Dear Reader,

Welcome back to Wonderland. Thank you for once again going down the rabbit hole with me. The next stop on our journey is a place where walls move and trees glimmer, dreams and reality blur together and any sort of collective perception of the world disappears entirely. This is where things really start to get bizarre.

I bet you thought that talking to outlets was the weirdest our journey would get; to be fair, I thought so too at one point. I thought that talking to inanimate objects would be the “craziest” experience I would ever have, which I think is a pretty reasonable assumption to make. But guess what? Reason has kind of flown out the window and any assumptions you or I have made should be disregarded immediately.

You never expect to be crazy and odds are, you won’t realize that you are a bit off your rocker until someone else points it out to you. Even then, you probably won’t believe it at first—I mean, I sure as hell didn’t. It took a while for me to truly grasp that something was wrong and that I needed help. You’d think that as soon as trees started glimmering I would’ve figured it out, but alas, that was not the case. It took months of a steadily growing number of absolutely bizarre experiences for me to admit to myself, much less anyone else, that some crazy shit was happening.

It started with a walk across campus to an early morning class—I saw a tree and it just flickered, kind of like a light bulb right as it’s about to die. I definitely thought it was weird, there was a part of me that was like, “Dude, that’s not right … trees are not supposed to do that.” The rest of me, however, was pretty nonchalant about the whole thing, I mean, whatever, weird stuff happens all the time, right? So a tree did a weird glimmery flickering thing, did it hurt me? No. So I told myself it was fine, and it probably would’ve been except for the fact that it kept happening. As time went on more and more things started to glimmer or flicker, it sort of felt like those things were where various dimensions converged (which probably should’ve been an indicator to me that things were off—generally one doesn’t just casually talk about dimensions colliding … ). There was definitely a little part of my brain (we’re going to call this part “Sane Maddie”) that continually protested and tried to alert the rest of me that something was wrong. Unfortunately, Sane Maddie was not very convincing and I mostly ignored her …

Over time we grew from just having glimmer things to walls and ceilings moving around at random and having dreams that seemed more real than my waking hours. Once again, Sane Maddie was not pleased with this turn of events, but the rest of me thought nothing of it. In fact, at times it was pretty cool—I was on top of the world and everything was moving and I didn’t care, I could sit still as the world shifted around me! Turns out that a wall moving is not such a good thing and that it gets really scary pretty damn fast. Things escalated rapidly from me casually observing things to Sane Maddie screaming at me that things were NOT okay and that it was time to be scared. Sane Maddie was trying as hard as possible, our perception of the world was most certainly not the same as the people around us. Nothing like some reality issues to kick off the semester!

Eventually, with the help of some good drugs, Sane Maddie rejoined the rest of me and I returned to my previous position as a semi-functioning human that mostly didn’t see things that weren’t real. It’s funny, once I got back to “reality” or whatever you want to call it, I realized that a ton of people pay a lot of money to experience what I get just by being me—Team Mental Illness for the win!

So there you have it, Dear Reader, sometimes walls move and I get confused about dreams and reality and Sane Maddie needs to kick and scream until we realize something’s wrong. Mostly, though, I’m just a boring college student who gets to make tasteless jokes about losing touch with reality. But hey, you’ve gotta take what you can get, right? 

I welcome your feedback! Please feel free to send your questions, comments, or concerns to omearama17@grinnell.edu or if you prefer to remain anonymous, to my campus box, #4255.