Afterword

Playing against one's own subconscious, "house advantage" takes on a deeper meaning.

This is the afterword from I Hear You Watching, my novel based on my experience with hearing voices and paranoia.

But you can jump in here! The afterword discusses my recovery from the experience, and spoils very little of the book itself.

Previously on I Hear You Watching…

A whole damn book about losing my mind. Start here.

I Hear You Watching is based on my personal experience with auditory hallucinations.

It’s not a memoir. Some aspects of my story had to be altered in translation—the truth was bent in order to more effectively convey the truth. Characters were combined or omitted, events shifted in time, but rest assured, everything in Alex’s imagination happened exactly as described.

Here I must acknowledge the biggest change, to give credit where credit is due and allow for some further discussion of my recovery.

At the time of my “unmooring” I was in a long-distance relationship with a woman in Paris, France. Her name is Louise. We’re married now. The long-distance portion of our relationship lasted for a year and a half, and I started hearing voices smack-dab in the middle of that period.

She appears nowhere in the novel.

Why would I exclude such a monumental change in my life—a move across the world for love; a change which, it could be argued, contributed to my break from reality because for the first time in my life I had something to lose?

Well, the novel takes place in the mind of an unreliable narrator, and a handful of the characters are imaginary. In our post-postmodern world the inclusion of a “long-distance Parisian girlfriend” would sound alarm bells for most readers, who’d spend the duration of the book waiting for the obligatory reveal that the girlfriend herself is imaginary and the “move to Paris” at the end is simply a delusional euphemism for Alex’s institutionalization.

Or the reader might accept the Parisian girlfriend as real but feel she’s an outlandish plot device inserted to save Alex by whisking him off to France at the end.

The fact is, both of those natural and understandable assumptions are wrong. Louise is indeed very real, and moving to France didn’t solve my problems.

So I excised the “French connection” from the novel entirely, and replaced it with my brief online dating experience. This had the added benefit of opening the book up to deeper exploration of the sexual and racial aspects of Alex’s troubled mind, which were equally important to my real-life episode.

Now the other big omission—my recovery. Clawing my way back to reality took several years of focused effort, which would make for a tedious ending to a novel, so I’ll condense it for you here.

While I cut myself off from online/phone communication with Louise and my family, they had their own long-distance chats about my increasingly strange situation. A psychologist family friend had instructed them to question the suspicions and delusions I presented as “facts,” to avoid reinforcing the paranoid wall I was building around myself.

During a rare moment of reconnection, Louise finally suggested to me that my tormentors might be imaginary.

Had the idea come from my parents, I might’ve brushed them off as not understanding or appreciating the gravity of the situation. It would’ve felt belittling, like assurance at twenty-seven years old that there’s no monster under my bed.

Even hearing it from Louise, the person I trusted most in the world, made me bristle. There’s an inevitable tinge of betrayal when someone suggests you’re imagining things, especially someone who’s not physically present for the experience. How did she know the observers weren’t real? She hadn’t seen the dumb surprise on my neighbor’s face when I confronted him. She hadn’t sat from sunset to sunrise deflecting and returning their taunts through the smoke detector. She didn’t know as much as I did about America and its history—data that lends disturbing credibility to my most outlandish ideas.

The quest to expose my observers had cultivated in me a powerful gambling addiction. I thought if I put my chips on the right spot and waited through just one more spin of the wheel, I’d hit the jackpot!

But when playing against opponents from one’s own subconscious, “house advantage” takes on a deeper meaning…

The one thing I still hadn’t tried was acting as if they were imaginary.

So I made a conscious and very difficult decision to pocket the few chips I had left and walk away.

On the recommendation of the aforementioned psychologist friend, I had a session with a doctor much like Dr. Devnet in the book. This doctor was in my hometown of Seattle, and my parents flew me up to see him.

I probably would have benefited greatly from continued therapy beyond that single session, but the doctor couldn’t refer me to anyone in L.A., so I would’ve had to do the legwork to find someone myself. Not to mention my insurance didn’t cover therapy, the American healthcare system (especially for psychological care) is an expensive mess, and I was broke and saving up to move to France. But the one appointment gave me some tools to sort concrete versus imagined evidence, and the doctor had given me a short-term prescription for an antipsychotic (risperidone) to help me “get my head above water.”

In my case, I feel the pills didn’t do much beyond unpleasant side effects. This isn’t to discredit medication as a possible solution for others, but I believe my particular psychosis was behavioral rather than neurological. Over the years, strange weeds had grown in my mental garden. Some were protective. Some I hadn’t noticed. Some I kept because they were pretty. Then changes in the weather made those weeds flourish and overtake the other plants.

I cannot emphasize this point enough: one’s ability to observe changes in the weather and tend one’s personal mental garden is power.

While I was in Seattle identifying the weeds (seeing the psychiatrist), Louise dove into research. She sent me articles on auditory hallucinations, which we discussed during daily video chats. My strongest weapon against the voices was talk—with real people. Voicing my thoughts and experiences externalized them, which shed objective light on the stories I was telling myself. As Alex says at the end of the book, things I believed in silence sounded ridiculous when spoken aloud.

