#The rare schizoid post

[diabolocracy]

I love being schizoid and all but I'd love it even more if there was a cure for anhedonia and avolition.

[low-empathy-advocacy]

[in this post, "apathetic" is used as a shorthand for "having low/no empathy"].

shout out to apathetic people who are overlooked often!

shout out to apathetic people with paranoid personality disorder. shout out to apathetic people with schizoid personality disorder. shout out to apathetic people with schizotypal personality disorder.

shout out to apathetic people with avoidant personality disorder. shout out to apathetic people with dependent personality disorder. shout out to apathetic people with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

shout out to apathetic people with otherwise specified personality disorder. shout out to apathetic people with unspecified personality disorder.

shout out to apathetic people with schizophrenia. shout out to apathetic people with schizoaffective disorder. shout out to apathetic people with schizophreniform disorder. shout out to apathetic people with delusional disorder.

shout out to apathetic people with brain damage. shout out to apathetic people with epilepsy.

shout out to apathetic people with intellectual disability. shout out to apathetic people with global developmental delay. shout out to apathetic people with communication disorders.

shout out to apathetic people with depersonalization-derealization. shout out to apathetic people with dissociative identity disorder. shout out to apathetic people with otherwise specified dissociative disorders.

shout out to apathetic people with (c)ptsd.

shout out to apathetic people with bipolar affective disorder. shout out to apathetic people with depressive disorders.

shout out to apathetic people with chronic fatigue.

shout out to apathetic people with any other not listed conditions that are rarely discussed in terms of low empathy.

shout out to undiagnosed apathetic people.

[sygneth]

I am not even sure if I will be posting this (though, if you're reading this, I did), but, nevertheless, I have a few points about Jean that I have to make. He is no saint. He is an asshole and I’m not gonna pretend that he is not. But there is so much more to it. 

Let me start with the most obvious. He is said to have clinically diagnosed depression, with, apparently, no distinctive source, and, from what he says, we may assume he is under some sort of psychiatric supervision. 

He was diagnosed seven years ago. Diagnosed with depression, which probably means he’s been dealing with it for a good while longer, only at a certain moment he decided to seek help/had an attempt/any other circumstance that lead this man to get a diagnosis. He is now 34, seven years earlier he’d be 27. 

The reasons for such unspecified depression may be many, from some kind of a rare neurological defect causing one’s brain to be incapable of properly producing/transmitting/I’m-not-a-biologist-neither-is-English-my-first-language-so-I’m-not-gonna-dig-into-neurological-dysfunctions-further-but-you-get-the-point, serotonin, through a burnout, all the way to having other, undiagnosed disorders/illnesses as *checks Luiga’s tweets* Schizoid PD (I am not convinced that what Jean presents is a 100% textbook SPD example, rather SPD traits/behavior patterns? But I’m no specialist and even if I were, it’s hard to diagnose someone based on those few dialogue lines) and codependency tendencies. The doctors didn’t diagnose any other disorder, or at least he never mentions it, but looking at the world of Elysium, those disorders may not yet have been widely recognized, especially if not presenting themselves in the most typical ways/high-functioning. And Jean tends to be high functioning despite his issues. Yet, I assume that in Elysium, and Jamrock especially, the access and quality of psychological and psychiatric services are poor and probably limited. Not to mention education on the matter, which is probably low if not near none. (Just looking at how is alcoholism treated by *everyone* there, or the short mention of McCoy’s brother gives me a good 90’s/early 00s Eastern Europe vibe of mental issues/disabilities public awareness.)  Now, keep that in mind. 

Alright. Next up: a codependent, close relationship with an alcoholic. 

Jean’s relationship with Harry is an interesting one. I found this interesting research on codependency among spouses of alcoholics, that states codependency is related to, among others, SPD traits. (That’s an, uh, disclaimer? I was just curious how that two may coexist, but apparently, they do.) 

Back to the main thought. 

As someone who has been in a close, codependent relationship with a person who had problems with drinking, I can tell you something. It’s more than hard to get out of one. You see a person you care about do stupid, drunken, dangerous shit, you may be angry at them, you may be furious, yet you will still feel responsible for them in a way, and you will take that responsibility and try to get them out of the shit they got themselves into. I’ll say more, if that’s an actual relationship, you will feel social pressure that you are responsible for your partner’s behavior and you’re the one to take care of them. If it’s your work partner, then it’s highly probable you actually will be held responsible for their behavior, so you’re even more likely to clean up their mess. And when you help them out, because you care, because you feel like you should, because you don’t want to be “dicked” for it, maybe all of the above, they will be grateful and they will praise you and love you and even if you feel like this is not the right thing to do, you will do it again.

It takes a lot of work and self-awareness to get out of something like that healthily. And if you have some psychological knowledge, it also helps a lot, to understand how to deal with it. And the only way to do it, regardless healthy or not, is by setting boundaries. If you can healthily set them, and make the other person respect them, that’s very good. But if you have some other mental issues in addition to that, if you lack knowledge on how people’s behavior patterns work, on how exactly addictions work and that, you are maybe having some problems with generally understanding relationships between people, how and why they work, it’s very likely that you won’t be capable of setting those boundaries and enforce them to be respected. It’s very likely that one day, when something will happen and you will realize how toxic and unhealthy this relationship is for you, you will panic and you will start to do anything to get out of it, like a cat drowning in a well. That you will start acting cold, maybe even merciless from a certain perspective, maybe you won’t let yourself believe in their pleading and assurances of change, because you will know that letting yourself *feel* sympathy for the person you had this relationship with may lead to spiraling back into the wheel of codependency. Maybe you have already tried this, and letting yourself trust them only led you back to the point where you started and maybe this time, you don’t want it to end up this way.

And you know what? There is nothing wrong with trying to ensure your mental well-being. “Before approaching the casualty, always make sure the area is safe.” YES because if you’ll get hurt trying to help somebody, there will be one more person to help. The same applies to helping people get their life together. If you won’t have a good mindset to help them, if they will only drag you down, maybe the area isn’t safe? 

Moving on. 

Now, remember when I said that the level of social and psychological awareness seems very low in Elysium/Revachol/Jamrock? About that. 

You know what else I see, looking at the Harry-Jean-Dora-Kim situation? A bunch of people with self-awareness in terms of emotion, and emotional development of teenagers, but problems of grown-up people. And they are not to blame, the system is to blame. Harry seems to be very self-conscious and connected to his emotions, yet for six years he couldn’t find a healthy way to get over a heartbreak. He has tendencies to act violently, to randomly drunk-phone his ex to harass her (I mean come on, he was asking her if she is naked), not to mention a tone of other things. 

What happens here to Jean, is his situationship/best friend, whom yeah, he decided to ‘have a break’ with, immediately gets over it, and starts to go out with someone else. Taking, that this man has probably understanding of his emotions on a level of a high-schooler, he WILL be salty. He will be mad at Harry and he will be salty towards Kim when he sees them in Whirling. (Not to mention that it’s probably how they just roll in the precinct, and I’m quite sure that Harry’s and Jean’s relationship has been japing on and teasing each other, and as long as they both knew how it works, it was all good, compare: this post. So yes, Jean will be angry with Harry and he will act like an offended drama queen partially because that is just how their relationship dynamics probably looked like for the last two (at least!) years, and partially because he is an offended 16-year-old drama queen, whose bestie told her to fuck off and found a new (boy)friend. 

Is it good, that grown-up men have the emotional capabilities of high schoolers? No. Should we blame them, or the fact that their system seemingly doesn’t provide any prevention, doesn’t promote awareness, or offer any proper healthcare for that matter? I’ll leave that to you.

To add to all this, yes, the RCM’s fucked up system, hierarchy, and mentality don’t help. Yes, it would be better for both Harry and Jean and probably Kim too, taking for his PTSD, to get the fuck out of there and live peaceful lives. But you know, changing your whole lifestyle isn’t easy. Understanding that maybe it’s better to leave now and that it doesn’t mean you’ve “wasted” your years is a process, a long and hard one. I had to learn this. My close ones had to learn this. Some of them still didn’t, especially, that where I come from, there is this CEE culture of not letting yourself fail with peace of mind. You got to do everything the best you can, you gotta do it 120%, and if not, you’re a rotten piece of shit. Looking at how Harry treats himself, Revachol seems to have this in common with Central-Eastern Europe as well. 

Another thing, we don’t even know what Kim or Jean did before they joined the RCM, and Harry was a gym teacher. Thinking that it is easy to just switch your job in, again, a place with a CEE mentality, is a huge mistake. At the age of 40-odd years especially. In the 90s, especially. We don’t even know if Jean or Kim have any other education on their account, besides being cops, so changing professions would mean additional education, and for Harry, how many places, realistically, would take in a 45-year-old gym teacher?

I generally see that many people seem to forget/not understand how CE European mentality works, and it shows. I am glad that we live in a world where awareness of things such as homophobia, ableism, misogyny and else is common knowledge. But it wasn’t here, not even those 15 years ago. I remember people using names of dysfunctions and disabilities as slurs. Grown up people. I remember my classmates and my friend calling each other faggots or laughing at each other for not being gender-affirmative enough. Half of us turned out to be queer, and nobody had a problem with that, because in those times this kind of language wasn’t necessarily indicating someone’s worldview, it was just a bad habit, a very common one. I am more than happy, really, that we got rid of this kind of narrative and are more aware of the weight of a spoken word now. But when talking about past or settings that resemble this past, let’s please not forget that it DID look different and take that into consideration. Please. 

Remembering what we derived from and what a great progress as a society we did is important, as it shows the way we managed to walk, but also reminds us of what people had to deal with. And is a warning, because now we’re probably still all doing things that in 30 years will be so, so wrong. 

So concluding this ridiculously long consciousness stream, I love you, DE fandom. Now, I have an interview to watch (probably not anymore) and a comic page to draw (as always). I’ll leave you with this here.

[tothepointofinsanity]

hello as another schizoid i just wanted to say i love your sayaka art (& additional text) it's so indulgent she's highly szpdcore although we are one of the few people in this fandom who even know what that is LOL. wishing you well ^_^

Zoid gang unite…Thank you for the ask and kind words. ^^ Sayaka is currently a comfort (blorbo) character for me and no doubt a lot of others, so I was initially hesitant to write analysis and make art of her under a schizoid lens <- perhaps out of my anxiety of how others might say it’s “wrong” since it is rare for anyone to display belief for a character they like has a pd surrounded by misinformation and stigma to begin with. Sayaka has very strong bpd and szpd codes, I think. Thankfully, everyone here has been very patient with me, so for now I still feel comfortable enough to continue posting. 🙇‍♂️ Take care as well.

