#clearly experienced psychosis but it wasn't something i registered at the time cuz i just assumed

[albatris]

Sorry in advance for the potentially dumb question, but: do you suffer from psychosis/schizophrenia? I’ve seen you reblog a lot of posts about it, of course, but i was curious. Also, if its not too personal, if you do, how much does it impact your writing/the weirdness glitchiness factor?

Not a dumb question at all, you’re all good!

So this is kinda…….. not something I’ve spoken about in a great amount of detail or specifics on this blog? And talking about it directly is actually kinda weird! I wasn’t expecting this to feel weird, but it totally does! So please excuse how long this answer took me hahahahaha

So I mean YEAH psychosis is a thing that I possess, this is a thing that resides inside my brain and occasionally outside of it………. I’m not schizophrenic, I’m more in the schizotypal realm of things, which is like….. I mean, that’s a label that best encompasses my experiences and so far it’s the only label that’s been vaguely and tentatively applied to me that’s ever really made me go “oh hey yeah that would actually explain a whole fucking lot” but like. Bits of it are still kinda wonky. Mental health is wonky, I think, generally speaking…………….

I was gonna talk a bit here about my specific experiences but, like, I really had no idea where to start with those and I don’t actually know how relevant it’d be to this question aside from being vaguely tangential in terms of psychosis………… so uhhhh I’m gonna jump ahead and talk WRITING which is WAY more in my comfort zone apparently

and oh my god this was so many words, I’m so sorry in advance, I have no idea if any of this is actually like………… super interesting? But I enjoyed the opportunity to talk about it so cheers for that! I think!

(and I’m sorry if you were expecting like………… a really short sharp sweet answer, I don’t really deal in shorts or sharps or sweets, I mostly deal in, uh………. rambling)

Rest of this post, under the cut, which I hope actually works on mobile, for the sake of your dashboards - 

So this message was an adventure for me into how the questions “How does it affect your writing?” and “How does it affect the glitchiness/horror factor?” are actually two entirely separate things. I mean, they’re two separate things because I’m assuming by “glitchiness factor” you’re thinking specifically of the stuff in my recent ATDAO posts about body horror and the unreality? In which case………… let me get to that in a moment

And since this post got super long, I’m going to start with my extremely short summed-up answer, and then elaborate on it………

In terms of how it affects my writing? In lots of direct ways!

In terms of how it affects the glitchiness and horror aspects? In some weird roundabout ways! It’s not where the horror stems from, but it’s where the response to the horror stems from and where a lot of my descriptive choices stem from! It’s not the horror, but it’s kind of the lens through which I explore the horror!

AND NOW HERE WE GO………… WORDS AHOY

So in terms of how it affects my writing, generally speaking

boring straightforward answer first:

It’s something that crops up in a super literal sense, just in that I’ve got a fair few characters who are psychotic to some degree or another, and it’s something that plays into how they relate to the world and their specific character voice and how they respond to the situations they find themselves in. 

somewhat irrelevant, it’s, uhhh….. something that I feel interacts with themes in a different sort of way, too. ‘Cause a lot of times there’s, like….. stories about people going on cool magical sci-fi quests, and there’s Stories About Psychotic People, and there’s not an awful lot of overlap between the two unless it’s in the context of “and the whole magical quest was a delusion all along!” which, ew

and for fucking REAL there is so much interesting ground to cover and opportunities for different perspectives and new avenues through which themes can be explored, like, in that overlap of stories. It’s something I wish I saw a lot more of in fiction! Which is another huge driving force in, like, why I write stuff the way I do

and now slightly more interesting:

Worldbuilding! It’s definitely something that plays into worldbuilding and like…. my love of creating stories that are kinda just……. “reality but a little bit to the left” if that makes sense? 

Whether this is something like Undertow, where there’s a degree of magic woven into the fabric of the universe, where things are connected by invisible threads, where I can give opinions to objects and feelings to the weather and the streetlights, where the earth itself has a voice? Or whether it’s something like ATDAO, where reality is coming undone at the seams and the fact that everything is just a little lopsided and haywire is a Mundane Part Of Everyday Life? That’s something I find super cathartic and quite lovely to play around in! I’ve always experienced the world as Just A Little Bit To The Left, and writing was one of the first avenues I found to kinda…. channel and explore and expand on that and put my feelings of strangeness into words?

It’s kinda, like, I like being able to share that kind of vision with others in some sort of way, and not necessarily in a frightening or horrible way, y’know? 

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT TO SAY that anything I write is, like, 100% a direct mirror or my own life and how I see the world lmao. A lot of my writing takes experiences and feelings and little facets of how I experience the world and works them into something that’s often more literal and concrete, or it’ll start out as My Thing and as I’m writing, it sorta blooms into something totally different. But bits of it are in there, sure, although they change shape a lot! And it’s definitely in there with a lot of the general overarching feelings and concepts! Yeah!