Louise was the most empathetic and least judgmental listener I could’ve asked for, but this wasn’t an automatic solution. I had to consciously strip away layers of defensiveness and doubt, and I still felt a nagging suspicion that she wasn’t getting the full picture from her vantage point on the other side of the world.

When I finally moved into her tiny studio apartment in the middle of Paris, the distraction of being in a new place made the voices disappear for a week or two.

Then they returned, talking to me through the ceiling. Louise tried to convince me they couldn’t be real because they spoke English while we lived among French people.

This logic helped for a few days, until we found out the apartment above ours had become an Airbnb hosting an endless parade of English-speaking tourists who were, as I heard through the ceiling, unanimously annoyed by the “noise” of my existence and occasionally replaced with my “government spies” come to check up on me.

Later we moved to a neighborhood where English was less ubiquitous.

I continued my captioning/transcription work for U.S. companies at a distance, and fought my agoraphobia by taking long walks in the area. Universal healthcare exists in France, but without a French social security number I still couldn’t afford to see a therapist, so this self-imposed “walking therapy” was all I had. My system was: any time the thought of leaving the apartment turned my stomach, I made it an exercise. I smiled at every stranger I passed. Not in a weird way (I hoped), but in a way calculated to convey: Hi. We both exist, and that’s nice.

Unlike in Los Angeles, many of my smiles were returned. Some of the smiles even led to conversations with strangers on buses, on benches, in restaurants, at the grocery store. It felt so good to see and be seen, and to have tangible proof that the world didn’t hate me. Other people were as curious to know me as I was to know them.

Meanwhile I took French classes, and the voices through the walls dropped their English and morphed into a French couple. As my French improved I caught the voices making the same grammatical mistakes I frequently made. Every shard of evidence chipped away at the voices’ credibility.

A friend gave me a Tibetan singing bowl for my birthday, which helped drown out the voices’ laughter at my continued attempts to meditate. When ignoring them became less of a struggle, I swapped the singing bowl for a loop of meditation beads that I used to count my breaths.

I kept all this up for over two years, until at one point I noticed I’d gone most of a day without asking myself, Do I hear them now?

This was a triggering question. As soon as I wondered, Do I hear them now? they’d burst into my ear like clowns through a paper hoop. YES! my brain would shout back, WE’VE BEEN HERE THE WHOLE TIME!

They’d pipe up when I was tired, stressed, or feeling insecure, and often take the form of family or friends when we visited each other. After I changed jobs for a company in France, I sometimes thought I heard my coworkers discussing a mistake I’d made or a weird look I’d accidentally given someone.

Still, I maintained my rule that unless someone says something to my face, I have nothing to worry about. Most of the time that’s enough.

I continue to experience social anxiety, and am susceptible to worry that I’ve been misunderstood or hurt someone’s feelings. On the rare occasion that I butt heads with someone, my mind plays out scenarios wherein I defend my position, or tell them off, or give a witty retort that shrinks their argument to nothing. But this is the sort of mental garden maintenance that most people have to do, and I’m now better equipped to recognize these digressions and guide myself back to a place of mindfulness before I get lost in the weeds. It’s not always easy, but it’s never as bad as it was before.

I’m grateful for this journey. If things hadn’t come to a head, I might never have learned to manage my neuroses and defense mechanisms.

Plus it gave me this wild story to share with you.

As you know, I didn’t go it alone. Louise was my anchor from across the world. I’m grateful for her trust and support, and I love her more than anything. My parents provided empathy and a safe space when I needed it. Other family and friends helped along the way. My thanks to the (real) people who took part in my adventure, knowingly or unknowingly.

Thank you to every stranger who smiled back. You have no idea what it meant to me.

Thank you to family and friends who read drafts of this book and shared their thoughts. Thank you to my beta readers on Critique Circle, whose feedback was so insightful, and who proved that my story could resonate with complete strangers.

Thank you to Eliott Blue, whose cover art beautifully encapsulates the novel’s themes and atmosphere.

And thank you for reading.

If you’re struggling with auditory hallucinations, you might feel utterly alone. The best thing you can do is find someone you trust and talk to them about what’s going on. They could be a family member, a friend, a mental health professional, or another voice hearer.

Two of the best online resources I’ve found are Intervoice and The Hearing Voices Network.

My final message to fellow voice hearers is possibly as terrifying as it is reassuring:

YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

May you find serenity and live like nobody’s watching.

-Zac

If you haven’t yet read the whole book, you’ve got two options:

To further support this book and its author (me), you have many options…

Share your referral link and get a free copy of the ebook when three people subscribe!

Leave a review here on Substack or somewhere else!

Leave a copy somewhere else.

---

Got a question about the book or my experience with hearing voices and psychosis? Don’t be shy! Join the chat and…

---

Next on I Hear You Watching…

I’ve got some ideas. Stick around to see where this goes.