Hallucinations were the original secret. They trained me to keep all the other ones. I learned an important lesson from my parents in early childhood: if anyone outside our family found out, they would put me away. In earlier times, my dad told me, people would have considered me a shaman or prophet, but in modern times, they would assume that I was insane.
The first nineteen years of my life were defined by this fear, the fear that that any day I would lose the ability to tell the difference between hallucinations and reality. That’s why I’m always asking people “Am I crazy?” My therapist loves when I make that slip. He jumps all over it in our sessions. He knows that it’s a real concern of mine. I spent the first nineteen years of my life trying to figure it out. I carried the dread of living on borrowed time as a pre-schizophrenic.
And this is why I’m tired all the time.
There is precedent in my family. One of my uncles is a diagnosed schizophrenic. He lives in my grandmother’s basement. I saw him in the background at certain family events, but we have never spoken. My mother was terrified I would turn into him. She was triggered by the possibility of auditory hallucinations. That was the tipping point, in her mind. She would panic and interrogate me now and then. I always reassured her that I had only seen things, not heard them.
I lied to her so she wouldn’t think I was a budding version of my uncle, but to be clear, the voices didn’t speak to me in any sustained fashion. I couldn’t have conversations with them. They came and went like interjections. And I didn’t just hear voices. One day when I was home alone, I heard tribal drums start to play, and there were no tribal drums in my house. It was scary, but I also have a soft spot for tribal drums. So, like with all my hallucinations, it was a mixed experience. Keep in mind what my father had told me: the hallucinations made me special, a shaman, a prophet, but if anyone found out, they would call me crazy and lock me up. The thing that made me special also made me unsafe. It was a Chinese finger trap.
I keep trying to write essays that focus exclusively on the hallucinations, but then I get lost along the way. I had to change the title halfway through writing this one because I noticed tangents had taken over. C’est la dissociation, I suppose.
I hallucinated up until age nineteen. The last one was auditory. I heard it in the lobby of the mental health center at UVA as I walked towards Dr. T’s office. It was incredibly on the nose.
“Don’t go there,” a voice called from nowhere. It was a neutral male voice. A tenor. I ignored it and walked into Dr. T’s office anyway. I would see him for the next four years.
Out of all the people I owe in life, Matt and Dr. T will always have top billing. They took me in when I needed them most. They told me that I wasn’t crazy. They convinced me to tell them everything. At my last session, I told Matt that he had saved my life. He got bashful and said something like “I don’t know about that.”
But I knew. I knew.
Therapists vary like all professionals. My own sister had a lukewarm experience with her therapist at the same university. She stopped going to him in the first year, but I got special treatment from the Center, something I felt privately smug about. After six sessions at the Center, you’re usually referred out. But they let me come all four years of college. Later, I would feel the same sort of warped pride when Matt told me what the intake counselor had relayed to him four years earlier: I was the most anxious person she had ever seen.
Matt was picked by Belinda, the therapist who did my intake. Four years later, at the advice of Dr. T, I would request my therapy notes and see her description of me. Very nervous thin white male. He presents as a bit odd socially.
That last sentence has really stuck with me. I hear it when I go too far with a bit. I hear it when I sputter stupid-sounding things during one of my anxiety attacks. I hear it when my Tourette’s flares up and tics jerk me around like I’m some possessed doll.
He presents as a bit odd socially.
My favorite line from the notes came from Dr. T. I thought about making it the title of something, and maybe I will if I ever compile a book of essays. The line in question was this:
“Mr. Bozicevich is a complicated case.”
I can’t read the notes without crying. If I read them, I will sob and shake. It’s inevitable. But when I read that line, it makes me chuckle. I’m grateful for the comic relief. The sentence is so silly and monumental at the same time:
Mr. Bozicevich is a complicated case.
Dr. T. gave me my favorite diagnosis: PTSD. He gave it to me at our first session. I had been vague with Matt during talk therapy, but Dr. T broke me down just by asking “Anything else?” after each time I blubbered out one of my secrets. Dr. T was very controlled and very reactive in different intervals.
“Oh my god,” he would grimace when I told him a bad story. “That’s awful.”