[groovesnjams]

"Party People" by Rose Gray

DV:

To be honest I was a little suspicious when suddenly everyone in my little online circles - not just the indoor kid critics - was talking about Rose Gray. But they were right! Louder, Please is a delight, and "Party People" is a massive gem, the rare bright spot in a typically-slow first month of the year. Producer Sega Bodega brings his warmest synths and Gray turns the straightforward lyric into something like a pledge of allegiance, to the club, to the people in it, to the nights you never want to end. But there's depth here, and character. I love the way she leans into the "fffuck"; even more, I love the way "Party people only ones I wanna trust" lightly carries the implication of a hard-learned lesson. I was rude about Charli when we covered Gray's collab with TSHA last year and I don't want to repeat myself so let me just end by saying if I'm lucky, I'll hear "Party People" in at least a few DJ sets this year.

MG:

Lol, party. Friends, we are living in strange times and I can barely even tolerate music anymore. I feel this intense schizoid fissure between our dull headache nostalgia culture ("Party People," here, which I will probably only nominally address in this post, is nostalgic for a time period when I was already an adult and, thus, doesn't even give me those memory-holed tingles. It's good though, it would have been good if it was a Rita Ora song, too) and the acute stabbing pain of needing beauty, more beauty! Gotta touch the divine while we still can! Like, for real, what will the divine be when we're all biodiesel? I guess it will still be there, it's probably a facet of consciousness -- something I think can't be exterminated so easily. At the moment, songs like "Party People" just further disorient me. What is even going on? It's not this, like, hard bodied predawn rave thing, I know that much.

[insipid-drivel]

I cannot express enough how important it is to look up and research any diagnoses, especially those regarding mental and behavioral health/development, before fully accepting what a diagnosing therapist or doctor has handed down. Especially if the diagnosis is of a highly stigmatized or rare condition.

I see these posts a lot on tumblr from people who spent years, even decades, with fairly common presentations of ASD, ADHD, and other relatively common conditions misdiagnosed to some of the societally-bleakest ones possible. BPD? Bipolar (especially Bipolar 2)? Schizoid personality disorder? Those aren't diagnoses that are going to help someone who doesn't have them.

First off, I want to say one thing: A label is only as good as the information attached to it applies to you. If you're happy to be diagnosed, that's great! If it's still taking time to reckon with a diagnosis? That's totally okay. A lot of people need to spend a long time with support, friends, and loved ones to adjust to having a daunting label assigned to them. This isn't to say that you should completely fob off your diagnosis, either.

Here's the biggest thing I came to understand when it came to the world of diagnostics: A correct diagnosis is like receiving your own Dewey Decimal number at the library: It can take you to where the research and peer-supported information about your condition is available for you.

When I first began seeing my psychiatrist of now over 5 years, he tried to diagnose me with Schizoid Personality Disorder. There is nothing wrong with that, except that it wasn't the right diagnosis for me. I went home after his big revelation with me, looked up what credible sources like the NIH, WHO, and DSM-5 to read about what defined a Schizoid personality and how people who have agreed to interviews and published studies attest to feeling.

When I read the description of the symptoms and common mental and emotional traits for people with Schizoid Personalities, it was like reading a long-form antonym; the opposite of a description of how I felt and what was really going on in my mind.

So, I took that information with me to my next session with him, and after having found other related conditions in the same general family as Schizoid Personality Disorder, I found that I was really Schizotypal, which is a very, very, very different diagnosis. To be sure, I texted the links to the articles I'd read to my psychiatrist, and told him at our next meeting, "I don't feel you have an accurate grasp of what my experience and behaviors are. This [Schizotypal] is a more accurate summary of my life experience, while Schizoid sounds like a different person's diagnosis. Can we try this over again?"

My psychiatrist asked me some more detailed questions, including questions about whether I was showing him an accurate reflection of my normal personality when we were in-session. I answered that I didn't, and so my personality was much more reserved and cool toward him than how I usually felt and behaved around people I'm comfortable with.

I walked out of his office that day with a new diagnosis: Autism, and Schizotypal Personality Disorder.

About 2 years later came the biggest revelation of all: Dissociative Identity Disorder.

My life became very lonely after I came out publicly about that one.

Nevertheless, never be afraid to do your own research, ask questions, or debate differential diagnoses. If the shoe fits you, then it fits you, and you and your therapist or healthcare provider can move forward from there. If trying to study it reveals it's shaped for a horse and you can barely walk around with it on, then it may be worth a longer discussion.

[thegeminisage]

tng update time. a day or more ??? ago i watched "the outrageous okona" in several bits and pieces, and then last night i caught "loud as a whisper."

the outrageous okona: this one is...fine? i think it seems better than it actually was due to being in the first two seasons in tng

i liked okona and i really liked the plot twist about him not actually doing any crimes whatsoever but instead playing messenger boy for his buds. that part was good. appearances deceiving etc, and he pulled a very clever stunt to get them to admit the truth. unfortunately by the time i started liking him the episode was over. so.

did NOT like the "data can't be funny" plot...like, he did define a joke in an earlier episode, and it frustrated me that he seemed to have forgotten the definition and NO ONE would explain it to him. they just kept going "you gotta feel it bro"

personally, i think if data was told the definition of a joke, and had the concept of comedic timing also explained to him, he could master the art of TELLING jokes, even if he himself never felt or even understood the urge to laugh. it's just ai learning. i guess in 87 they just hadn't conceived of it.

i did like the part where guinan was like just bc you cant laugh or make other people laugh doesnt mean you're not human...it was kind of the narrative to want to be accepting of his differences...but at the same time the whole premise felt so terribly unfair to him it's not enough to save it

also, the jerry lewis moment has uh...aged. a lot of those jokes aged

speaking of data, he had several good ace moments in this episode. "sexual attraction is not a part of my programming" and "i don't believe it's true that the act and emotion of love are the same thing" etc etc. i don't know if i believe in ace data because again you cannot be making the robots ace but i do deeply respect people who do and i'm happy for them that this was in this episode. if stuff like this keeps happening you could win me over maybe. MAYBE.

loud as a whisper: WWWWOW 10/10 EPISODE.......a rare win for early seasons tng......

first of all, that one guy speaking through those other people was COOL. like at first it was a bit creepy, are they his thralls or what, are they ok, why does he keep flirting with deanna in the workplace, but after it was explained that they were interpreters and after riva got angry that picard spoke to them instead of him it was like. YES. this is the shit. his interactions with deanna became a lot less skeevy once you realize his interest is genuine and benign and he's not some megalomaniac psychic nutjob

his conversation with geordi...like yes it's a little on the nose to be like "my disability is part of me and i like who i am so i like my disability" but this was 87. some people hadn't gotten it yet. i mean hell a lot of people still haven't yk

offering geordi a cure out of nowhere when they previously said it was impossible is wack BUT I DID REALLY LIKE that even though geordi's condition causes him chronic pain he still didn't leap at the chance to have his sight restored. like that's his way of existing and being alive and nobody would choose to change it on a dime unless it was causing them nothing but abject misery...like it's such a nice way to communicate that geordi values the different way in which he sees the world

not to be like sooo personal on a fucking tng liveblog post and definitely not to be like "being blind is exactly the same as x" bc it's absolutely not but things like being ace or having adhd/a multitude of other mental illnesses have caused me so much FUCKING grief over the years but if someone came along and offered to magically fix me like...it's such a fundamental part of Who I Am and how i experience being alive that if i was fixed i might not be me anymore and you can SEE THAT like you can quite literally see the gears turning in geordi's head and it's so fucking good. i love geordi so much he's my best friend

today i still have to do "the schizoid man" and "unnatural selection" hopefully before 730pm where we will finally do "a matter of honor" and "the measure of a man" together. AUGH

[psychoticallytrans]

A couple notes that I forgot when I originally posted this:

It's also a common symptom of schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder, but often doesn't respond to antipsychotics. In addition, in schizophrenia and schizoid personality disorder, anhedonia generally tends to "come and go", as opposed to depressive disorders, where when untreated, it often doesn't let up for months or years. This can make it more difficult to spot and treat than in depressive disorders.

ADHD can also have "come and go" anhedonia as a symptom, and ADHD medication has mixed results with alleviating it.

An early warning sign is if you've tried the "enrichment in your enclosure" by rolling out something new and fun or something you rarely do that generally brings you joy, and the result is an emotional reaction you can describe as "null".

A commonly overlooked symptom of depression is anhedonia, the inability to feel joy or pleasure. The reason that it's easy to overlook is that it's easier to miss the absence of something that's not around all the time than it is to miss a symptom that causes active distress, such as feeling tired and miserable all the time.

Anhedonia is good at being a persistent undercurrent to your life. My aunt, who has major depressive disorder, related to me that she figured out that something was wrong when she looked at the daffodils she had planted blooming, and couldn't recognize the emotion that she felt when she looked at them. It had been long enough since she had felt happy that she lost the ability to recognize the emotion.

It's a particularly dangerous depressive symptom, because it robs you of the ability to feel those little spots of joy that keep a lot of people going, while not doing anything to impair your ability to function. If you don't know that this is a treatable symptom of depression, it's easy to assume that your ability to feel good is permanently broken, and decide to commit suicide because you don't want to live like that. It's not an irrational conclusion, but it is an uninformed one, and everyone deserves to have all the information when making a major decision.

This is what a lot of questionnaires are trying to look for when they ask about "loss of enjoyment". If you can't remember a loss of enjoyment because you can't remember enjoyment, then you probably have anhedonia. If you struggle to define how it is to feel "happy", "content", or "good", or how it feels when you feel those emotions, you probably have anhedonia. If you can't remember feeling any of those emotions for a week or more, you probably have anhedonia.

Symptoms commonly co-occurring with anhedonia are fatigue (often the cause), clear and thoughtful consideration of suicide, loss of desire to socialize or do activities that used to make you happy, and weight loss (due to lack of enjoyment of food).

This section is anecdotal. In what I have observed, anhedonia due to fatigue rarely responds well to depression treatment unless depression was causing the fatigue. If fatigue and anhedonia are co-occurring and are not both alleviated by depression treatment, consider other causes for the fatigue.

