Living with Voices

Chapter 1

1. Chapter 1, (2013)

There was a point in time where I thought I had everything. I had the car, the house, 2 college coeds living with me looking after my dogs while I traveled, a very good job with a very secure company; I had it all. As a High Performance Computing (HPC) specialist for IBM got to travel the world on their dime. I got to work in some of the most prestigious institutions in the world helping them out with their HPC product from IBM: GPFS. I was so proud I even had IBMGPFS on my license plate, and to boot, Phoenix was a great city for a young guy. I lived in Tempe, home of Arizona State University so the nightlife was nice also. Again, I thought I had everything I would ever need. Then things began to change as my world slowly started to crumble before my eyes.

Shortly after returning from Hawaii on a business trip for IBM, I began to have hallucinations. People would talk to me but I knew that what my brain was actually processing was not what they were actually saying. At the beginning these were random occurrences, but over a period of a few weeks my symptoms increased, and I started to get confused at certain times when people would speak to me and I also started to become paranoid, very paranoid. Ultimately the paranoia increased so much to the point where I didn't want to bring harm to anyone around me; I didn't know what to do, so I made the executive decision to leave everything behind, pack up a few things and just start driving. Driving has somehow always made me feel better and at this point I just didn't feel very well; I was confused to say the least.

Both my roommates were nowhere to be found so I made the tough decision to leave. I deliberated on this decision for some time but ultimately I was slowly starting to go out of my mind. I put my dogs in the back of my SUV, along with a quilt, a case of water, and their dog bowl; that was it. I literally left all of my personal possessions behind including my cellphone and my laptop. My paranoia was so great that I thought they would use my cell phone to track me. (My SUV had GPS navigation built-in so I knew I could go wherever I needed to go and at least find my way).

Having lived in Arizona for a better part of a decade I traveled quite a bit to Mexico for recreation, so when the time came to leave, I thought to myself that Mexico would be far enough and by going international that might change things. I thought going to the beach would help me clear my mind and escape this overwhelming feeling of paranoia, but I didn't take into account the fact that it was February, and in that particular part of Mexico it gets cold during that time of year.

I made one stop before leaving the country, and that was to empty my bank account. Looking back on it now, I have to laugh a little bit because even then as I withdrew my meager life savings I had a sense of paranoia also. I was just a nervous mess. I was so paranoid that when the bank teller asked for the reason for my withdrawal, I simply said "for charity" as I didn't want to disclose my intentions to anyone. I left phoenix and headed south to the US/Mexico border, then I made my way towards the town of Hermosillo, and from there I could find my way to the beach town known as Bahia de Kino.

It took me a few hours to get to the border, crossed safely into Mexico, and then there was construction once I made it into Mexico so I was driving for quite a while. Day started to turn into night as I started to see signs for Bahia de Kino and I began to ask for directions. It's surprising that once you cross the border how little English is actually spoken. Finally I found a woman who spoke English and said she was heading towards Kino, but ultimately my paranoia got the best of me and after following her for a few miles I drove in a different direction.

After driving around Hermosillo several times, I decided that Kino would not be my final destination so I made the tough decision that I was going to leave Mexico and head towards my mother's house all the way back in Pennsylvania (PA), something like 3000 miles away. I had nowhere else to go and I didn't feel comfortable heading back to phoenix. I found a gas station nearby, filled up the tank, and just parked on the side of the road to get some sleep as I knew this was going to be a long journey. Despite my best efforts I didn't get any sleep as the traffic was quite noisy; Chevy 4x4's with their loud off road tires were just going back and forth as if they were unintentionally taunting me. So after a few hours I made the best of the situation, let both dogs out of the back of the SUV to go pee and poop as I knew we had a very long drive ahead of us. I also stopped at a local gas station to refuel. After refueling I put the dogs back in the SUV and started to drive. As came to grips with the fact that I would be heading home to PA, I started looking for any street signs signaling which way would take me back to the border. Luckily a huge sign that read "USA à" showed up so I followed it. At this point I wasn't having any voices, just persistent paranoia.