And it made me feel so much better. That was what I really wanted to hear. I just wanted someone to tell me that things had been awful, that I wasn’t crazy, that the things that had happened should not have. That’s why PTSD is my favorite. When I write the list out in my head, it goes in this order:
1. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
2. Major Depressive Disorder
3. Tourette’s
4. Scoliosis
I was floored when Dr. T said PTSD. I thought you had to go to war for that particular condition. But he said I had gotten it just by living my sad little life. And he knew my school. I remember that. He grimaced when I said the name.
“Oh, believe me, I’ve heard stories,” he said. I didn’t ask him what they were, so I guess I’ll never know. I’m not sure if it matters. But it would be interesting to compare notes.
PTSD. It had trauma and stress in the title. It was undeniable. I was having trouble because bad things had happened. It was not my fault. No one could convince me otherwise.
That last one has not been so consistent. The further I get from childhood, the more my memories feel like a movie. I double check and triple check. Is all this really based on a true story?
These days, I try to think of it like this: PTSD is the first few chapters, not the conclusion. There are whole other sections of my biography waiting for me if I can get well. But to do that, I must ease up on myself. I must stop being such a good little soldier. I must stop keeping all these secrets.
I was dejected after the neurologist diagnosed me with Tourette’s. I teared up in the parking lot and hid it from my parents. My father was relieved. He had gotten upset when I filled out the pre-appointment questionnaire. I marked that I had nightmares and he accused me of trying to see a therapist, and he was right, although I couldn’t admit it then. I was hoping the neurologist would refer me to a therapist because the secrets were eating away at me. I felt at any moment I might collapse in on myself. But I also felt guilty for wanting therapy. I had been taught that therapists were evil unless they were Christian, and even then, they were suspect. Therapists broke up families. What’s more, therapists would be the most concerned with hallucinations, as it was their job to find the crazies.
Tourette’s was correct, though. My symptoms aligned. In fourth grade I developed an eye twitch. It got remarks from the teacher. My dad asked me to suppress it, and I did, but then a host of other tics sprouted along my body. Most notably, my legs would shake and quiver at random moments, the oblique regions of my stomach would clench, and I made weird little noises in the back of my throat. I could suppress the tics, but that would make them worse later. So, I mostly saved suppression for performances because a tic would break character.
I’ve gotten pretty good at managing Tourette’s. Most acquaintances don’t know, and I go through periods where I have barely any tics at all. In those periods, I start to doubt the diagnosis myself. But the flare-ups are powerful rebuttals. For a couple years in my mid-20s, I could barely get through a vehicle ride, especially on the metro. I had this terrible sensation throughout each trip that I would piss myself. I clenched to prevent that, but all the clenching put further pressure on my bladder, and that would make me clench even more, which prolonged the chicken-and-egg paradox of it all: had the tics started because I had to piss, or was my bladder straining under the pressure of my tics?
I bounced my legs like kids do when they’re fidgeting. Sometimes I had to stand and sway-clench, rubbing my pants constantly to make sure they were not covered in piss. I had to clear my throat again and again, making little grunts or “kuh” sounds. I worried that people on the metro would think I was another one of the spastic addicts who populated the city. I worried that I was one mental breakdown away from joining their ranks. I worried that I might be pre-schizophrenic after all.
CBD has helped my tics more than anything else. Ditto for panic attacks. I learned about CBD by getting sucked into a former friend’s sketchy business venture. For a year, I managed said ex-friend’s CBD store. It was one of the worst experiences of my 20s. But it also introduced me to CBD, which has helped me quite a bit. So, that’s been confusing. The thing that helps my anxiety also reminds me of something that causes me anxiety. It’s another Chinese finger trap.
But like I always say, that’s the subject of a different essay, and it’s not one I want to type up at present. I’m sure I’ll hear it at some point, though. That’s how the essays make me write them. I resist all day, trying to do practical things, and the essays play on repeat in the back of my thoughts until I give in and start typing. Hours go by. The words pour out of me. I feel elation and then worry. This is too much. This is too personal. This will ruin everything.
