safe. For some reason, as much as I had been losing it lately, I felt that the people around me were losing it too. I thought that it was my responsibility to keep them sane and I could hear my dad in the shower singing bhajans (Hindu religious songs), which he hardly ever does, and he had been in there for a long time. I thought he was very close to losing his sanity, so I decided I had to stop this all once and for all.

Later on, when I was in the car on the radio, there was a segment on the ABC radio about a red envelope. To this day, I am not sure whether I hallucinated the segment or if there was coincidentally actually a program about a red envelope. Nonetheless, I had decoded this to mean that the red envelope was the key to saving everyone around me. I had imagined that I would go to my sister’s house, hand her the red envelope, she would literally give me a key, and I would stop being scared, and everything would go back to normal.

Notwithstanding that my sister would be at work, and nobody would be at her home, I decided to grab my dad’s car keys (mine were hidden away somewhere), and started to back out his car onto the driveway, but then realised I didn’t know the way to my sister’s house on the Gold Coast off by heart. So, I stopped in the driveway and started punching in her address to the car’s in-built GPS system. By this time, dad had come out onto the driveway in his towel, and opened the door. He had thought that someone was stealing his car and had run out of the shower to see what was going on. He looked really upset and told me that he would drive me wherever I needed to go. I was defiant and said I would go myself, because I didn’t think he was in the mental state to drive (ironically). I got out of the car and refused to give him the keys. He started to get almost hysterical and took the keys off me. This scared me and I started to run in the opposite direction. I didn’t know where I was going, but I thought I was in danger and that I needed help. I was scared that my own father would hurt me. Somehow my dad managed to console me and convince me that he wouldn’t hurt me, and I agreed to come back home. But I remember thinking that whatever evil entity was out there wanting me to suffer was winning, and I remember crying to myself and feeling really depressed.