[robin-the-enby]

I saw the match ups you are doing so I was wondering if you can a matchup for me as well

Soooo

I'm a girl and I'm bi. I have somewhat long straight black hair, tan skin and dark brown fox eyes. As for my mbti, I'm an intp with 6w5 ennegramme( isthathowyouspellit?). And I have a really broken humor. And I'm very very very lazy.... I can sleep 2 whole days without eating or anything. And I loveeeeeee listening to music!! ( Especially The Weeknd and Darci ).

When first meeting I'm like the most responsible, reliable, nice, modest, respecting person ( to elders it stay the same unless they cross their limits) but after getting to know me I can be very chaotic ( but fear not due to getting called I'm loud all the time I have mastered the way of shutting tf up ) Oh and I love reading but only if I feel like it. I'm mostly into sci-fi or action genres. And for some reason I hate watching/reading (like movies and mangas and novels not fanfics ofc ^0^) anything that's under romance. And I loveeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee gaming. I play genshin impact, asphalt 9, twisted wonderland and obey me ). I almost forgot I have severe anxiety, Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, Schizoid personality disorder and I'm hella paranoid. Most of the time I'm in my head and I rarely step out of the house. OH AND I absolutely adore animals. In fact I have 8 dogs, 3 cats and a Betta fish!

Oh even though I'm lazy if I really want something done, I always find a way to finish it.

So yeah that's it. I hope you don't mind ^0^

Hi, my matchups aren't open, as stated in my bio and pinned post. Hope you have more luck elsewhere! And thank you for liking my stuff <3

[obscenitymoving]

(anon who asked about how you found out you had szpd, again)

would you be able to describe what the 'split' in schizoid pd is like for you, personally? and would you believe it is generally the same among all schizoids or can their personal interpretations of the split vary depending on who they are?

in addition, i'm having trouble telling how to differ between szpd symptoms and personality traits and ways of being as a person, since i presume schizoids' experiences will vary as they're all their own people, too. i'm unsure whether you'd be able to explain this for me? that may seem peculiar and i know you're not the SzpdTM Authority pfff but you're the first person i found to ask

i ask this as someone who is wondering whether they have szpd but who has a Loooot of issues in dealing with figuring that out (plus doubt is not fun when you have ocd and obsessively intrusive thoughts that revolve around trauma conditioned mindsets that are contrary to accepting and understanding myself in relation to the pd, let me say that...) so i just figured i'd send another ask ^_^ once again your answers and time are appreciated!

hi again. i have to assume it can be similar between other schizoids as much as it can be different but since i literally do not know anyone else whos schizoid i really dont have much to compare my own experience to. my own experience is much like how it was discussed in the post i linked before. my "inner" world is very very rich, i cannot tell you just how much time i spend immersed inside my self where it is considered "safe". even as a kid i thought i was just a 'maladaptive daydreamer' but its since evolved way past that. like, to a point where i cannot imagine a world in which i dont rely on my inner machinations. mostly i can just describe it as making ocs and literally focusing on their world almost 24/7. its a "safe" situation which i can entirely control. i dont think i can go even an hour without retreating back into that world, even when im entirely alone and theres nothing to "hide" from so to speak. where on the other hand the way i present myself to other people is very stereotypical. ive been called a robot and the like. i lack empathy and i never reach out to people first. im not entirely stoic, mostly because i dont think any person can truly be entirely emotionless, but id describe the feelings as very fleeting, at least for the outside world. i get over arguments very quickly because its simply not in my nature to be angry for very long. when i do cry (which is very very rare for me even in the safety of my room) its for 5 minutes at most and i immediately "get over it". my joy feels more like instant gratification instead of something lasting.

i cannot really tell you just how much of who i am is because im a schizoid or if its just my normal personality i wouldve had regardless. mostly because i think just in the way schizoid forms it makes it very difficult for us to hold onto a certain identity. i mean we're literally the personality disorder without a personality. ive spent years trying to figure out who i was, went by 20 different million names, used 20 million different identities, etc. i feel slightly more solid in now, which is interesting i suppose. just the fact that i am a schizoid has given me a good identifier in who i am. on my insta i cannot even begin to describe to you just how much i mention my szpd. its all i talk about sometimes. when i had a job last year (which i quit because customer service is um... it doesnt work for obvious reasons) it was all i talked about. because it was all i had to identify myself. now that im jobless and about to start college, ive latched onto Being A College Student because its all i have, and its all i feel safe sharing to other people. that last part is important because i truly do think we have personalities, its just we dont feel safe showing it to the rest of the world, by showing it, the delicate way in which we control our inner environment will be "invaded" by the "outside world". its one of the reasons i quit art. i could not stand showing my art to people and then them forcing their own emotions and ideas onto it.

im sorry about the last paragraph you sent. unfortunately i cant really help or give much advice beyond what ive already said because it just came so naturally to me. well it wasnt that smooth obviously, but the only thing i really had to get over was my own self doubt and thinking that one regular experience or two entirely invalidated me being a schizoid (which it doesnt). the best i can say is i wish you luck and i hope my annoying ramble-y paragraphs helped you in some way. as always feel free to send more asks and i do hope you can find other schizoids to talk to! my own experiences are very limited.

[infernallegaycy]

Writing Psychotic Characters

Hi! I’ve seen a few of these writing things pop up recently (and in the past), but I haven’t seen any on psychotic characters—which, judging from the current state of portrayals of psychosis in media, is something I think many people* need. And as a psychotic person who complains about how badly psychosis tends to be represented in media, I thought I’d share a bit of information and suggestions!

A lot of this isn’t necessarily specifically writing advice but information about psychosis, how it presents, and how it affects daily life. This is partially purposeful—I feel that a large part of poor psychotic representation stems from a lack of understanding about psychosis, and while I’m not usually in an educating mood, context and understanding are crucial to posts like this. A lot of this also relates to writing psychosis in a modern-day setting, simply because that’s where bad psychotic representation tends to mostly occur (and it’s the only experience I’ve had, obviously), but please don’t shy away from applying this advice to psychotic characters in sci-fi/fantasy/historical fiction/etc. Psychosis is not a wholly modern phenomenon, nor would speculative fiction feel truly escapist without being able to see yourself reflected in it.

Please also note that I am not a medical professional nor an expert in psychology. I simply speak from my personal experiences, research, and what I’ve read of others’ experiences. I also do not speak for all psychotic people, and more than welcome any alternative perspectives to my own.

*These people, in all honesty, aren’t likely to be the ones willingly reading this. But there are people who are willing to learn, so here’s your opportunity.

(Warnings: Mentions of institutionalization/hospitalization, including forced institutionalization; ableism/saneism; and brief descriptions of delusions and hallucinations. Also, it’s a pretty long post!)

Up front, some terminology notes: “Unpsychotic” refers to people who are not psychotic. This includes other mentally ill and neurodivergent people. Please try to avoid terminology like “non-[identity],” as much of it is co-opted from “nonblack.”

Also, “psychotic” and “delusional” will not be, and should not be, used to refer to anything but respectively someone who experiences psychosis and someone who experiences delusions. Remove these words as insults and negative descriptors for anyone you dislike from your vocabulary.

In addition, I generally use adjectives rather than person-first language because that is the language I, and the seeming majority of other neurodivergent and mentally ill people, prefer. Others might describe themselves differently (as “people with psychosis,” for instance). Don’t assume either way—I’d generally suggest you say “psychotic person” first, and then correct yourself if the person in question prefers different terminology.

1) Psychosis is a symptom, not a disorder.

As a term, “psychosis” describes any number of symptoms that indicate a break with reality, such as delusions and hallucinations (I’ll go into more detail about this in a bit). It commonly occurs as part of several mental and neurological disorders, including but not limited to:

Schizophrenia

Schizophreniform disorder (same symptoms as schizophrenia, but for a shorter period of time than 6 months)

Schizoaffective disorder (combined symptoms of psychosis and a mood disorder, but not enough to completely fill the diagnostic criteria for either)

Bipolar disorder (typically as part of manic episodes, but it can also occur in unipolar depression and depressive episodes)

Personality disorders, including borderline personality disorder (for which transient paranoia under stress is part of the diagnostic criteria), paranoid personality disorder, and schizoid personality disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

Dissociative disorders (though psychosis =/= dissociative identity disorder; if you want further information on the latter, which I do not have, please seek out another post!)

Psychosis can also occur with forms of epilepsy, sleep disorders, metabolic disorders, and autoimmune disorders. It tends to be a major part of neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In addition, it can occur when not related to a chronic health condition; things like sleep deprivation and stress can induce temporary psychosis, as can drug use and medication.

This isn’t to say you necessarily need to define a disorder for a psychotic character, as some psychotic people (including myself) primarily just describe ourselves as “psychotic,” and some aren’t diagnosed with anything specific. However, if your psychotic character is a main/perspective character, I definitely recommend it. Chances are, someone with that disorder is reading/watching, and I’m sure they’d love to see a bit of direct representation. In general, you probably should at least have something in mind, because psychotic symptoms and severity/onset can differ greatly.

Some psychotic disorders’ diagnostic criteria explicitly exclude others (someone cannot be diagnosed with both schizophrenia and schizophreniform disorder at the same time, for instance, though the latter can develop into the former), but comorbidity is possible—and often common—among certain disorders and other neurological/mental conditions. Rates vary, so definitely research this, but in short, it is very much possible for psychotic people to have multiple disorders, including disorders that don’t include psychotic symptoms. (Personally speaking: I’m autistic, ADHD, and OCD in addition to being psychotic, and I’m physically disabled as well.)

I’m not here to do all the research for you—if you want to know more about specific psychotic disorders, then by all means, look them up! Go beyond Wikipedia and Mayo Clinic articles, too. Talk to people who have them. Seek out blogs and YouTube channels run by people with them. Read books about psychosis by psychotic people**. Pay attention to how we describe ourselves and our disorders.

And if you want to write characters with those disorders, especially if you’re writing from their perspectives, then please for the love of God, hire a sensitivity reader. For authenticity, I would recommend seeking out someone with the same disorder, not just anyone psychotic.

**If you want a fiction recommendation: I don’t actually know if the author is schizophrenic like the main character, but I really enjoyed and related to The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan. Content warnings include, but might not be limited to—it’s been a while since I read it—unreality, self-harm, suicide, abuse, and mentions of transphobia. I haven’t personally read any autobiographies/memoirs/essays yet, so I don’t have any to offer, and quite a few that came up through a cursory search seemed only to focus on being an inspiration to neurotypical people or were from a perspective other than that of the psychotic person in question. If anyone (preferably psychotic people) has any more recommendations, fiction or nonfiction, let me know!

2) Not every psychotic person has the same symptoms.

As mentioned, psychosis consists of symptoms that involve separation with reality, which can present as positive or negative symptoms. Every person’s experiences with these are different, but some generalizations can be made. I definitely recommend reading studies and articles (especially directly by psychotic people) describing experiences and presentation!

I’ll start with positive symptoms, which refer to the presence of symptoms unpsychotic people don’t have, and can include hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thoughts, speech, and behavior.

You probably know what hallucinations are (perceptions of sensory information that is not really present), but you might not know the specifics. Types of hallucinations include:

Auditory (which tend to be the most common, and are probably the form everyone is most familiar with, primarily as “hearing voices”)

Visual

Olfactory

Tactile/haptic

Gustatory (taste)

Somatic

Some types with regards to bodily sensations get a little muddled from here, but some forms of hallucinations you might not have heard of include thermic (hot/cold), hygric (fluids), kinesthetic (bodily movements), and visceral (inner organs).

(Note: Hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations, which occur when falling asleep or waking up, are not related to psychosis and can occur in anyone.)

As mentioned, there are some forms of hallucinations that are more common, but that is not to say that everyone has the same hallucinations. A lot of us have auditory and/or visual hallucinations, but not everyone does. Some have tactile, olfactory, or gustatory hallucinations instead of or in addition to more common forms (hi! Auditory hallucinations are pretty rare for me, but I constantly feel bugs/spiders crawling on me). If you write a psychotic character that experiences hallucinations, then you should definitely do further research on these types and manifestations of them.

You’re likely also familiar with delusions (a belief that contradicts reality), though again, you might not know the specifics. Delusions can be classified as bizarre (implausible, not shared or understood by peers of the same culture) or non-bizarre (false, but technically possible). They can relate to one’s mood or not.

Some people only experience delusions and no other significant psychotic symptoms (this occurs in delusional disorder). Delusions differ between people and tend to be heavily influenced by environment, but there are some common themes, such as:

Persecution

Guilt, punishment, or sin

Mind reading

Thought insertion

Jealousy

Control

Reference (coincidences having meaning)

Grandeur

Certain types of delusions are more common in certain cultures/backgrounds or certain disorders. I can’t really go into details about specific delusions, because I try not to read many examples (for a reason I’m about to mention), but if you plan on writing a character who experiences delusions, I definitely recommend heavily researching delusions and how it feels to experience them.

I would like to note: I’m not sure how common it is, but I’ve noticed that I personally have a tendency to pick up delusions that I see other psychotic people talking about having. Just kind of, like, an “oh shit what if” feeling creeps up on me, and before I know it, that delusion has wormed its way into my life. Just in case you want some idea of how psychotic people can interact amongst ourselves!

Another quick note: Delusions, by definition, are untrue beliefs; this does not mean that anyone who has ever been delusional is inherently untrustworthy.

Disorganization of thoughts/speech and behavior is more self-explanatory. Problems with thinking and speaking tend to be one of the most common psychotic symptoms, sometimes considered even more so than delusions and hallucinations. There are a lot of ways thought processes can be disrupted, and I honestly think it would be kind of difficult to portray this if you haven’t experienced it, but some common manifestations are:

Derailment

Tangents (which you might notice me doing sometimes in this very post)

Getting distracted mid-sentence/thought

Incoherence/“word salad”

Thought blocking (sudden stops in thoughts/speech)

Repetition of words/phrases

Pressured speech (rapid, urgent speech)

Use of invented words

Poverty of speech/content of speech

(Note that thought/speech disturbances aren’t necessarily exclusive to psychotic disorders. They tend to be common in ADHD and autism as well, though symptoms can be more severe when they occur in, for example, schizophrenia.)

Behavioral abnormalities can include catatonia, which presents in a number of ways, such as mutism, echolalia, agitation, stupor, catalepsy, posturing, and more. Episodes of catatonia last for hours and sometimes longer, which usually requires hospitalization and/or medication. This tends to overlap heavily with symptoms of autism spectrum disorders, which can be comorbid with conditions like schizophrenia.

Negative symptoms, on the other hand, refer to the absence of certain experiences. It can include flat affect (lack of or limited emotional reactions), generally altered emotional responses, a decrease in speech, and low motivation. Most of these speak for themselves, and I’m not honestly sure how to describe them to someone who’s never experienced them in a way that isn’t very metaphorical and therefore kind of unhelpful. If any other psychotic people have suggestions, feel free to add on/message me!

Not every psychotic disorder involves or requires both positive and negative symptoms (to my knowledge, manic episodes of bipolar disorder mostly only include positive symptoms), but many psychotic people experience both. And, as expressed multiple times—and I really can’t stress it enough—every person’s experience with psychosis is different.

If you interview two psychotic people at random, chances are they aren’t going to have the same combination of symptoms. Chances are they won’t even have the same disorder. Therefore, if you write multiple psychotic characters, they shouldn’t be identical in terms of personality or psychosis.

There are also some qualities of psychotic disorders that may not necessarily be diagnostic criteria but are prominent in people with these conditions. These also vary between disorders, but cognitive impairments and similar traits are fairly common.

3) In a similar vein, daily experiences can vary greatly. Psychosis can be a major part of psychotic people’s lives, but it doesn’t always affect daily life.

For some people, psychosis occurs in episodes, not 24/7; you may have heard the term “psychotic break,” which tends to refer to a first episode of psychosis. This is especially true of disorders where psychotic symptoms occur under stress or during mood episodes.

For other people, psychosis is a near-constant. It can wax and wane, but it never completely goes away. These people might be more likely to invest in medication or long-term therapy and other treatment methods.

Psychosis’s impact on everyday life can also be affected by insight (how well the person can tell they’re having psychotic symptoms). There’s not a ton of accessible research—or research at all—into insight and how it affects psychotic people, and I’m not a big fan of describing people as having high/low insight because I think it has the potential to be used like functioning labels (which, for the record, are bad; plenty of other autistic people have written at length about this), but just something to keep in mind. It’s a sliding scale; at different points in time, the same person might have limited or significant awareness of their symptoms. Both greater and poorer insight have been linked to decreased quality of life, so neither one is really a positive.

Just something to be aware of: Yes, sometimes we do realize how “crazy” we seem. Yes, sometimes we don’t. No, it doesn’t really make things any better to know that what we’re seeing/thinking/etc isn’t real. No, people with low insight shouldn’t be blamed or mocked for this.

As such, the diagnostic process can vary greatly. Psychotic people aware of their symptoms or how their lives are being impacted may directly ask for a diagnosis or seek out information on their own. Other times, family or friends might notice symptoms and bring them up to a mental health professional, or someone might be forcibly institutionalized and diagnosed that way.

My professional diagnostic processes have been pretty boring: Over time, I just gradually brought up different diagnoses I thought might fit me to my therapist, whom I started seeing for anxiety (which I no longer strongly identify with, on account of my anxiety mostly stemming from me being autistic, OCD, and psychotic). I filled out checklists and talked about my symptoms. We moved on with the treatment processes I was already undergoing and incorporated more coping mechanisms and stuff like that into therapy sessions. Hardly the tearful scenes of denial you’re used to seeing or reading about.

Other people might have very different experiences, or very similar ones! It all depends! I generally don’t really like reading scenes of people being diagnosed (it’s just exposition and maybe some realization on the PoV character’s part, but it’s usually somewhat inaccurate in that regard), so you can probably steer away from that sort of thing, but you might find it useful to note how your character was identified somewhere? I don’t really have any strong opinions on this.

I’d also like to note: Everything I publicly speak about having, I’ve discussed in a professional therapy setting, just because of my personal complexes. However, I do fully support self-diagnosis. Bigotry and money are huge obstacles against getting professional diagnoses, and if someone identifies with a certain disorder and seeks out treatment mechanisms for it, there’s no real harm being done. If someone is genuinely struggling and they benefit from coping mechanisms intended for a disorder they might not have, then I think that’s better than if they shied away because they weren’t professionally diagnosed with it, and therefore didn’t get help they needed. With proper research, self-diagnosis is fully ethical and reasonable.

I do not want to debate this, and any attempts to force me into a discussion about professional versus self-diagnosis will be ignored.

Anyway! I can’t really identify any specific daily experiences with psychosis you might want to include, because as mentioned, everyone has different symptoms and ways they cope with them.

Some psychotic people might not experience symptoms outside of an episode, which can be brought on by any number of things; some might experience symptoms only under general stress; some might have consistent symptoms. The content of hallucinations and delusions can also shift over time.

Psychosis can also affect anyone—there are certain demographics certain disorders are more likely to occur in, but this could just as easily be due to biases in diagnostic criteria or professionals themselves as it could be due to an actual statistical correlation. If you want to figure out how a psychotic character behaves on a day-to-day basis, then you’re better off shaping who they are as a person beyond their psychosis first, then incorporating their psychosis into things.

(A note about this: I consider my psychosis a major part of me, and I firmly believe that I would be a very different person without it; that’s why I refer to myself as a “psychotic person” rather than “a person with psychosis.” However, there is a difference between that and unpsychotic people making psychotic characters’ only trait their psychosis.)

4) Treatment for psychosis differs from person to person. The same things don’t work for everyone.

Some people are on antipsychotics; others aren’t. Medication is a personal choice and not a necessity—no one should be judged either for being on medication or for not being on medication. There are many reasons behind either option. Please do not ask psychotic people about their medication/lack thereof unprompted.

If you want to depict a psychotic character on medication, then research different forms of antipsychotics and how they affect psychotic people. I’ve never been on medication and don’t really plan to be (though if I ever do, I’m definitely taking a note from Phasmophobia’s book and calling them “Sanity Pills.” Just to clarify, I don’t want unpsychotic people repeating this joke, but if you want some insight on how some of us regard our health…), so you’re better off looking elsewhere for this sort of information!

I’m not going to get into my personal opinions on institutionalization and the psychiatry industry in general now, but institutionalization is, while common, also not necessary, and many psychotic people—and mentally ill and neurodivergent people in general—have faced harm and trauma due to institutionalization. Again, I can’t offer direct personal experience, but I recommend steering clear of plotlines directly related to psychiatric hospitals.

I would also like to emphasis the word treatment. Psychosis has no cure. It is possible for psychosis to only last a single episode (whether because it’s only due to stress/another outside factor or because it is treated early), or for symptoms to be greatly reduced over time and with treatment, but for the most part, psychotic people are psychotic for life.