Scoliosis is not so exciting as a diagnosis. It’s relatively common and my case is relatively mild, but it’s a decent response when people tell me not to slouch. I’m trying not to, I have scoliosis. Oh, I’m so sorry. That’s all right, it’s a mild case, but it does make it hard to have good posture.
It’s a conversation that lets me feel magnanimous while usually getting people to shut up. I never expect people to doubt my scoliosis, but I’m convinced on some level that everyone suspects I’m faking my Tourette’s. My father thought I was playing up the twitches, especially when they happened at church (they tended to be the worst there and at school), but he calmed down when they diagnosed me. Tourette’s was not his fault. It was a neurological accident. So, I’m still not quite sure why I continue to doubt the diagnosis myself. Maybe I resent it for my father’s relief that I wasn’t being referred to therapy.
The best conversations I had with my mother and father respectively were this year. I was quite high both times, and we talked for hours. Of course, I don’t remember most of either talk, but I remember discussing our family in a larger context: trying to figure out whether my paternal grandfather had PTSD from World War II, trying to discern whether my maternal great-grandfather had PTSD from the Holocaust, all sorts of taboo things like that. It was a puzzle we would have never done together when I was growing up. Things were too tense back then.
In that conversation with my dad, we even discussed the hallucinations. We hadn’t talked about them in years.
“I never figured that one out,” I told him.
For both conversations, the discussion was in code, at least on my end. I was trying to explain in nonconfrontational language what I had learned as their prodigal son. I was trying to convey that I didn’t mean to hurt them by remembering the difficult stories. I wasn’t trying to keep them mired in shame. I knew that they were sick too, that they had also been hurt, that the family curse had not spared them. I remembered the difficult stories because I could not forget them. They kept appearing in my thoughts and nightmares. They kept spurring symptoms and diagnoses. Learning how to tell my stories was the only way to save myself, and maybe if I did it right, I could save them too.
I believe that generational cycles are like riptides. You can’t struggle too hard against a riptide, that will only get you sucked in further. You have to swim along with the current. You have to find where the riptide ends.
Major Depressive Disorder is the most recent diagnosis. That’s what my doctor said to my insurance provider, at least. I’m ambivalent about MDD. And yet, I put it second on the list, probably because it pairs well enough with the first. I’m fine with MDD so long as it doesn’t overshadow PTSD. That’s the money diagnosis right there, not MDD. Major Depressive Disorder is too indirect. On some level, I need people to know that bad things happened, that these things still make it hard for me to function, and that it is not my fault. I also need to know this for myself.
It sounds so dramatic typed out like that. It’s like that scene in Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon’s character laughs it off and then he cries. Robin Williams holds him, and in that moment, he knows the thing that he’s been trying to realize his whole life, the obvious but not-so-obvious thing:
It wasn’t his fault.
I have a real fear of being cliché. Sentences like that last one trigger said fear. We’ve seen that arc already. Denial to acceptance. Repression to release. It’s not so surprising anymore. It’s all over movies and TV, Instagram and Tik Tok. Traumatized stars and influencers are everywhere. Disabled ones too. The most successful ones double as hot people. I don’t make the rules.
My fear of cliché is related to my fear that the bad things that happened are not so bad, that I am too privileged for pity, that my trauma is boring. But I usually get Dr. T type of reactions to the stories I think of as more innocuous, and that always gives me relief. If they thought that was bad…and then I think of the headline traumas, the movie moments, the money shots. Sometimes I cry thinking about them, sometimes I don’t. It depends on the day and time.
PTSD, MDD, Tourette’s, Scoliosis. Those are the big four. I rehearse them the way a child rehearses his address or phone number. This is what I will tell the adults if I get lost.
But where do the hallucinations fit in? In spite of my fear, I told Dr. T about them, and he didn’t think they were very important. He told me that the hallucinations didn’t fit any definition of psychosis. I spent my whole childhood terrified to tell someone outside my family, but Dr. T was barely phased. He shrugged the hallucinations off, and just like that, he freed me. The world outside had not deemed me crazy. I was not going to be taken away. My parents had been wrong.
