When my thoughts stopped feeling like mine

I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and for a long time, I didn’t fully understand what was happening to me. In the beginning, the voices felt real enough that I followed them without questioning. At that point, it didn’t feel like I had a choice. It just felt like that was how my mind worked. I stopped taking medication early on, thinking I could manage things on my own. Not long after that, I went through an intense period where everything felt heightened. I had been meditating a lot, and it started to feel like I had tapped into something deeper. There was this overwhelming sense of clarity and euphoria, like fear had completely dropped off. At the time, it didn’t feel like something was wrong. It felt like I had unlocked something. But looking back, that’s also when things started to shift in a way I didn’t fully understand. I had always been able to observe my thoughts during meditation, but at some point, that changed. Instead of just watching thoughts, it started to feel like they were separate from me. Like I was no longer the one thinking them, but someone listening in. The thoughts even had a kind of “voice” to them, like they belonged to someone else. That was confusing, because on one hand, I felt more aware, but on the other, I felt less connected to myself. A few years later, things got even more intense. There was a period where my body didn’t feel fully under my control. Movements felt automatic, almost like I was observing my own actions rather than initiating them. It’s hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it, but it felt like being present and absent at the same time. At the time, I tried to make sense of it in different ways. I connected it to meditation, to spiritual ideas, to personal changes I was going through. Some of it felt meaningful, even powerful. But at the same time, there was a loss of control that I couldn’t ignore. That’s the part I think doesn’t get talked about enough. Experiences like this can feel profound, but they can also blur the line between awareness and disconnection. Between insight and symptoms. What I’ve come to understand is that not everything that feels deep or intense is necessarily something to trust at face value. Sometimes it’s the mind trying to process more than it can handle all at once. I still think meditation and self-awareness can be helpful, but for me, it became important to stay grounded and not let those experiences completely define what’s real.