Dead Alien
Aug 3, 2026

I don't think I know how to grieve without helping.
I think the last several times someone has died around me, I focused on the caretaking.
I told myself there was always someone who knew them better than me to take care of. I watered the flowers at the memorial, I reached out to the people going to the service, I did whatever made grief feel like work to be completed.

I had a nervous breakdown this weekend. It was like some underlying thing that I had always feared got loose. I always avoided addressing anything that seemed like dissociation, always avoided anything that seemed like an obsessive thought, a delusion. It wasn't more than a fleeting thought I would never have to verbalize. But this weekend I was well and truly stuck with the worst version of it. I still knew what was real and what wasn't, but what wasn't was much, much louder than it ever was before. That other people were imposters, unreal, completely foreign to me. No person connected with me and I did not connect with them. They behaved around me the way someone would behave around a corpse, or an alien. Like what I was saying was disturbing and foreign. Like maggots ate through my chest as they stood before me; cold eyes, grey skin. And they repulsed me just as much as I repulsed them. The smallest comment left me disgusted, like they had just described skinning an animal while it was still alive. My surroundings felt like a replica, my friends felt like they had been replaced by hollow, rotting pumpkins. Only two things felt real at first, my partner and my cat. They felt like the only two beings who hadn't changed. I don't know why. I had to sit and focus on imagining my own room in my own head over and over again, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, while sitting on my bed beore that began to feel real again. I couldn't speak for a while, and trying to call out felt like all the effort in the world. I felt like even if I was able to talk to a mental health professional, which I wasn't (I lost insurance coverage just this week), I'd likely be hospitalized.

The week leading up to this was hard. I lost my health insurance, I ran out of my norethindrone (which stops my menstrual cycle; meaning I was having a period again for the first time in many years), I felt like I no longer had any family, I found out coworkers at my job loathed me as a person and were insulting me behind my back, and a member of my community and person I saw as a ray of light and a friend died at the hands of a drunk driver. All while I worked, did my internship, and attended classes all 7 days of the week. Several days a week, I was doing two of these three things. Class than work, internship than work, etc. Average of 10 hours a day. It just got to be too much. But there's no rest for the wicked, right? Does this new week fix any of these issues? Not really. I have one less class. That's... good. But needless to say I'm nervous.

Smash like and leave your diagnosis in the comments section below.

-chasey