I had a psychotic break from reality in January of 2016, due to many factors – most notable of which included poor sleep habits, microdosing CBD/THC products, and workaholism. In the nearly five years since this self-imposed hospitalization, I’ve learned that such an action can have a very long reverb.

In music; reverb is a function of the shape of the room in which the sound is being played. When you ask a sound engineer about it, (or google it) a lay person can easily get lost, especially if you’re not a musician. (speaking from personal experience, as always)

If a sound has a very long reverb, what does that even mean? Sabine, the founder of architectural acoustics, measured it. He found that the reverberation time is proportional to room dimensions and inversely proportional to the amount of absorption present. Like in some cases, sound bounces off the walls? Holds in place? Resonates weirdly? Yes. There are schools and legions of people who’ve studied this and written software programs that can measure and test the acoustics of a place. It’s fascinating to me on many levels.

When borrowing this term and applying it to the actions of checking oneself into a psych ward, it means there are little stink waves, like Charlie Brown’s buddy Pig-Pen, that followed me and stick to the nostrils of my family members and friends who were aware of what was happening. They were helping to orchestrate what happened. I mean, it wasn’t my idea to go to Langley Porter. I agreed I needed to see a general doctor – since I didn’t have a primary care provider, and I wasn’t even sure I was insured, but I knew I couldn’t sleep, and hadn’t slept well, for at least a week. My friends and family were so insistent, persistent. Relentless, really.

So if the shape of the room is the shape of my life and the people in it, this reverb metaphor works. A linear straight path – a long hallway of work work work work work to an ill-perceived finish line, all work and no play – or all work and the wrong kind of play … led me straight to burn out and paranoia, not to mention cynicism, bitterness and high anxiety. Loneliness. It’s a common, cliched tale, but it happened to me. Ever since it’s sort of all I can think about.

Like Pig-Pen in the clip, I did think I was looking good. I justified my actions by jokingly saying I was Charlie’s Fourth Angel – coming inside the mental health psych ward to document what the User Experience is like, because that is what I do for a living, so let’s do some double dipping duty while I am here, getting myself checked over. No one got the joke, especially my Dad – who’d flown out on a moment’s notice to see what was causing my weird speech patterns and cryptic text messages over the past few days. The folks absorbing my sound, in person, and on social media – were mirroring back to me, and echoing the weirdness I was emitting. But, at the time, it all made sense.

Since then, so much has been revealed about how Facebook, in particular, is monetized and how many startups are sort-of parasites on this behemoth. What I haven’t mentioned that is one of the critical factors of me checking myself in when I did, is that I had just started working for FB as a contractor four business days earlier. The sheer connectedness of their Menlo Park campus “triggered” some of my most fantastic surveillance nightmares, and I thought, well – if my family thinks it’s a good idea, perhaps I can, and should hide-out, take a break for a bit. It was my inability to disconnect that drove me inside a mental health ward, the folks absorbing my sound could tell what I needed. Sleep, and empathy. Both of which I got.