Apparently out at the mall, they are not very nice to me, or about me. It is the opinion of a neighbour however, delivered with unmistakable contempt, that maybe people would be nicer to me if I was a little more friendly towards them.

How do I know this? It was acted out for me from about ten feet away. I have seen similar performances hundreds of times.

But wait! NO, I haven't either. I only 'believe' that I have because I have a brain disease that causes me to 'think' this happens when 'really' it does not. I am just hallucinating it. Yes that's it. That's it exactly. Really it is just my own projected opinion of myself and no conversations between others are taking place from one to ten feet away, as I told psychiatrists they were. They know that because the invalidation of the experience is written down in the Big Book of Insanity. It cannot be real you see as it would not be reasonable for people who do not even know me to be behaving this way. As we all know, the world is filled to overflowing with reason. If I can't see that, I am obviously crazy. Therefore we must deny it and give it an alternate meaning, preferably one that keeps the reality of the experience locked tightly into my tiny little defective mind so no one else will have to see it.

So when others stand a few feet away and ask each other, why doesn't she do something? Why does she never say anything about it? All I have to do now is follow the interpretations of my experiences as handed to me by experts.

I tell myself: No one is talking about me. No one is saying, why doesn't she do something. No one is talking about my lack of friendliness towards them, or fabricating slanderous stories about me being a thief, or telling tall tales about me being an alcoholic, when I am not, or about being psychic or anything like that; no sir. There was no ‘joke’ or ‘game’ being played here and there is no one on my side and never was, and certainly there would be no 'man' admiring me from afar as we middle aged, to aging, old whack jobs like to imagine from inside the parameters of our personality disorders. I am just imagining the whole thing including all these imaginary conversations from the public. Yes doctor, I can sure see that now, you are the expert who is “always right and never wrong” as is stated inside the est training  of a psychiatric nurse I know.

So now that I have spent the last seventeen years being straightened out by psychiatry and the entire population of the city where I live, none of whom see this as I see it, I have learned that I must not speak of my perception problems, and I must not react to anything I only 'think' is happening, by displaying any of those inappropriate affects of mine. I've got it now.

So the next time I think I see groups of people with their heads cocked together, lowering their amused little eyes and talking out of the sides of their duplicitous mouths, I will understand that it is all just a manifestation of my insanity. After all if I cannot trust the combination of authority and group consensus to created and define my reality for me, who or what can I trust? For a fleeting second there, I thought, “I could trust my own experience of reality and my feelings as appropriate, to that perception  but then I remembered that I can't, as I have a really serious mental illness/brain disease that causes me to 'think' I know my own ass from a hole in the ground, when really, I don't.

I wish to now thank all of the staff of Homewood Health Centre for changing my life recreating my experience of reality so that my life can be just the way it has turned out today. Thank God that now, as I walk through the streets every day listening to the hallucinations in my mind of bus driver, library opinion, and being called stupid by hospital staff and ugly by their charming children etc.  I can know that none of this is really happening or ever was happening, that I just imagined the whole thing and now I can ignore all of those I used to believe were duplicitous bitches and verbally abusive bastards, because they weren't then, and are not now. I only thought, or think they are, because I am crazy. What a relief. Many thanks  to all the doctors who heard all the signs and symbols of madness in my 'story' and kept me apart from the rest of the world until I was ready to agree to let go of my false beliefs and embrace theirs instead.

Oh, now you won't take that the wrong way will you?

I wouldn't want to confuse you after all. Not that your confusion is the same as mine. Yours would be legitimate and connected to concrete reality, whereas mine is just an internal pathology, without relationship to any real experience...isn't it?