Questioning My Reality

In retrospect, I should not have been shocked. I had ignored my own instincts for years — partly because of the emotional pressure and dismissal I experienced from people closest to me.

For a long time, I felt like something was “off.” Years earlier, I had encountered information in the public domain about networks involved in smuggling and extremist financing in South Asia, and it left an impression on me. Around the same time, a close friendship connected to Pakistan’s establishment began deteriorating. Phone calls became conversations that felt interrogative rather than friendly, lasting 12+ hours on some occasions and including attempts to influence my stance against terrorists. During one such phone call, a suspicious drone landed on his balcony.

My family dynamics had been emotionally volatile for most of my life, and eventually I had to distance myself for my own mental health. Even in-laws occasionally made comments that felt threatening or disproportionately intense. I remember someone once mentioning snipers while we were sitting in my living room with floor-to-ceiling windows. Another person once half-joked about killing someone with a single touch — something that struck me as extremely odd coming from a person working in the US tech industry.

There were also small symbolic gestures that I couldn’t explain at the time — like when my father-in-law left three dead leaves on my desk during a visit in 2023, the fall before the old war escalated. During the same trip, he randomly asked me what would happen if every person's secrets were leaked. When I shared poetry about interfaith harmony, they responded combatively with couplets about blind, alcoholic poets.

Since then, more than once, I woke up with unexplained bruises and cuts on my body. I dismissed the bruises as coincidental, but the cuts were harder to dismiss. Once, the cuts represented three dashes on more than one part of my body. On another occasion, the cut accompanied fresh drops of blood.

Earlier, when I decided to write a book about philosophy, religion, history, and the neuroscience of consciousness, an old schoolmate whom I hadn't spoken to in more than 15 years reached out and casually mentioned that a relative of his was killed for writing a book about philosophy.

As this period unfolded, I also noticed a number of Pakistani-American professionals publicly supporting political factions back home, and at times I wondered whether certain media figures were intentionally hinting at hidden meaning in their videos — especially when those videos were filmed outside sensitive legal venues in New York, and timed to coincide with other developments. Whether these signals were real or imagined is impossible to prove — but it contributed to growing unease and ambiguity, during a winter with an unusual number of "lone wolf" attacks in the United States and Europe.

Then, during heightened tensions between me and my wife, when the threats I had identified were peaking, her family suddenly convinced her to travel urgently to Pakistan. I feared for her safety. She went anyway, despite the fact that our marriage was already fragile. When she returned, she oscillated — some days telling me she believed what I was perceiving, and other days insisting I was imagining threats. It destabilized my sense of what was real.

During this period, I also began noticing unusual objects and insects around places I’d go to smoke — in alleyways, on the rooftop, even near our building entrance. Maybe this was random urban noise. Maybe it wasn’t. But it fed a growing feeling that something was closing in.

Later, strange coincidences began appearing in symbolic form — inside the apartment and outside it. One example that stayed with me: my wife came home wearing a black scarf with images of fire and chains. When I went downstairs to smoke later that night, a man dressed entirely in black wearing chains approached me and asked for a lighter. That same winter, the city was seeing an unusually high number of fires.

Eventually, these strange patterns escalated into insinuations — triangulations that implied infidelity, danger, humiliation — almost as if the goal was to break my sense-making so thoroughly that any reaction could be dismissed as paranoia.

Regardless of the objective truth behind any of it — the psychological impact was real.

I was being pushed toward doubting my own reality itself.