Everything Feels Wrong

Not an original title, but one that seems to fit the general feeling I’ve had today. As advertised on the tin, everything has felt wrong today. When I say everything, I mean everything, from my own body outward to the world around me. Nothing feels like it belongs in the frame in which it sits. Everything feels like it’s a half-second off. Not enough to disrupt, but more than enough to be noticeable. As if the world is moving at 30 frames per second, while my own brain sees it all at 60 fps.
It all feels meta today, like I am hyper-aware of what is going on, while not knowing exactly what it is that’s taking place. Everyone around me moves like they normally do, but I feel as if I’m peeking behind the curtain, that I’m looking at the inner workings and finding it’s all off, that there are cogs and sprockets in the machinery that are slipping.
Moreso, it feels like just outside my field of vision, are shadows watching it all, and I don’t know what they are. I know they’re there, I know they’re moving around me, just on the edges of my peripheral awareness, but I cannot catch more than a fleeting impression.
I had the worst anxiety attack this evening that I’ve had in two months. I have been bathed in frigid water, from head to toe, and now it’s running through my veins, chilling different parts of my body. It all. feels. wrong. Sounds are emanating, the visual information my brain receives is interpreted, but like it’s in the background and not something upon which I am focused. That was happening before the panic attack. The attack itself is just icing on the proverbial cake.
I’m trying to share with all of you how I see this, what it feels like, and how my brain is reacting, but it is difficult to hold it all together when I just want to scream in gibbering terror and run away. Yet I have to hold it together, because a life depends on me to do just that.
Icy claws are pricking my shoulders, along my neck, and up the back of my scalp. There is a disassociation here, where my brain and my mind meet. Both of them are staring at each other, trying to suss out just what it is that’s happening, but neither of us know. We just know that something, everything, is very wrong.
Okay. Have you seen the movie “They Live” with Roddy Piper (an American wrestler)? For those of you who don’t know, or haven’t heard of it, it was a schlocky “B” movie made back in the 1980s, about a man (Piper) who stumbles upon a pair of glasses that lets him see the world as it truly is, and when he does so, instead of seeing regular people everywhere, what he finds are that the faces that appeared human before are completely different through the lenses of the glasses. In positions of authority, we see some kind of alien creatures. Colorful advertising billboards we see with the regular naked eye, through the glasses, are replaced simply with the word “Obey,” or “Consume.”
It’s as if the glasses make it possible to view the machinery of society underneath, and the insidious nature of its true operation and purpose. Now, I’m not saying anything about aliens, but what I am saying is that the feeling Roddy’s character has right before he puts on the glasses is exactly how I feel right now. I already feel like there are things happening around me that intend to deceive me, or even harm me. These things are hidden, whether they be people, events yet to happen, or something like that, I don’t know, but though I cannot see them, I can sense them just outside my periphery.
In the interests of full disclosure, I do have a paranoid streak. I have never been a fan of overarching authority, because an authority that does not need to feel ramifications for what it does, has no need to care about who it destroys, for whatever its notion of right or wrong. So that could be playing a part in it.
That said, I’ve always had a feeling, deep down inside, that I don’t belong here, that I am an outsider here. I feel as if no matter what I do to help others, to live a life dedicated to love and kindness, that none of it will matter in the end, that when I die, no one will care, and there will even be celebration by others. I can feel it, as if I have touched the mind of the universe, and can sense its thoughts.
I feel it. Everything feels wrong. I wish I could properly discern just what it is, so I could elaborate on it, so I could clarify it for everyone else, but my vocabulary currently lacks the ability, and that may terrify me more than anything else, as if I have no mouth and I must scream. All I know is that everything feels wrong. Not just “off” but wrong. Like I don’t belong here, and yet here I am. That the events taking place here shouldn’t be happening, but are. It is a disassociative sense of self and environment. Kind of like having a multiple personality, but is instead a multiple reality.
For those who may have a MPD, forgive me for the comparison, as I am desperately trying to put this feeling into words. Unfortunately, all I have are metaphors, and abstractions. I find it that difficult to put into words. If only I could put it into words. For now, though, all I can say is that everything is wrong, danger is everywhere, coming from all sides, I am in its path, and I don’t know what to do about it.