Dr. T suggested seeing a neurologist, but I never did, probably because the hallucinations stopped, and I had much bigger symptom fish to fry. These days I have trouble believing that they happened at all. I have to remind myself now and then.
I hesitated to throw out the word shaman earlier, but that’s the word my father used. I hesitated because people in LA wear out the word with no trace of irony. I worked at a store with shaman in the title, the same CBD store referenced earlier. Several people came in to throw fits. One man, seemingly on drugs, screamed at me in front of customers. We had stolen his word, don’t cha know. He was the shaman, not us. Many more “shamans” came in throughout the year I worked at the store. Most of them were unwashed, drug-addicted schmucks in flip flops and tank tops.
And this is why I’m tired of LA.
I don’t see any need to tell doctors now, especially after my experience with the mental health questionnaire and my current doctor. Spoiler alert: she lost her shit. Doctors can only process so much, especially with high caseloads. Keep it simple, answer the questions, get your prescriptions, get your referrals, and then move along. That’s how it feels, at least. But I hesitate to sound disparaging of these professionals. We should all know by now that our medical system is failing its most essential workers, especially nurses. I’m biased towards nurses because my mother was an RN, and she was worn down by her jobs, the definition of burnt out.
Everyone is overworked, it seems. And yet, employees are bolder now. People are less afraid of asking why we can’t stop, or at the least, slow down. I keep writing drafts of my essay “On Work,” but none of them have felt right. I’m still missing something.
Anyway, I don’t hallucinate any more, and I have four diagnoses to explain why I’m such a mess. What more could I want?
Well, for starters, I need a fifth diagnosis. I’m dealing with too much heart and stomach nonsense to go without one. But I hope the fifth diagnosis is something treatable. At my stress test, the supervising cardiologist reassured me that they have all kinds of great medications now. Sometimes the heart ends up working better than it did before. Sounds like a super serum to me. I’m biased, but I think the nation could use a Golden Jewish take on Captain America right now.
Waiting for a diagnosis feels like spinning one of those prize wheels on game shows. Come on, come on, give me the ulcer (ulcers can be fixed in two weeks with antibiotics). Come on, come on, daddy wants an ulcer.
I didn’t get the ulcer. I was so close, and then the big red dial ticked onto “Spin again.” The test for the bacteria came back negative. No two-week, all-expenses paid trip to the Antibiotic Resort for me. Not unless I land on something similar. Onward to the endoscopy.
It seems impossible now to get better, as I’ve had some of these symptoms my whole life, but I remind myself of the success with panic attacks. I used to have them every day. Now I don’t. I found some scammy-sounding thing called CBD, and it worked, just like magic. That’s one of the reasons I got sucked into my former friend’s sketchy business venture. The product was good. It soothed my Tourette’s as well. After three weeks of taking CBD, I noticed that I was sitting still on a bus for the first time in over a year. I did not have the sensation that I was going to piss myself. I was able to sit there like a normal adult and ride.
Unfortunately, despite what salespeople want you to believe, CBD can only do so much. It’s not a panacea. For me, CBD does almost nothing for fatigue or appetite. THC does, though, but that is this week’s nominee for some later essay.
I really thought that I’d be done with most of this health nonsense by now. I’m way behind my timeline. In my late twenties, I was supposed to reach my jacked, success story phase. That’s what the whole past year was about with that crazy bulking regimen, the one in which I tracked every piece of food and devised ever more ways to Trojan Horse extra calories into my bloated little body. I took shots of olive oil and imagined that I was Rocky. Things like that. Unfortunately, I never could stay above 140. Every time I reached that benchmark, I would get sick, and during the recovery, my weight would slip back down into its typical range.
I keep fantasizing that something simple will fix the stomach issues, and that finally fixing them will unleash incredible growth. I might just transform in that second puberty way; the Zac Efron bulk, hopefully, not the dad bod inflation. That’s a bit idealistic, but I did see my panics attacks die down to a level I never thought possible. But also, according to that ultrasound, my heart is weaker than it should be, so I better not get cocky. But also, medical science has come a long way, as that cardiologist reminded me, and so, there is reason to hope.
My doctor said something cute like that my during my last visit. It was after I reminded her of having certain symptoms my whole life.