However, with proper support networks and coping skills, many psychotic people are able to lead (quote unquote) “normal” lives. What coping mechanisms work for what people differs, but some psychosis-specific coping mechanisms might be:

Taping webcams for delusions of persecution/surveillance (which is honestly also just something everyone should do with webcams that aren’t in use)

Covering/closing windows for similar reasons

Using phone cameras/audio recordings to distinguish visual and auditory hallucinations from reality (most of the time, a hallucination won’t show up on camera, though it’s possible for people to hallucinate something on a camera screen too)

Similarly, removing glasses/contact lenses to check a visual hallucination

Asking people you trust (because of stigma and delusions, this might not be a long list) to check for symptoms of an oncoming episode

Avoiding possible triggers for psychosis (for example, I don’t engage with horror media often because a lot of it -- both psychological horror and slasher-type things -- can trigger delusions and hallucinations)

I’d also like to mention that treatment isn’t a clean, one-way process; especially with certain disorders, it’s normal to go up and down over time. I’d honestly be really uncomfortable with a psychotic character whose symptoms don’t affect their life whatsoever. There are ways you can write how psychosis affects someone that are… weird, which I’ll touch on, but overall, I think it’s better to actually depict a psychotic person whose symptoms have a clear impact on their life (even if that impact is, say, they’re on medication that negates some of their symptoms).

Just to reiterate: I am not a medical professional and cannot offer real-life advice regarding treatment, especially medication. Please do not ask me too detailed questions regarding this.

5) There are a lot of stereotypes and stigma surrounding psychosis.

The way psychosis is perceived both by general society and the field of psychology has changed a lot over the years, but even now, it still remains highly stigmatized and misunderstood. Wall of text incoming, but it’s important stuff.

Typical media portrayal of psychosis tends to fall into specific categories: The scary, violent psychotic person, or the psychotic person who is so crazy you can’t help but laugh. There are other bad depictions, but these are generally the ways I see psychotic people regarded and represented the most, so I want to address them directly.

Let’s talk about psychosis in horror first. Psychosis is often stereotyped as making people aggressive and violent. You’ve all seen the “psychotic killer” trope and depictions of people who are made violent and evil by their psychosis, even if it’s not explicitly named as the case. You’ve all seen “psychotic” used as a negative adjective, used synonymously to murderous, evil, harmful, violent, manipulative, etc—maybe you’ve even used it that way in the past. There’s no denying that the way society regards psychotic people is overwhelmingly negative, and that leaks into media.

If you are considering giving a violent, irredeemable antagonist psychosis, consider this: Don’t. More or less every psychotic person hates this trope. It’s inaccurate and, needless to say, rooted in ableism.

There are racialized aspects to this as well. People of color, especially Black and Latine people, are already stereotyped as being aggressive, violent, and scary; there’s also a history of overdiagnosis (and often misdiagnosis) of schizophrenia in Black people, especially civil rights activists. White and white-passing people will only be singled out if someone notices us exhibiting psychotic symptoms, but Black and brown people are already under scrutiny. Be extra cautious about how you write psychotic characters of color.

I’m not saying you can never give a psychotic person, say, a temper; in some cases, it might even make sense. Spells of uncontrollable anger are part of the diagnostic criteria for BPD, for example, and irritability is a common trait of manic episodes. Some delusions and hallucinations can affect aggression (emphasis on can—it would be inaccurate to imply that this is always the case. Once again, each person has a different experience with their psychotic symptoms).

But when the only psychotic or psychotic-coded characters you write are angry and violent, even when the situation doesn’t call for it, then there’s a problem. When you want to write a schizophrenic character, but only in a situation where they’re going on a killing spree, there’s a problem.

Studies have shown that no substantial link exists between psychosis and violence. There is a small association, but I think it would be reasonable to say this is partially because of the stigma surrounding psychosis and various other overlapping factors; no violence or crime exists in a vacuum. In addition, though I can’t find any exact statistics on this, psychotic people are susceptible to being victims of violence (likely because of this very stereotype).

On this note, don’t use mental hospitals as a setting for horror, especially if you plan on depicting the mentally ill patients there as antagonistic and unhinged. As mentioned earlier, institutionalization is a huge trigger for many psychotic people. True, psychiatric hospitals have definitely served as a source of trauma and pain for many in the past, but mentally ill and neurodivergent people have been (and are) the victims in those situations.

Also, don’t do the “what if it was all a delusion” thing. I know this is most common in ~edgy~ theories about children’s series, but… yikes.

In the same vein that you should avoid depictions of psychotic people that are ripped straight from a bad horror movie, don’t push it too far into comedy either. You’ve heard “psych ward” jokes, you’ve seen “I put the hot in psychotic” jokes (a supposedly humorous instance of that psychotic as a negative descriptor thing), you’ve heard people say “I have anxiety/depression, but I’m not crazy!”

Even other mentally ill and neurodivergent people constantly throw us under the bus, as can be seen in that last one. We’re the butt of plenty of jokes—we see things that aren’t there, we talk to ourselves, we believe things that are just so wacky you can’t believe anyone would think that way. (Even when we don’t.)

If you have to write another character laughing at a psychotic character for their symptoms, then have it swiftly criticized in the text, and try not to imply the reader should find psychosis funny either. Treat psychotic characters’ symptoms with sympathy and understanding, not ridicule.

Psychotic people literally cannot help our delusions/hallucinations/other symptoms. If something we think/say seems “crazy” to you, chances are it does to us as well.

(We’re talking about portraying psychosis in fiction, but this applies to real-life treatment of psychotic people, too!)

Also, I’d like to note—all of this is about the way unpsychotic people view psychotic people. If you see a psychotic person laughing at themself or viewing their symptoms as scary, then that is not an invitation for you to laugh along or go beyond symptoms and think the person is scary for being psychotic. That’s the thing about gallows humor; you have to be the one on the gallows.

Moving on! In romance, there is often a presumption that love can cure psychosis. This is false. No matter how much you love (whether romantically or platonically) and want to help a psychotic person, that alone will not “heal” their psychosis. Please do not depict a psychotic person having to be cured to be happy or in love. It doesn’t work that way.

This doesn’t mean you should stray away from romance in general—I personally would definitely like to see more portrayals of psychotic people being loved and supported, especially in romantic relationships. I’d prefer it not be in spite of their psychosis, either; it would be weird if someone loved a person because of their psychosis, but I don’t think you can really love someone whom you disregard such a large part of either.

Point-blank: Psychotic people are worthy of love and affection, and I think this should show in media as well.

In relation to relationships, I’d also strongly advise steering away from writing family members and friends who see someone’s psychosis as harder on them than for the psychotic person, unless you want to explicitly disavow this behavior. Sure, it probably is difficult for other people to witness my psychotic symptoms. But it’s harder for me to have them.

I’m not sure if this is a widely-held belief, but some people also seem to think psychosis is less common than it is. Psychotic people are all around you, and if you read that as a threat or anything like that, you might need to do some self-evaluating. We exist, online and in person, and we can see and read and hear the things you say about us!

Specifically: By the NIMH’s statistics, roughly 3% of people (3 out of every 100) in the United States will experience psychosis at some point in their lives. Around 100,000 people experience their first episode a year.

This also means that it’s possible unpsychotic people reading this will end up developing a form of psychosis at some point in your life as well. Yes, even without a genetic basis; yes, even as a full-grown adult (see how common psychosis is in neurodegenerative disorders). Now this one is intended as a threat (/hj).

Also, you can’t always tell who is psychotic and who is not. I imagine there are a lot of people who wouldn’t know I’m psychotic without me explicitly saying so. Set aside any notions you might have of being able to identify psychotic people, because they will definitely influence how you might go into writing a psychotic character, and they will definitely end up pissing off a psychotic person in your life. Because… you probably know at least one!

People often regard psychosis as a worst-case scenario—which, again, is something that occurs even by people and in works that uplift mental health in general (something I’ve mentioned before is The Bright Sessions, in which a telepath is misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and has an “I’m not crazy!” outburst). I’ve talked about treatment already, but I just thought I’d say this: Psychosis is not a death sentence nor a “fate worse than death.” It may be difficult for unpsychotic people to understand and handle; it is harder to live with. But being psychotic is not an inherently bad thing, and psychotic people should not be expected to act like our lives are constantly awful and hopeless on account of stigma.

I think that’s all I have to say, so thank you so much for reading, especially if you’re not psychotic! I hope you’ve learned something from this, and once again, fellow psychotic people are more than welcome to add on more information if they’re willing.

[avpdpunpun]

its weird having symptoms that seemingly contradict at first. like i really rarely have interest in other people’s lives and i’m just not able to care about them much, but at the same time, i still desperately need their approval and am scared of what they think of me and what they might do behind my back.

it’s a lot more difficult to build relationships that you paradoxically need when you’re not naturally inclined to do the things that are considered the building blocks of them, (e.g, message people frequently, engage emotionally, etc) 

[your-democracy-is-fucked]

The difference.

So these are the differences I see in elliot and MM who I do thinks name is actually Elliot. Like how mr robots name is ‘mr robot’ because that’s what Elliot calls him but he never corrects Krista or anyone so it’s assumed that’s his name. So I think MMs name to his is Elliot as well. But that’s a whole other thing. I hope the anon who asked likes this I tried friend.

First: MM

He is much more closed off to touch, to people, to everyone. He is very very touch sensitive. Because I think MM is a trauma holder so he remembers the feeling of what their dad did. So being touched is just a reminder.

MM is much more cynical about the world. I don’t think he sees much good in it at all. I think he sees small pockets of decency but it’s rare.

He needs Krista. Needs her more then anyone else because she is his one place where he can say and feel anything. Because Krista is a therapist it’s what she does. She helps. And Mm sees Elliot and himself in her. As he says in the first season. “I want a way out of loneliness just like you”

MM is lonely, he doesn’t have friends, he has people who are elliots friends, but not really his. We see that with how he acts with Angela, and the small bits we get of how they were before he joined allsafe. And Mm is just slightly off on what they all remember.

MM has Schizoid personality disorder it’s in the way he acts, his lack of emotional range, him not really getting signals of people.

MM is different. But not so different it’s noticeable. It’s just like someone mentally moved the couch 1 inch to the left and now everyone is ramming into it.

Now. Core Elliot.

He I think, from the small scene we saw of him, the one on Halloween when Mm first came to be. I think he was a sort of normal cyber security guy.

He talked about how much the govt sucked, he maybe had an Instagram to follow on what Darlene and Angela were doing but he never posted.

He had a Facebook but he deleted it after he realized how dumb it was. He was normal.

