'The Outsider'

A poem I wrote about a year ago, on ironically feeling more normal after the psychosis than before it

(Here’s a short written piece or poem, if you can call it that, about the way my psychosis affected me positively in a sense. All because it forced me to stop conforming to social expectations, something that I used to feel was suffocating me. I realised after the psychosis, that the consequences were salvageable and nowhere near as horrible as I expected and that going forwards, I didn’t need to place so much importance on appearing put together at all times anymore, especially when I really wasn’t.)

I perched on the edge of normalcy,
Desperate to break my way in somehow
But in my desperation I failed to realise that,
Outside of my safe haven that was made up of some dear friends,
I was trapped in a world spanning my arm’s length,
Trapped in my own world, seemingly forever as an outsider of the real world.

If my body was just a vessel and my mind a prison,
I suppose that means my psychosis was like parole.
It was freedom from chasing perfection..
From chasing desperately after what I thought it meant to be normal-
Freedom from trying desperately to hold it together when I was breaking apart.
Perhaps at the cost of my grasp of reality,
But
When after it was all over, and I did not recover my desperation as expected,
In the strangest way, I felt like I understood what it meant to be normal for the first time;
Ironically, now I feel more normal than I ever have…
No longer the outsider.

-ex-psychotic person

Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash