The Brain Glitch

The brain glitch

Author's Note

This was me earlier this year. Intensive treatment later, I understand what happened. I’m sharing this so others might recognize the signs sooner than I did.

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It doesn’t start with sirens. It starts with a good day.

You sleep a little less and wake up clearer. Coffee hits harder. Colours look sharper. After months of dragging yourself around, you call it what it looks like: finally having your life back.

Thoughts speed up. Then they multiply. Lyrics match your thoughts. Headlines echo private fears. A text lands at the exact moment you were thinking of that person. Nothing feels random.

At first, it’s fun.

You talk more. Jokes land. Work feels easy. People say you seem like your old self. The dark clouds finally lift. You take on more, sure you can handle it. Life is good.

Sleep thins out.

You lie down because you know you’re supposed to, but your mind won’t wind down. You get up, pace, scroll, write, delete, rewrite. The clock jumps from midnight to three to five. You doze briefly, wake up buzzing, and call it proof that everything is okay.

Then the patterns thicken.

A look across a room feels loaded. A pause on the phone feels like a test. Songs stop being background noise and start sounding like messages. You don’t say that out loud, but you feel it.

The messages get longer.

You pour out walls of text to the people closest to you, trying to explain what you now see: why things happened the way they did, what it all means, what needs to happen next. You hit send. Their replies are always short: “are you okay,” “this is like a lot,” “I’m worried.” You hear judgment where they mean concern. You answer with more explanation, more context, more intensity. If they don’t understand, that becomes part of the story too.

Underneath the rush, fear moves in.

Lights feel too bright. Your heart never really settles. A cancelled plan, a delayed reply, a strange look—each becomes a sign. You can’t shake the sense that you’re at the centre of something important and dangerous at the same time.

The people who love you feel it most.

Arguments stop being about what they’re about. Small issues turn symbolic. You talk about meaning; they talk about safety. They say you’re scaring them. You say they’re holding you back. They try to pull you toward basics: sleep, food, appointments. You feel dragged away from the real work only you understand.

You make a firm decision: no help.

No pills, no hospital, no labels. You tell yourself this is anything but illness. You will think your way through it. You will sleep later. You say this with the confidence of someone who has always solved problems by thinking harder.

The pressure keeps building anyway.

Your body frays. Your thoughts sharpen and darken. The mind that once spun out big ideas starts throwing up worse options. Not because you want them, but because it’s desperate for an exit. They arrive like intruders. You hate them. You also can’t fully shut them out.

One day, you put them into words and send them to someone who never asked to hold that kind of weight.

You’re trying to say, “this is how bad it feels in here.” What lands on their screen is, “this is what I might do.” You scare them in a way you won’t understand until much later, when you reread your own message with a clearer head and feel your stomach drop.

Conversations start without you.

Family, friends, partners compare notes: the pacing, the nights with no sleep, the strange connections, the way you’ve changed, the messages. Their worry is no longer vague. It has receipts.

The calls come: “people are concerned.”

You dodge, joke, insist you’re fine. You explain harder. You feel cornered by kindness. By everyone.

Eventually there’s a knock that doesn’t feel optional.

You open the door and realize the decision has already been made. They come in. The tone is calm, the words are soft, but the message is clear: this can’t go on. You argue, explain, insist. It doesn’t matter. Forms appear. You are being brought in.

The world suddenly shrinks to a ward.

White walls, locked doors, a thin mattress, fluorescent lights. Someone puts a band on your wrist and turns your life into a file. You tell your story and watch it get flattened into notes: not sleeping, talking fast, big ideas, refusing care. From your side, you were defending your reality. From theirs, you were confirming the problem.

Time blurs into meds, meals, checks, pacing, the slow leak of adrenaline.

The storm inside you finally runs out of fuel. Patterns loosen. Songs go back to being just songs. The universe stops whispering directly in your ear. You look around and realize you’re in exactly the kind of room you swore you’d never end up in.

What’s left after it all isn’t just exhaustion—it’s wreckage.

Messages you barely remember sending. People you frightened. Relationships bent out of shape. Routines shattered. Trust cracked. You now know your own mind can carry you that far off course. And worse, while it was happening, you were the last one to see it.

That’s the brain glitch.

Not just racing thoughts or lost sleep, but the moment when your inner narrator goes rogue, sounds more convincing than ever, and starts burning down your life while you insist everything is fine.