When I hear voices in reality, whether it is hearing the neighbors talking, people on a bus or train, anyone, anywhere, talking. For me, the voices of people around me that I can hear is replaced with speech about me and it is always horrible. This does not happen when someone is speaking directly to me, although I experience paranoia sometimes in direct conversations. I am able to mostly manage this stuff by rationalizing it in my head or just ignoring it.
I also experience swings in extreme emotions that I do find hard to manage, and paranoia which can be quite disruptive. I have disorganized thoughts that can consume hours on end of my time just by myself in my flat.
I am trying to understand whether the voices altered is a psychosis or not. I have been avoidant of this, I've had it since being a teen and believed it was down to my low self-esteem, I mostly try to rationalize it but sometimes it is difficult. last Sunday I went to a theme park and because of my anxiety about the rides I found it very difficult to manage the altered voices I could hear.. and my whole experience became pretty awful and I felt very paranoid.
My Grandma takes strong medication for a mental health problem that no one talks about, we all believe it may be paranoid schizophrenia and I never took the time to look at things going on within myself which I now realize maybe be onset symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia which I have now learned is strongly heritable. I find this accumulation of weird things about me embarrassing and increasingly hard to hide from my partner since the trip to the theme park, which seemed to trigger it off into being worse. This is the first time I have ever been open about any of this.