He smoked a lot of weed to keep himself calm, he’s like Mm but way more chill. He seemed to have a strained sort of relationship with Darlene but not one so bad it was weird.

He was normal. Well as normal as he could be. He questioned if Darlene was still having panic attacks so it’s implied he probably has them. Not knowing the reason but having the feelings of it.

I think Elliot core is much more open to sex, he’s not a tinder guy but he’d hook up with someone. The rare one time a year he wanted to go out.

He loves Angela, like he loved her through and through. And Mm took that small part of Elliot and kept it I think.

Core Elliot was for all things a normalish computer hacker. He hacked his friends and anyone he wanted. He wasn’t all about world domination and saving the masses but he would talk about it.

I think before the event that brought MM to the world I think Elliot was not normal, but he faded into the background he didn’t want to be seen he liked his work as a white hat and that was that.

He maybe talked to a few people but he was content with his invisible status.

I think after the events of season 4 it took him longer to process that he was in control, and now is in therapy to understand what happened to him, the year he was gone.

He works on his relationship with darlene, and they become close, like they were when it was MM at the hold.

It’s hard, it’s not easy, but Darlene is his anchor to helping him through things.

I think Elliot, finds someone, maybe in a group therapy that his therapist suggests to help him branch out and talk to more people in a safe environment.

And over time they sort of help each other. Maybe Elliot and this person get married years and years down the line maybe they don’t. But I think Elliot tries to be better, to become himself again.

But MM, Mr robot, young him and mother are always there in case he needs them. When something is a little too much and none of his steps from therapy work. He has them. And he learns to be okay with that.

Core Elliot is a lot like MM but small differences, small things that are noticeable to Darlene and others now.

Core Elliot is like MM but more open to certain things that MM wasn’t. Like touch, Elliot doesn’t like to be touched but he doesn’t always shove people away, relationships, he can see the good in some people. Still hates the corruption but he knows not everyone is evil.

Core Elliot is and was just a normal, awkward, mentally ill hacker, socially awkward and not good with people per say, but he tried at times.

In a way I think he sees he needed MM, even if he doesn’t know why just yet, he knows he needed MM to help him. Just like how Mr robot was always in his corner to make sure no one fucked with him.

Core Elliot and MM are vastly different but also eerily similar. MM is all of elliots inner traits heightened and forced to the surface.

They both need the other.

So I hope this is okay on what you wanted anon. I tried my best because in my opinion MM and Elliot are vastly different but eerily similar because MM is just all of elliots inner traits brought to the surface. MM is all the traits Elliot core had to mask to seem normal in the real world.

[aaknopf]

Today we present a preview of a major new biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, coming this fall. Through committed investigative scholarship, Heather Clark is able to offer the most extensively researched and nuanced view yet of a poet whose influence grows with each new generation of readers. Clark is the first biographer to draw upon all of Plath's surviving letters, including fourteen newly discovered letters Plath sent to her psychiatrist in 1961-63, and to draw extensively on her unpublished diaries, calendars, and poetry manuscripts. She is also the first to have had full, unfettered access to Ted Hughes's unpublished diaries and poetry manuscripts, allowing her to present a balanced and humane view of this remarkable creative marriage (and its unravelling) from both sides. She is able to present significant new findings about Plath's whereabouts and her state of health on the weekend leading up to her death. With these and many other "firsts," Clark's approach to Plath is to chart the course of this brilliant poet's development, highlighting her literary and intellectual growth rather than her undoing. Here, we offer a passage from Clark's prologue to the biography, followed by lines from one of Plath's celebrated "bee poems."

from Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

The Oxford professor Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s biographer, has written, “Women writers whose lives involved abuse, mental-illness, self-harm, suicide, have often been treated, biographically, as victims or psychological case-histories first and as professional writers second.” This is especially true of Sylvia Plath, who has become cultural shorthand for female hysteria. When we see a female character reading The Bell Jar in a movie, we know she will make trouble. As the critic Maggie Nelson reminds us, “to be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing.” Nelson reminds us, too, that a woman who explores depression in her art isn’t perceived as “a shamanistic voyager to the dark side, but a ‘madwoman in the attic,’ an abject spectacle.” Perhaps this is why Woody Allen teased Diane Keaton for reading Plath’s seminal collection Ariel in Annie Hall. Or why, in the 1980s, a prominent reviewer cracked his favorite Plath joke as he reviewed Plath’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Collected Poems: “ ‘Why did SP cross the road?’ ‘To be struck by an oncoming vehicle.’ ” Male writers who kill themselves are rarely subject to such black humor: there are no dinner-party jokes about David Foster Wallace.

Since her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become a paradoxical symbol of female power and helplessness whose life has been subsumed by her afterlife. Caught in the limbo between icon and cliché, she has been mythologized and pathologized in movies, television, and biographies as a high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death. These distortions gained momentum in the 1960s when Ariel was published. Most reviewers didn’t know what to make of the burning, pulsating metaphors in poems like “Lady Lazarus” or the chilly imagery of “Edge.” Time called the book a “jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape.” The Washington Post dubbed Plath a “snake lady of misery” in an article entitled “The Cult of Plath.” Robert Lowell, in his introduction to Ariel, characterized Plath as Medea, hurtling toward her own destruction.

Recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of Plath as a master of performance and irony. Yet the critical work done on Plath has not sufficiently altered her popular, clichéd image as the Marilyn Monroe of the literati. Melodramatic portraits of Plath as a crazed poetic priestess are still with us. Her most recent biographer called her “a sorceress who had the power to attract men with a flash of her intense eyes, a tortured soul whose only destiny was death by her own hand.” He wrote that she “aspired to transform herself into a psychotic deity.” These caricatures have calcified over time into the popular, reductive version of Sylvia Plath we all know: the suicidal writer of The Bell Jar whose cultish devotees are black-clad young women. (“Sylvia Plath: The Muse of Teen Angst,” reads the title of a 2003 article in Psychology Today.) Plath thought herself a different kind of “sorceress”: “I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect,” she wrote her friend Mel Woody in July 1954.

Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote of Sylvia Plath, “when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her own plot.” Yet to suggest that Plath’s suicide was some sort of grand finale only perpetuates the Plath myth that simplifies our understanding of her work and her life. Sylvia Plath was one of the most highly educated women of her generation, an academic superstar and perennial prizewinner. Even after a suicide attempt and several months at McLean Hospital, she still managed to graduate from Smith College summa cum laude. She was accepted to graduate programs in English at Columbia, Oxford, and Radcliffe and won a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge, where she graduated with high honors. She was so brilliant that Smith asked her to return to teach in their English department without a PhD. Her mastery of English literature’s past and present intimidated her students and even her fellow poets. In Robert Lowell’s 1959 creative writing seminar, Plath’s peers remembered how easily she picked up on obscure literary allusions. “ ‘It reminds me of Empson,’ Sylvia would say . . . ‘It reminds me of Herbert.’ ‘Perhaps the early Marianne Moore?’ ” Later, Plath made small talk with T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender at London cocktail parties, where she was the model of wit and decorum.

Very few friends realized that she struggled with depression, which revealed itself episodically. In college, she aced her exams, drank in moderation, dressed sharply, and dated men from Yale and Amherst. She struck most as the proverbial golden girl. But when severe depression struck, she saw no way out. In 1953, a depressive episode led to botched electroshock therapy sessions at a notorious asylum. Plath told her friend Ellie Friedman that she had been led to the shock room and “electrocuted.” “She told me that it was like being murdered, it was the most horrific thing in the world for her. She said, ‘If this should ever happen to me again, I will kill myself.’ ” Plath attempted suicide rather than endure further tortures.

In 1963, the stressors were different. A looming divorce, single motherhood, loneliness, illness, and a brutally cold winter fueled the final depression that would take her life. Plath had been a victim of psychiatric mismanagement and negligence at age twenty, and she was terrified of depression’s “cures,” as she wrote in her last letter to her psychiatrist—shock treatment, insulin injections, institutionalization, “a mental hospital, lobotomies.” It is no accident that Plath killed herself on the day she was supposed to enter a British psychiatric ward.

Sylvia Plath did not think of herself as a depressive. She considered herself strong, passionate, intelligent, determined, and brave, like a character in a D. H. Lawrence novel. She was tough-minded and filled her journal with exhortations to work harder—evidence, others have said, of her pathological, neurotic perfectionism. Another interpretation is that she was—like many male writers—simply ambitious, eager to make her mark on the world. She knew that depression was her greatest adversary, the one thing that could hold her back. She distrusted psychiatry—especially male psychiatrists—and tried to understand her own depression intellectually through the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Erich Fromm, and others. Self-medication, for Plath, meant analyzing the idea of a schizoid self in her honors thesis on The Brothers Karamazov.

Bitter experience taught her how to accommodate depression—exploit it, even—in her art. “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, or recreate it,” she wrote in her journal. The remark sounds trite, but her writing on depression was profound. Her own immigrant family background and experience at McLean gave her insight into the lives of the outcast. Plath would fill her late work, sometimes controversially, with the disenfranchised—women, the mentally ill, refugees, political dissidents, Jews, prisoners, divorcées, mothers. As she matured, she became more determined to speak out on their behalf. In The Bell Jar, one of the greatest protest novels of the twentieth century, she probed the link between insanity and repression. Like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the novel exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even the “best minds” of a generation crazy. Are you really sick, Plath asks, or has your society made you so? She never romanticized depression and death; she did not swoon into darkness. Rather, she delineated the cold, blank atmospherics of depression, without flinching. Plath’s ability to resurface after her depressive episodes gave her courage to explore, as Ted Hughes put it, “psychological depth, very lucidly focused and lit.” The themes of rebirth and renewal are as central to her poems as depression, rage, and destruction.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asked in his poem “Harlem.” Did it “crust and sugar over—/ like a syrupy sweet?” For most women of Plath’s generation, it did. But Plath was determined to follow her literary vocation. She dreaded the condescending label of “lady poet,” and she had no intention of remaining unmarried and childless like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. She wanted to be a wife, mother, and poet—a “triple-threat woman,” as she put it to a friend. These spheres hardly ever overlapped in the sexist era in which she was trapped, but for a time, she achieved all three goals.

They thought death was worth it, but I Have a self to recover, a queen. Is she dead, is she sleeping? Where has she been, With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

Now she is flying More terrible than she ever was, red Scar in the sky, red comet Over the engine that killed her— The mausoleum, the wax house.

from “Stings” by Sylvia Plath

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[theschizoidblog]

Anger Outbursts

Blog 3: 11/07/2020

I want to start this particular blog post by saying that what I am about to describe today, might not be very common in schizoids. Maybe it’s not schizoid at all. Maybe it’s just me. Schizoids have what I’ve seen described as “flat affect” – as in that they show very little emotions. However, during my lifetime, I’ve had a few anger outbursts. These might be PTSD related in some cases. PTSD *is* common in schizoids. These attacks have been happening at an increasing rate in my lifetime. Hardly at all before the age of 30, but then more and more after that age until I decided it was one of the reasons to seek therapy.

The outbursts are usually incredibly brief. Such an outburst only lasts a few minutes, sometimes just a matter of seconds, but the spike of adrenaline often affects me for a few days, and afterwards, I’m a sobbing mess of guilt and other negative emotions for often hours in a row, and I’m exhausted as hell.

I will describe the triggers and my own reaction and what the experience is like. Sometimes I call it an anger outburst, but it could also be a form of anxiety attack or adrenaline attack or panic attack. I honestly don’t know the correct, professional distinction between all of them.

When it happens, my fight or flight response is triggered, and I usually choose “fight”. I’m not sure if I never choose flight, or if choosing flight just doesn’t trigger it and thus I’m hardly aware I even made a choice afterwards.

I really don’t know what the correct label is for my own “attacks”, but if after reading this blog, you feel like you know, then don’t hesitate to reply, send me an ask or reach out to me on facebook.

An overview of outbursts

Very often, my outbursts are work-related.

The very first time I had it was when I was about 16 years old. I had forgotten my homework, something which did happen a lot. I was a good student, but forgetful. I always forgot a book, sometimes I did forget to do homework too, but in this case, I’d done my homework but left the book at home. When the teacher asked, I was ashamed to say I’d forgotten it at home, but I said it. Another girl in my class, someone who I always found disrespectful towards me (and a bitch), was like “she probably didn’t do it!” – even though it was only the first thing she said to me that day, I decided it would also be the last thing she said to me that day. She said it in such a taunting manner that I barked back at her: “I DID DO IT!”

Now, for me to bark was rare. I was usually quiet, friendly and never looking for a fight. I dodge confrontation at all times. I was sooner a mediator or observer in the classroom than a fighter. But in this case, the fight or flight response got triggered, my adrenaline rose up, and I decided to stand up for the truth, and thus I shouted back in her face. She was visibly startled (when you never respond that way and know how to carry volume and fierceness in your tone, it lands) and she backed off immediately with an apology.

The teacher (who really had nothing against me, I was a good student) didn’t mention it either and just let me be for that hour while I cried where I sat.

I was a mess for the rest of the day. The first hour I sat in class crying and shaking, completely confused by what I’d done. Later that day I tried to keep up the pretense I was fine, but I was exhausted.

I don’t think it happened for another ten years afterwards, until as a 26-year-old, something very similar happened at work. I don’t know what the precise cause was, but a colleague of mine was a bit of a sneaky bitch, always gossiping behind everyone’s back. Calling her a bully might be an overstatement, but she was not a great person. She had two faces and I did not trust her. She said something that struck a nerve, fight or flight response was triggered, I chose fight and spoke back to her, then I ran out of the room, slamming the door. Then the next hour or so I spent on the toilet, crying. Very adult. Very professional. In what I call the “discharge”, after the adrenaline had left my body in the rage of anger, there was so much guilt and confusion I could not face anyone.

Skip another few years. A different situation. Once again at work. I do a helpdesk job, but it’s high-demand. We are expected to be flexible, answer phones, mails, social media, in various languages, about various subjects, always creating tickets and being productive. In the morning as I drove to my work place, I saw a small van of the internet company outside. My first thought was: “they better not fuck up our internet connection today, we’re behind on tickets.” An hour later, the internet goes down. I can’t do my job. There’s pressure on us to perform, and I get so angry at the thought that there was no problem but that those two idiots of the internet company outside managed to ruin our internet… While our leads ask us to switch to hotspots, my VPN connection decides not to work along, and I get so frustrated by this ridiculous problem that it triggers another outburst and I have to hide in the toilet in order to sob out my frustration.

Another outburst, one from over a year ago. I’m at work. It’s been busy as hell. I’ve been working overtime. We’re asked to fill in a self-evaluation. It’s a bit of work, but I’m glad to do it, I find it very important to do. So I do it after my time. So it’s 5 o clock and while others are going home, I’m still behind my desk, filling in the evaluation so I can take my time for it. After thirty minutes I’m done and I click “next” – but the site gives an error as though nothing has been saved. In no time at all, the fight or flight response is triggered, I take my keyboard in my hands and smash it down onto my table. I break its tiny fragile legs. A few meters away from me two colleagues were talking and they look at me like “wtf?” – I mutter an apology and sit there shaking, trying not to cry. (In the end, my evaluation got saved correctly, which makes it even worse, the site just gave a weird error after saving. I did not have to do it again.)

Something else which triggered a really bad episode was when I was at home, not at work for a change, and I was in a fandom discord. I can’t remember the exact cause, but mods were angry with me for a specific discussion in which I had not held back. I wanted to defend myself, but they denied me the opportunity to do so and gave me a strict warning. Without a means to stand up for myself or express my own emotions in a safe way, I exploded in anger, then in tears, just behind my computer, shaking, being a mess, eventually feeling exhausted. (This was a PTSD trigger for me, which I recognize as related to PTSD I got at the age of 21.)

This week I had another explosion.

I’ve been working on a new project with a few others of my team. Every week we get a few days to work on the project, each a few days. Last week I did two days, and this week I would be doing three days of work on the project. There’s a ton of work to tackle, so I planned it out and had planned out all three days. The third day, I start working in the morning (at home), with a clear vision in my mind of what I’m going to do that day so that everything is done before my colleague needs to continue the day after.

I’m at it for about ten minutes when I hear from the colleague that she gets to do the project that day, instead of me. She gets to do it for the rest of the week. My brain just short-circuits for a moment. I’m angry as hell.

In this case, it could be compared to a balloon that got inflated to a very big size, but did not pop immediately. Instead there’s a tiny hole of air and it’s deflating. In the minutes while I’m super-angry, I finish some of the stuff I must finish, mails that I had to send out and had already planned the day before. I use the adrenaline boost as a wave to do as much as I can in as short a time as I can. I take the energy from that moment and use it to be productive for the few minutes that I know it lasts.

I simultaneously express my anger about changing the shift on such short notice with the one responsible for this change. (via chat) I don’t blame her personally, but I voice that it affects me a great deal when she makes such changes without me knowing a day in advance. (While I express this anger I remain professional at the same time.) But slowly, the adrenaline wave is ending. A few minutes later, it’s over, my project work is done, and I’m a sobbing mess, unable to do my job of answering the phone while helping customers with their questions.

Luckily, I have a few great colleagues and team leads who know I’m in therapy for this reason, who also know I’m a schizoid, who know that I’m dealing with PTSD and who also know that I’m currently in EMDR treatment, which might cause things to trigger me more easily. So I just have to type to one: “having an attack”, and a few minutes later she’s calling me, and by then the anger is over and it’s a sobbing attack, and I explain through my sniffles and tears that I exploded, over what I exploded, and she’s immediately like: “Okay, what do you need to do right now in order to get over it?”

I state that it’s very exhausting, and that sleeping it off might be good. She agrees. It’s about 9 o clock, I go back to bed, and at 1 PM I am back at work, answering the phone, still exhausted, but at least able to answer the phone in a composed way again. I quit at 5 PM and by 6 PM I’m in bed again, sleeping. My productivity level in the afternoon was low, but at least I contributed in some way.

The Thoughts That Come With The Exhaustion

I feel most of these outbursts in my body for two days. The first day it’s like I just ran a marathon in a period of 3 minutes or so. The second day it’s like I ran a marathon the day before. :-P It’s just very tiring to have these outbursts. It drains my energy and my emotions.

At first there is anger, but almost at the same time there’s also guilt. There’s sadness and defeat. I remember the thought process of my last outburst very well, since it was only a few days ago. It was something along these lines:

