The Sickness

I’ve always had a hard time of it. When a voice started talking to me, I’d been sick ever since my teens—and in a way that in itself raises questions about your mental health. Namely: I was suffering from both electrosensitivity and ME. 

It was a life of almost total isolation. The only person I really saw was my mother, who was just as isolated. That’s what happens when you're sensitive to electricity. You’re physically cut off from the world because you can’t be anywhere near modern electronics. Then there’s the mental isolation; most people think you’re just making it up and despise you for it. If you also suffer from ME (chronic fatigue) you don't have the energy for a social life anyway. And your condition is so depressing that most people assume you are imagining that too. At worst, even your loved ones leave. At best, they stay—co-sick and dragged down into your misery. My mother belonged to those who stay.

But I’m not here to discuss the existing or not of electrosensitivity and ME. Once you start hearing voices, the question of whether things are all in your head or not doesn’t really matter anymore. Let's just settle on this: it all cleared up once the voice appeared.

By the way, the voice wasn't the first sign that I was losing my mind. For years, things had been getting stranger and stranger, until it was hard to tell if people were treating me like a freak or if I was actually going crazy—or if I had always been.