I’m a Paranoid Schizophrenic Investigative Journalist and I’d Like to Explain Myself (Kind Of)

I fell asleep listening to the Book of Revelation and woke up convinced the world was already ending.

By the end of this article, you will understand this joke.

I’m forty two. I’ve been diagnosed with things my whole life. Bipolar depression. A light touch of autism. Treatment resistant depression, which is medical for ‘we tried everything, sorry,’ which is also medical for ‘if we cured you, your insurance company would stop paying us.’ About seven years ago paranoid schizophrenia showed up and made the rest of the list look like a warmup act.

None of it registered when I was a kid. I couldn’t look people in the eye. I ran in circles in the backyard until I physically collapsed, which might seem like an expression of the unbridled joy of childhood but in my case was just me trying to burn off the meds. Grown ups called it ‘shy.’ Grown ups called it ‘a phase.’ Grown ups in general were extremely committed to not calling it what it was.

I thought I was normal. Every kid does. It just took me longer than most to find out I wasn’t.

Teenage me got put on roughly a dozen different meds for the depression. None of them worked. What they did do was make me want to smoke an absolutely heroic amount of weed. So I did. Two hours a day, every day, for ten straight years. Don’t try this.

Turns out if you’re bipolar and you smoke that much weed, you unlock a secret achievement called paranoid schizophrenia. No trophy. Just spiders.

I have to explain the spiders. One of my best friends growing up was a guitar playing computer genius. Sharp as ten tacks. The kind of guy you figured would end up running a tech company or becoming a rock star. In his mid twenties that guy vanished and a different one showed up wearing his face. He told me spiders lived inside his brain and were eating their way out through his eye sockets. Not a metaphor or a bad trip. He believed it the way you believe the sun comes up.

He killed himself about seven years ago. That was right around when I was starting to accept I might be the same kind of sick he was. Heavy emphasis on the paranoid part. I think about that timing more than I’d like to.

My job takes me to genuinely dark places. Satanic cultism. Technocratic fascism. Conspiracies that run straight through foreign intelligence agencies. Not the kind of thing you can wave off as message board nonsense. I’ve gotten calls in the middle of the night from unlisted burner numbers. Voices with Russian or Chinese accents. They tell me I have a big mouth. They tell me bad things happen to good people. These aren’t random. This is a concerted effort to scare me.

It worked well enough that I spent a year building a deadman switch. It runs across a dozen offshore servers watched over by a custom AI overseer I built myself. If I stop checking in it releases roughly a decade of evidence. Some I dug up myself. Some got mailed to me out of nowhere by hackers I’ve never met. One of them once sent me a data dump they claimed came from John McAfee’s Pentagon hack. The one where he mailed laptops out with backdoors already built in. The one that is probably the real reason a billionaire ‘committed suicide’. I have no idea if the file’s real but the person that sent it to me is a well-known whitehat hacker that claimed it’s legit and it’s part of THEIR deadman switch system. I’ve never dug through it and I don’t want that data anywhere near my actual computer. It just sits in the deadman switch with everything else in case I ever vanish for an extended period of time. There’s other footage in there I won’t even try to describe here (Frazzledrip maybe? [Don’t Google that]). A mountain of other material I’m honestly too scared to even open.

I live every day genuinely afraid for my safety. I know exactly how easy it is for a stranger to brush past you with a needle full of potassium and have the autopsy just read heart attack. I know how intelligence agencies and organized crime actually operate in the modern world. I know exactly how easy it is for them to make somebody like me disappear.

The job grinds on me. Lately I haven’t slept much. When I’m low on sleep my mind starts playing weird tricks on me. The kind I have to talk myself out of very carefully or I end up doing something stupid. Eight years ago that talking myself out of it thing failed completely. My paranoia had convinced me the apocalypse was about two days out. The constant barrage of that thought finally broke me down. I called an Uber. Rode out to a mountain. Climbed a tree to wait for the end of the world to start. Full Realtree camo. A week of freeze dried food. Zero intention of coming down until it was over.

I stayed up there almost 48 hours before I finally managed to talk my schizophrenic brain back down out of the tree. I am not ashamed to admit that this really happened.

That’s why I’m writing this today instead of something about technocratic fascist cults trying to take over the world.

