I’ve Had Delusions. That’s Why “Delulu” Makes Me Flinch.
“Delulu”
Delulu season is here. ✨
Stop asking if you’re qualified enough. Start acting like the future you’re working toward is possible. Every breakthrough begins with someone believing before there was proof.
As a business founder, I see this and its iterations everywhere when I open LinkedIn or other social media. They come from well-meaning entrepreneurs, coaches, and thought leaders aiming to help us build confidence and follow our dreams. In building a company, these are things I desperately need on most days.
But seeing these posts doesn’t inspire me; instead, my body lights up with anxiety, and my stomach turns. It is not simply the exhaustion of pop-psychology affirmations or manifestation, but because I have been “delulu,” and it broke me.
The irony here is that most days I am doing exactly what those posts encourage: hyping myself up to push past my comfort zone and build my dreams despite extreme fear or low confidence.
But delusional has never been a state I have passionately sought. It has, instead, been one I have spent much of my adult life actively avoiding.
What Actual Delusions Feel Like
It’s 2016, and I am 29, working in health research and building a second career as a mental health advocate after publishing a memoir about my bipolar disorder. While I dream of making advocacy my full-time job, it’s not my full-time job at this time. The reality is that the grant for my real job is ending, and I am running out of time to find my next full-time role.
As unemployment looms near, I decide I am getting a helpful push from the universe to get out of the nest and into my next big move.
But I am terrified. And slowly becoming manic.
From my journal:
I am on the verge of magic. My senses are heightening.
I feel that things are just out of reach. Real clarity. I sit silently and stare at the world as if it will start speaking to me. I am waiting for something larger to unfold. There is danger presently because real things are happening. Real jobs. Real work. Real people. I need to hold this in check.
But I am starting to feel like I am the chosen one. For what, I don’t know. I have a meaning and purpose I am waiting to discover, but I feel I am just on the precipice.
Am I manic? I am not normal, but I give off normality to everyone who sees me. Perhaps I am standing on the edge of madness. I’m frightened of what is over the ledge.
The magic overtakes me. Today I know that I am in a dream. Of course, however, because everyone else is in my dream, they do not believe me.
My psychologist asks: if this is a dream, what would happen?
Perhaps I am supposed to say, then I would awake.
I tell him I know that I am psychotic. I know this is bipolar. I know that this is mania. I know this because it is what people tell me. I know because I am supposed to know. Because I am supposed to be self-aware. Because I am ten years into this diagnosis and wrote a book on this. Because I am supposed to say this.
I know because I am supposed to be smart about these things. I tell myself intellectually that I grasp the concept, but in my heart, I know they are wrong.
I stare at the flames in a Catholic church until they are no longer flames but a vision.
I no longer believe in god, and yet, this god has granted me a purpose. A great, immeasurable purpose. Something so profound I cannot grasp it. I see the magic all around me. I see signs within signs. The moon blinks a secret. A greater reality beyond the veiled world everyone seems to be living within.
And yet, I cannot find my purpose, the answer. I do not know what God wants me to know. I do not do what I have been selected to do. I cannot find the meaning in the magic, and I am frightened.
God has made a mistake. I am the wrong choice. I am wrong. Chosen with a purpose unfulfilled.
As I become more and more psychotic, my mind goes beyond jobs or my age or everyday purpose into the true delusion that I am the one meant to solve the great crisis of the universe. We are headed for disaster, and I am the only one who can fix it. If only I could solve the problem and know my greater purpose.
But there is no believing hard enough that I can do it to make it happen. No. As my life spirals into sleepless nights, chaos, fear, and self-loathing, I am eventually hospitalized, filled with the trauma that I have failed the universe and lost my given purpose.
When I finally leave the hospital, I am shaken to my core by the realization that my reality was altered. I begin to question everything. I trust myself and the world less.
I keep going as I always do. I return to my desk job. I return to the fluorescent lights, the data entry, and the put-together self that no one ever knows is crazy. I return to normality, changed. I again lack my belief in god, and yet my heart is forever broken by my betrayal of my purpose. The pain of this disappointment stabs even deeper than my many fights with suicide.
But I keep going. I keep fighting. I leave my desk and computer at night, greet the moon, feel the residue of magic. Eventually, the moon is just the moon again.
Living with Reality
I am primed for the messaging around “delulu”. As a millennial, my cognitive development was shaped by hustle culture and girlboss feminism. My brain is almost hardwired for multi-level marketing and side hustles.
But I recognize the pattern. My internal alarm bells ding as I start to feel my inner girlboss trying to come out of her box, screaming, ” Yes! If I just become delusional with self-confidence, I CAN make six figures in a weekend.”
But my story is slightly more complicated than the average thirty-something woman dreaming of homesteading as a way to fight quick-fix urges to solve financial insecurity. Insecurity brought on by forces far beyond one’s work ethic.
My story is different because my side hustle for almost two decades was, in essence, the messy commodification of my mental illness—one in which my privilege made me an acceptable and safe spokesperson for the cause.
As people would repeatedly say, I “didn’t look like someone who…” before they stopped mid-sentence. My physical appearance and accomplishments were supposed to be their own stand against stigma. Pretty, smart people are crazy too!
I internalized the fact that my job was to be mentally ill in a way that showed I could still be pleasing, pretty, and accomplished.
This sheer amount of pressure through my career as an advocate is only now being fully processed.
Today, I have finally stepped into my role as a full-time advocate, where I do my best to balance my lived experience with my years of professional achievements. I work hard to find answers to how to better the mental health system without sacrificing myself along the way and do my best to “speak from my scars and not the wounds.”
And yet, sometimes scars reopen without you realizing they never fully healed.
Today, I am not delusional, though I am often in the throes of the entrepreneurial founder’s terror. Those moments of silence when your calls go unheard. The crickets of the universe chirping away after you spend a week diligently reaching out to “leads,” aka old friends, aka old classmates, aka random strangers that one person told you some other person said to talk to.
But I keep going.
Why This Conversation Matters
I share my story to help shift the narrative toward reality. The reality of a world that needs to have hard discussions about mental health. The reality that our economic and social system does not set everyone up to accomplish their dreams, leading them to feel they must forget reality to come closer.
I dream that young people can feel safe and supported on their path. That they can speak about their experiences without feeling pressured to capitalize on their pain as a means of connecting. They can share their stories in a world where mental health challenges are normalized, and they feel they are enough merely for existing.
The internet and social media are bringing our perceived lives to greater and greater levels of curation. Younger generations are desperately trying to find new ways of working, be it entrepreneurship, side-hustles, quiet quitting, or, for those of us burned out on the hustle, dreams of living alone in a cottage in the woods.
Ultimately, we don’t celebrate being “delulu” because we misunderstand mental illness. We celebrate it because we’ve created a culture where everyday hope no longer feels like enough.
I still need hope to build my business and optimism to envision a better future. But having lived through psychosis, I don’t want to confuse hope with an abandonment of reality.
In the end, I hope to reach a point where reality alone can help me accomplish my dreams, where advocacy means seeing the truth and asking the hard questions, and where it is okay for the moon to just be the moon.