Gremlin O’Brien

I have heard voices since the age of three. They have come and gone for short and long stretches of time, the longest stretch of not hearing them being eighteen years (7-25). They are currently gone and have been totally silent for about a month or more. Today my mother asked me why I thought the voices had disappeared “all of a sudden” after twenty-eight years of hearing them. Initially, I responded that it wasn’t sudden – that I have been trying to get rid of them for a year. But it’s been more like three years; and there’s actually quite a lot of effort and process that I put in to getting rid of them.

The first step is medication.

I’m on an older antipsychotic, as well as a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant/antianxiety drug, as well as an antiaddiction drug. When I was in hospital, I was given the choice of taking the oral or injection form of the antipsychotic and I chose the needle because I knew I wasn’t going to take the oral. I’m thankful that I was put on the needle because it allowed me to stay on my medication and get regular treatment while I combated my delusions and voices which often interfered with my taking my medication as prescribed. Now that I’ve unraveled those delusions and I don’t hear voices, and I’ve demonstrated I can take my medications and attend appointments for years without any problems, we’re considering switching to only oral medication (no injection).

Clopixol, or Zuclopenthixol, the antipsychotic I use, is not the first drug I have tried. I’ve tried Risperidone, Abilify, Clozapine, Haloperidol, Perphenazine, to name a few. Clopixol has been the most successful by far, in my opinion.

Once the medication was squared away, the next key to getting rid of my voices was challenging the delusions that fed them. My delusions came with a host of false memories. Memories of getting kidnapped when I was a child, of being told I had a different set of parents than the ones I knew, of being physically and sexually abused, and so on. I believed in them wholeheartedly.

For a long time, I believed Conan O’Brien was my real father.

I kept my beliefs mostly secret out of fear that I would be challenged or laughed at. Then one day I opened up to my brother and asked him to do a DNA test with me to see if we were biologically related. He was positive he was my bio-sibling, but he agreed to do the test anyway. Thank God he did. It came back positive, with a 99.9 in infinitum chance that we were full siblings. I was rocked. I reread the test results again and again, but I just had to accept that my brother was my brother, which meant that Conan couldn’t be my father. My father and my mother were the people living in the same house as me, claiming to be my parents.

The reality of being wrong was trivial, compared to the fear of having my beliefs confronted.

Once that memory was debunked, I had to challenge the rest of my memories. Maybe I had never been kidnapped, either, or abused. This was hard to let go of. But once I did, I had to ask myself, even if telepathy were real, and I had it and Conan had it, why on Earth would he spend his time and energy talking to me? Being friends with me? Loving me? How would he find the time? Why haven’t he or any of the other voices approached me? Then I asked myself, what proof do I have of ever been talked to telepathically? I had been relying on my memories – many of which turned out to be false. Maybe everyone else was right, maybe I was talking to myself.

Confronting the voices helped them go away whenever they surfaced. Then gradually, they stopped coming around. I stopped thinking of them so much, stopped reaching out to them. Without the delusions, my emotional attachment to them faded. This blog post makes it seem like this realization hit and then everything fell into place, but it took years of constantly challenging my delusions to come out of it whole.

I am proud to say that while I love and respect Conan O’Brien as a fan, I have no personal insight into who he is or his character, nor do I have any relationship with him, friendship or otherwise. He’s not hiding in my closet or talking to me telepathically. I’ve never met the man, never spoken with him or even seen him at a distance.

I feel like my life can begin again. I have my head to myself. My feet on the ground. My eyes on the horizon.