Last night I fell asleep with headphones listening to Alexander Scourby read the Book of Revelation straight into my skull. Great voice. Absolutely deranged bedtime story. I stayed asleep long enough for my brain to stop filing it as narration and start filing it as breaking news. I woke up panicked, completely convinced someone was coming to kill me. At that exact moment a truck pulled into the motel lot and swept its red custom running lights across my face through the open curtains. I did not keep my cool. I went into full on schizo self-preservation mode convinced that whomever was behind the wheel of that truck was here to murder me.

Within minutes I was outside. Unchaining my ebike. Strapping on the bugout bag backpack I keep for exactly this occasion. Three hours before sunrise. My phone had been playing Revelation into my headphones all night. It was dead as a doornail. That mattered more than you’d think. My ebike needs a phone connection to run its own headlight. No phone. No light. I was riding into the apocalypse completely blind. I swung onto a bike path I never take. My sleep deprived brain decided I’d better mix it up in case the bad guys caught up to me.

You remember the end of ET, where the kids’ bikes lift off the ground and sail across the moon? That is not what happened.

I missed the turn doing about twenty miles an hour. Hopped the bank of a creek I didn’t even know was there and went over into six feet of cold water at 3 a.m.

Gravity and a creek will remind you that you’re still just a guy, soaking wet, because a stranger’s headlights looked demonic to a brain that hadn’t slept.

I laughed about it after. The cold water did that. Fifteen years ago this was a hobby. Now it’s a job. I’d bet money that if I’d never gone anywhere near this line of work I would not currently be a man who flips his bike into a creek because he’s convinced a truck is full of demons. That’s what staring into the abyss for a living does to you. Jung said gaze into the abyss long enough and the abyss starts gazing back. He never mentioned it also chases you into a trout stream at three in the morning.

You’re allowed to laugh too... but remember what I write about isn’t tinfoil hat conspiracy lunacy dressed up to sound scary. Everything Lily and I publish is backed by scripture. Backed by science. Backed by named reporters. Backed by hundreds of hours of research and verification and fact checking every single month.

I live every day of my life wondering if today’s the day someone breaks into my motel room and shoots me and calls it a ‘robbery.’ I wonder if today’s the day I’m out riding my bike and a ‘mosquito’ bites my neck and next thing anybody knows I’m dead of a heart attack that wasn’t actually a heart attack. That’s what being the Wise Wolf is like. It’s hard. It’s scary. It’s extremely lonely.

I don’t usually get into my personal life. Back when I still did in person reporting I got stabbed, shot at, nearly kidnapped twice, drugged in a bar and robbed of every piece of equipment and every dollar I had on me, then left in a dumpster ten miles outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Try that resume line at a job fair and watch the recruiters back away slowly. That’s not a metaphor for how hard journalism is. That is my actual life.

So when I say I’m paranoid, know that a good chunk of it got field tested and came back true. Reality isn’t supposed to do that to a man who already has schizophrenia. It’s cheating, honestly. That’s also the actual reason I live in a motel I rarely leave. Not a bit. Not a schtick. I’m paranoid but not because I’m schizophrenic. If I had never gotten into this line of work, my mental health would not be this precarious.

There’s a reason I don’t usually get this open about it. There’s a stigma in this country, especially for men. Tough it out. Smile. Never let anyone see the wiring. I was raised on that stigma same as everybody else. It’s not true. It’s not fair. It’s quietly costing men their lives while everyone around them insists they seemed fine. I wasn’t always fine. I’m often not fine now.

If you know somebody carrying a mental illness, go hug them. A real one. Most people treat us like we’re performing. Or exaggerating. Or like we just need to relax more. We’re not. We don’t. It’s heavy. It’s lonely. It’s real. Most of us are doing our best to carry it without dropping it on the people we love.

I’d love to tell you I could just go get a regular job. Clock in somewhere, collect a steady check, write this stuff as a hobby on weekends. Truth is a paranoid schizophrenic man with treatment resistant depression is not a great candidate for a nine to five. Neither is a body that’s been stabbed twice and thrown down a staircase by his own medication. Neither is a brain that occasionally schedules unscheduled apocalypses at 3 a.m. This newsletter isn’t a side project. It’s the only shape of work my health has left me. I’m stubbornly grateful it exists.

---

Paid subscriptions are what keep Lily and me doing this full time. Chasing documents and sources and the occasional truck with suspiciously demonic headlights. Can’t upgrade right now? Sharing this costs nothing and helps just as much. You might be carrying something like what I just described. Know this. You’re not faking it. You’re not weak. You’re not alone in it.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

Help the Wise Wolf extinguish the Great American Dumpster Fire before it burns our nation to ash. Upgrade to paid today.