“Schizoids aren’t ambitious people. You know this, but you also know that if you want to get your own place, not just rent it, you need to earn more. So you have to prove yourself. You have to work harder. You have to be more sociable. And you’ve been trying just that. This project is a way for you to prove you can tackle important work and maybe that might earn you a promotion in the future. That’s part of why you’ve been doing so much overtime for this project. And it’s a nice project. You like the project. But now that you’re having this attack, you’re only proving that you’re weak. You’re proving that you’re unstable. You’re proving that you need to remain at the lowest possible rank in this company because you can’t be given responsibility with this attitude. Not that you want to be a lead, but how can you be in charge of this project or any other in any way with these outbursts? What if you’d been doing a presentation to the CEO of the company about the project and you had such an outburst? What if he saw that? Not only would he want you gone, it would reflect badly on your coworkers and the team leads that are giving you this opportunity. They’re being patient with you, but it can’t last. At some point, they’ll have had it with you and they’ll see that they can only use you at the lowest possible responsibility, in a job where you’re easily replaced if you have an outburst. They’re good people, but capitalism doesn’t work on charity. In the end it’s about profit and you need to make sure you’re keeping up with the rest. You can still keep up with the rest, but you can’t prove to be more, so you’ll be stuck at the low-level income jobs for the rest of your life. Forget the ambition. It’s not real ambition. You have no ambition. This is why schizoids aren’t ambitious: because it’s defeating to always end up back at the low-level entrance jobs. Most schizoids don’t have jobs for longer than a few years, you’ve proven that time and time again before you landed this job. None of your jobs lasted very long. That’s why we forsake ambition and learn to just do our damn, miserable jobs. We can’t deal with the stress of climbing up the ranks. We can’t deal with the competition because we hate confrontation. So we just take a step back if someone louder and more aggressive says they want the job. Over and over again. No matter our talents. No matter if we have the capacity to out-think and out-work them on our best days. We can’t deal with the confrontation. We have no healthy way to deal with confrontation because we’re damaged in some way. We’re terrified of bad environments. We don’t want our work place to turn bad, so we always take a step back. Give up everything for the good of the group. To keep the peace. Just like how you did as a child. It’s the only thing you know how to do. To try and keep the peace. At the expense of your own happiness. So you bury it, deeper and deeper. What is ambition? You don’t know ambition. What do you want? You don’t know what you want. Or you think you don’t know, because wanting something might mean fighting for it, and fights are bad. Fights make it not worth it. So you remain miserable. Maybe someone else said they wanted to do the job. Maybe that’s why you were taken off the task. You made a mistake the day before. You admitted to making a mistake in the project. That’s why you’re not allowed to do the project today. They’re mad at you. They’re just tolerating you to do it because they need more people to do that work. Make sure you will not get replaced. You like this project. You can’t argue about it. Just be glad you’re back on the project next week. It’s a very busy time right now and you’re letting them down, so make sure that you’re up and running again as soon as you can. You can not afford to be a schizoid without a job. Certainly not during a pandemic. You can deal with people better than most. You just don’t like it when they mess up your schedule without your consent. But that’s going to happen more often in the future so how on earth are you going to deal with it? You have no idea how to deal with it. You’re going to short-circuit again. You don’t know how to prevent it. Maybe EMDR will help. Maybe it will only make it worse. The therapist said it would be worse for a while. But is this linked to your first EMDR session of a few weeks ago? Nothing you discussed in your last EMDR session resembled this situation, so why would EMDR be triggering this now? The therapist said you would get more triggers, but is this one? You shouldn’t blame EMDR. It’s probably not EMDR, it’s just an anger outburst like you’ve had before. Just because you didn’t want it to happen, doesn’t mean it stays away. You knew this could happen. Some colleagues are probably so disappointed in you right now. Some might be wondering where you are, they need you on the phone, it’s busy. You need to rest, you need to be able to answer phones again in the afternoon, you can’t do that in your current state. Think of something else, don’t allow yourself to ruminate about it. It’s not in your control. Not yet at least. Maybe you’ll learn to control it. You’re never going to control it this way. How old are you? You’re going to be dead before you control it. You’ve got depression too. Why do you even care about getting better? Just give up already. You’ve got depression so you shouldn’t be fighting for anything. Certainly not for promotion or approval. You don’t have the energy for that or the capacity to take any hits, so why do you bother? Maybe you should have gone to your safe space, like you were taught for the EMDR sessions? But this was not EMDR related, was it? Besides, it happened too fast. You needed to send those mails, when would you have had time to go to your safe space? You can’t send mails AND go to your safe space at the same time. You needed to ride the wave of adrenaline to get the last bit of work squeezed out of you. You needed to get the word out you were having an attack, so they knew why you weren’t on the phone. You did well enough, you finished sending the mails, transferring the project in a decent way, and you sent them the message you were having an attack. That’s something. That’s all you could have done, you did well. Does the safe space help now? Who are you kidding, you’re too exhausted to go to your safe space right now. You can hardly focus on one emotion or thought, that’s how tired you are, you can’t go to your safe space. That requires energy and focus. You have none right now. What’s it going to help, you need to rest now. Think of something else. Think of something fictional. Try to sleep.”

Harmful Thought Patterns

There are a lot of harmful thought patterns I need to break. Any psychologist could probably find several out of the thought process above. According to my own psychologist, I need to stop telling myself “I’m weak” – it’s a lie about myself that I believe deep in my core. But between knowing what is a wrong thought and between not believing a wrong thought lies a world of difference. I still believe that thought. It’s one of the things we’ll be working on, though I have no freaking clue how we’re going to break that thought since it’s one of my core beliefs.

There is some paranoia too. I don’t have the Paranoid Personality Disorder, but I can have paranoid thoughts during those moments of great sadness and guilt. But usually those thoughts are only there in moments of stress and I can recognize them afterwards, and most of the times at the exact moment as I’m having them as a paranoid thought. For example, thinking they’re looking for reasons to fire me, thinking they’re punishing me for making a mistake, I know that’s not the case. It’s a fear I have that they would do those things, but I know that that is not what they did, that’s not reality. That’s just a bad thought process that pops up after an attack. It adds to the guilt and sadness. It’s not something that I think during a regular day, since I usually don’t feed any emotions.

Not every thought that comes after an attack is a lie. I do believe there’s a lot of truth in my thoughts as well. There is self-analysis in there that is not completely wrong. I get wiser as I age and with the schizoid label also come new ways to look upon myself and my thoughts and history. I am starting to understand better why I am not ambitious. I am starting to understand why I avoid confrontation.

And I think the attack, in part, is triggered by confrontation. When you go back to the part where I describe all the past triggers I remember, it were always moments of confrontation in one way or another. I just have no idea how to deal with confrontation, hence me having a full meltdown whenever I force myself to stand up for myself.

I’m so not used to standing up for myself, that the exact moment I say to myself: “No, you NEED to say what you think about this NOW, you can not just pretend nothing happened” is when I have the outburst with all the unpleasant adrenaline and tears that follow. My communication towards the other party seems to be correct though. I don’t think anything was wrong with the chat I sent my colleague, or when I tell a bitch to back off - I think it’s assertive. But having a breakdown every time you’re assertive, isn’t normal. That’s the issue. 

Had I decided not to confront my colleagues about how unpleasant it was to me that they changed my schedule, I might not have had the outburst, I think. (I honestly don’t know.) There’s the tiniest moment before the outburst, the fight or flight moment, where I need to make the choice. And it is a choice that I can make. I have agency in that moment. I can choose what my choice is, but I can not really choose the effect that comes with either option.

If I choose to flee, I’ll be relatively fine. Maybe a little shaken. If I do that, it probably adds another argument to the “you are weak”-narrative in my mind.

If I fight, there’s a possibility I end up at war with myself. In my thought process, I might be entering a war with everyone else. That’s usually not the case. People usually back off. (At least for a while.) But in my thought process, if I choose “fight”, it’s like I’m going to war. In that way, I do think that there’s a big link between my outbursts and some form of PTSD. I don’t see it clearly just yet, but I think I’m getting closer to a breakthrough of what it is.

A Link to Autism

I did not get diagnosed with autism. (Though we did the test!) However, the outbursts often seem autistic in some ways to me. Maybe people with autism experience it in a very similar way. Maybe they don’t and I’m just projecting.

(Just to clarify – before “autism” existed, people with autism all got the “schizoid” label. There are a lot of resemblances between the two. People with autism mostly distinguish themselves from a schizoid like me by not having the same social skills. Schizoids seem to have the skills more naturally while for people with autism it’s usually a skill they have to work on, like maths or languages is to neurotypicals. Or maybe it would be a better comparison to say it’s like they have dyscalculia while the rest of the world can do maths without much of a problem, but apply that comparison to how we as humans learn social situations. Another difference: Schizoids don’t want company, people with autism often do, but don’t know how to go about it. They both come across as asocial a lot of the time, hence some of the overlap between the two labels.)

But if you shorten what happened, if you say: “Her schedule changed last minute, and she exploded” or “A classmate insulted her, and she exploded” – that would seem autistic to some. A change of plans can really ruin the day of a person with autism since they prefer structure. People with autism can also really explode at bullies because they don’t know how to deal with them.

So if you shorten my trigger and my “explosion”, I think an outsider would say: “Oh that has to be autism. She can’t deal with change. She can’t deal with social situations.” My type of explosion is something that people with autism go through as well sometimes.

Sometimes it does make me doubt if it’s not autism for a part, but I suppose I should follow the opinion of my psychologist, and I do have to state that I don’t have a lot of difficulty reading social situations. I’m very sensitive to some situations even, feeling when some people can’t stand each other in a room without even talking to anyone. I think that’s something people with autism often can’t read from the room. I have been called a very good observer by some friends and colleagues in certain situations.

To End It

I’m not sure what else is left to say. Writing this has exhausted me as well, in a way. Going through emotions is hard for a schizoid. We bury them, deep. We don’t do it consciously, we just do it. Bringing it back to write about it, did bring a few of the emotions back. I did shed a few tears while writing this. (I’m not saying this for pity, by the way, just as an FYI to my state of mind while reliving this.)

An anger outburst brings the negative emotions to the surface. Anger (at the cause of the issue), guilt (about getting angry), sadness (about our own state of being), fear (of losing friends/our jobs/respect) are all negative emotions. You don’t want to have these on any day. Most days we don’t have any emotions. But on a day with an anger outburst we experience all of those emotions. In a matter of minutes. In an hour. And then we’re exhausted.

Not all schizoids experience this, and I’m not sure whether to envy those people or to pity them. Envy, because these emotions are all negative. Who needs that negativity in their life? But also pity, because it seems like they’re the only emotions I’m given in this life. Isn’t it sad that some have none at all?

I try to approach it positively and say “at least you have these emotions. If you have the negative ones, maybe the positive ones are hidden inside you as well. You just need to find the correct trigger to bring them out.”

Some schizoids say they don’t want to experience any emotions. I don’t think I’m one of them. I’d rather have a day without emotions than with only negative emotions, but I’d like to go back to positive emotions one day. I don’t want to fake being happy at a party, as I usually do. 

And if I can’t have emotions, then all that’s left is achievement in life. To make value in my life, to accrue wealth or status or experience. I don’t mind dying poor as long as I’m not miserable. But imagine dying miserable and weak and poor, that sucks. I don’t want that.

Take care, and remember, if you have anything to share, your own wisdom or your own experience, my askbox is always open.

[actuallyschizoid]

can schizoid be passionate about something ?

Sure, why not? 

Nothing really stops schizoids from being passionate. You can read in recent post of mine that initially, as kids, most schizoids are, in fact, more emotional compared to peers. 

It’s just that it tends to flatten until it’s nearly gone because those well developed emotions don’t stand a chance in a world with the majority of people being the mess they are. 

But anyway, even schizoids sometimes have something they’re interested in — it just tends to be things most people don’t find much interest in. Like science of whatever rare kind, some old unpopular game, or maybe creativity that results in stuff that no one will ever see. Could be something common as well, though.

Whatever it is, schizoids sometimes are perfectly capable of being passionate about it. In their own way. Thing is, it all depends on definition of “passionate”. Which is a good deal subjective. 

How passionate? What do you compare it to? Is being able to kick your own butt out of the bed once a month to return to a thing you kinda liked but maybe not but enough to kick your butt out of bed sometimes can be considered “passionate”? xD

Well, I’d say it can. I personally sometimes can snap into this mode where I can spend a few days in a row working on some useless project (obviously the one that no one would pay me for), just because I had an idea. Then eventually it turns into another mode where I can’t get myself to return to it (or anything productive at all) for months. 

But there are also schizoids who have no issue being that Doctor Who-ish level of passionate. And that’s a perfectly fine form of schizoid as well. Perhaps with the lack of depression and some better grasp on our weird self there’d be much more of those schizoids who aren’t stuck in constant apathy being unable to do anything.