Enlightnmnt

 What you’re describing is a familiar pattern in contemplative traditions, but it helps to separate a few things that often get blended together.

1. “Awareness = self” is not the same as a stable realization

The insight “I am awareness, not the person” can feel like a collapse of the usual identity structure. But in many traditions (Advaita Vedanta, certain Buddhist schools), this is treated as a perceptual shift, not a final attainment. When the mind re-appropriates it conceptually, it often turns into a kind of philosophical stance—“nothing matters / everything is just appearance”—which can feel flat or even disturbing rather than liberating.

So what you’re calling “enlightenment felt terrible” is often closer to:
a destabilizing insight + no integrated grounding afterward.

2. The “everything is awareness” conclusion can become another belief

There’s a subtle trap here: the mind converts a non-conceptual experience into a metaphysical model (“everything is awareness, therefore…”). But that model is still just thought.

Many teachers explicitly warn about this. In Zen, for example, there’s an idea that seeing emptiness and clinging to it is just another form of ignorance. In that sense, your “this is all appearance in awareness” framing can quietly become another viewpoint the mind holds onto—rather than something lived directly and lightly.

That’s why people say enlightenment isn’t an intellectual understanding. Not because insight is wrong, but because turning insight into explanation reintroduces distance.

3. The “blissful enlightened person” idea is usually misunderstood

The idea that some people “stay in unending bliss after realization” is mostly a myth or a very simplified reading of complex reports.

More grounded descriptions tend to sound like:

• less compulsive identification with thought
• less internal resistance to experience
• more simplicity in perception
• but still ordinary human regulation, emotion, fatigue, irritation, etc.

What often gets mistaken for “permanent bliss” is actually reduced psychological conflict, not constant euphoria.

And yes—when people try to describe it, language breaks down. Not because it’s mystical, but because language is built for distinctions (“this vs that”), while these descriptions are pointing at a collapse of unnecessary distinction-making, which doesn’t translate cleanly.

A useful way to reframe your core question

Instead of “Did I attain enlightenment and it felt terrible?” a more precise question might be:

“Did I have a destabilizing non-dual insight that my mind turned into a fixed interpretation, and did that interpretation create suffering?”

In most cases like what you describe, the answer is closer to yes.

If this state still feels persistent or unsettling rather than just an old memory, it can help to treat it less like a philosophical problem and more like an integration issue—something that often resolves through grounding in ordinary structure (relationships, routine, embodiment, creative work), not further analysis of awareness itself.