“Well, don’t give up,” she said.
I could tell she was smiling under her mask by the way her eyes crinkled. She sounded like a teacher, but not in a condescending way. And she had been condescending before, so I knew the difference. This doctor had been driving me up the wall, to be honest. This is the same doctor who lost her shit after I filled out the mental health questionnaire, demanded that I go on medication, and then somehow forgot that any of it happened by the time I went back to her office for all the stomach and heart nonsense.
“Are you stressed?” she kept asking me at the follow-up appointments.
Bitch, I’m always stressed.
“I am,” I said. “But I do have a condition with stress in the title.”
“What’s that?”
“I was diagnosed with PTSD.”
“Oh, that’s right. Have you tried that eye thing? It’s supposed to be good for PTSD. I forget what it’s called.”
“EMDR?”
“Oh, that’s right! EMDR.”
Oh yes, this doctor was driving me up the wall, right into the ceiling. At the end of that appointment, as she was leaving the room, she stopped at the door.
“Are you sure you’re not stressed?” she asked me.
I almost lost it.
But I didn’t, because as someone who has spent years working in customer service, I never want to be that guy. Also, I am trying really hard not to be one of those toxic males I keep hearing about in the news. So, I resisted my worst impulses and reminded her, yet again, that I am always stressed. And then I reminded myself, yet again, of how hard the pandemic has been on medical professionals.
But I still wonder sometimes if she was fucking with me.
The conundrum of health as a writer is that symptoms and their resulting trials/tribulations can make for compelling stories, so you get attached. And I have become attached to my diagnoses, those four corners of my self-pity fortress. That’s why I’m looking to add a fifth and turn that fortress into the Pentagon, an institution with some real money behind it. Also, according to the ultrasound, the old ticker ain’t doing so good, so I do have to figure that out. C’est la cardiology, I suppose.
I’ve reached the age where I’m wondering how long all these diagnoses must last. What can I fix and discard? I feel more ready to do that now, especially as I write these essays. I have this armchair psychology theory that my symptoms substantiated a wrongness that I felt but could not claim, and my body holds onto them because of that. This notion is straight from the writings of Dr. Bessel Van Der Kelk. His book The Body Keeps the Score was a real game changer for me. It connected a lot of dots health-wise. Plus, my therapist is a fan, and he’s a real smart cookie, one of those frustratingly inquisitive geniuses straight out of a Neo-Freudian playbook that our culture hates to love. I used to enjoy dream analyses. They made me feel clever and deep. These days, I’m more of a bored housewife in therapy. No symbolism tonight, Honey. I’m tired. And why haven’t you fixed my psyche yet? I asked you to do that ages ago.
I’m almost thirty now. I’ve been in therapy for ten years. I’m hoping to finally realize on a visceral level that I can remember enough on my own, and that my memory will be enough to tell my stories.
You’re only as sick as your secrets, don’t cha know. One of my favorite quotes is from Maya Angelou, who says “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I remind myself of that often. Then I hear a Hypothetical Outraged Reader checking my privilege for quoting a black woman to describe issues in my life. Then I remind myself that Maya Angelou married a Jewish man, so maybe we do belong together. But then I remember that Maya Angelou divorced said Jewish man, and that the divorce was quite bitter. Also, some article I read said she became a bit anti-Semitic after the divorce, and if that’s true, then I don’t know what the hell to think.
And this is why I’m tired all the time. Also, the heart thing. Plus, I’m having trouble eating enough. My stomach hurts a lot. And maybe long covid is behind it all. I don’t know, spin the wheel again. Let’s see what it lands on.
This started out as an essay on hallucinations. I got a little lost along the way and wandered through all four of my diagnoses. I stopped at each corner of my self-pity fortress. I even showed readers the construction site for the fifth corner of said fortress, coming soon the Pentagon, an institution with some real money behind it.
I know I haven’t done the hallucinations justice, but the hallucinations are hard to write about. This essay was the third attempt. Everything gets fuzzy when I dwell on them too long. The hallucinations slip away while I am distracted. I guess that’s to be expected, though. That’s what hallucinations do, after all. They disappear.