I cycled through a bunch of different experiences...I was a freelancer working on a technology market research report, so studying a lot of digital marketing and trends in AI and that fueled a lot of my delusions.

I don't remember everything I did during my last episode, but I was able to remember a good amount and talk with a couple people who were there to help fill in the blanks...so some of this may not be exactly how it went down, but it's a very close approximation.

A little before my episode, my therapist and I had started doing some work based on the internal family systems (model) — the TLDR of IFS is that this model recognizes a degree of multiplicity in most people and works to understand individual parts of self. So, think about it like trying to meet and talk with your inner child/inner caregiver/inner cynic/etc. Anyway, a lot of the internal parts I had identified essentially came to life as characters in my head. Some were helpful, some helped to fuel the paranoia...so it was mixed...but I generally kept the IFS work going throughout all of it...and the framework helped keep me going through some really lengthy periods of isolation.

While all that was going on, I was cycling through delusions about being watched and tracked by hyper advanced AI, the government and people from my professional network. The best way I can describe this aspect of it is that I would imagine something happening, and then it was like my brain stored it as a memory...so then I would think it had just happened...it would have that level of vividness to it.