One other thing that kinda leads onto my next topic is, uh…… that a lot of how I interpret events and meanings in the world around me can be kind of frightening and threatening, and that’s not reeeaaaally something I want to delve into too much in my writing from a worldbuilding perspective? So generally the parts of ATDAO’s “reality but a little to the left” that start to twist into horror and unreality are things I’ve constructed specifically to serve that purpose, more so than things I’ve pulled directly from my experiences.

AND NOW IN TERMS OF GLITCHY HORROR STUFF HELL YEAH

so again I’m assuming by “glitchiness factor” that’d be all the unreality and all the body horror stuff and weird horror? Which, fuck yeah! Despite my squeamishness when it comes to horror, this is one odd little corner of ATDAO that I’m extremely fond of hahahaha

And, like, initially when I considered this question I was like…. oh, this is not something that really has any of its roots in psychosis or my experiences of mental illness. And that’s…… kiiiiiind of true? My construction of the unreality and its contents is a lot of me just me sitting at my laptop going “Hahahaha that makes me physically nauseous! That’s the worst thing I’ve ever come up with!! I’m adding it in immediately!!”

But yeah, it definitely does factor in, though! Maybe not in as interesting a way as you’d hoped? 

So first off, my experiences are something that sorta plays into my word choice and the specific way I use language in those scenes. And I’m also gonna go ahead and say that dissociation and specifically derealisation are also things I draw from pretty heavily for those kinda……. more glitchy horror-ish parts? So for me, my experiences factor more into HOW I describe the content more so than any of the horrid glitchy gory content itself. 

‘cause it’s kinda, like, a specific kind of fear, I think, it’s a little bit off-beat and weirdly-worded and disjointed and it hits your senses all wrong, it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense but it’s still extremely real. There’s a lot of weird or unsettling bullshit that goes on in the unreality that there’s no convenient Real World Descriptive Equivalent for. Like, cityscapes made entirely of soundwaves, the aforementioned body horror stuff in earlier posts, places that are a complete and total lack of Anything where there’s not even space or colour or texture or light, senses getting all tangled up into each other, something being simultaneously bigger than the sun and smaller than an ant, voices unravelling like twine? LOTS OF WEIRD, BASICALLY

There’s no nice neat right way to describe that, and if there was, it probably wouldn’t pack the punch it needs to, yeah? But I love that kinda shit, I get to pull from a bunch of really weird sensory experiences and feelings I have no real way to articulate and I get to use language in creative ways to evoke the same feelings, the same experiences, the same sense of fear and wrongness? I get to draw from weird shit to describe a bunch of weird shit that makes NO fucking sense whatsoever and that can’t realistically be tied up with words

Point is, they’re experiences I draw from in order to Get Real Fuckin Weird With Words

and getting weird with words in this specific way is CATHARTIC as FUCK dude it’s so good, it’s one of my favourite things. This is, like, the dark edgy version of what I talked about earlier in regards to worldbuilding and me painting a nice odd vision for people to share in hahahaha

“let me take you on a nice gentle stroll through my imagination” vs me supplexing you to the ground and beating the shit out of you with a bat 

And one other thing is just……. I’m sorry, I’m super tired, this bit is probably gonna be jumbled and wordy and maybe not super relevant but uhhhhhhh

So the unreality is not something I initially drew from any particular place in my psyche, but it IS something I’ve come to construct in a specific way, and a lot of it is something I build with the questions of like…… “How does a psychotic character respond to this input?” and “What does this scenery draw out in my character and how does it challenge them?” in mind, so I guess………… in that sense, there’s definitely still a fairly big impact? But kind of in a sideways way. The unreality is not so much based on psychosis, but it’s something I use to highlight specific elements of it, I guess, but mostly in terms of the skills it draws out

‘cause like. in ATDAO the only characters who kinda get to butt heads with the unreality aside from that one random dead car driver who may or may not be vaguely half alive in a state of horrific limbo are Jacob and Tris, and like

I don’t ever really frame Tris’s psychosis as some horrible terrible thing he’s burdened with that makes life a terrible living hell 24/7 but it is, like………. something he struggles a lot with over the course of the story, both in general terms and in terms of people not taking him seriously about the Extremely Real Fantastical Nonsense that’s going on and in general being hesitant to trust his perceptions of reality. And ALSO I guess in terms of just…….. the way he relates to the fact that he’s been dragged into some Extremely Real Fantastical Nonsense? And him wrestling with how he’s supposed to believe in something like that when no one else can see the evidence and everyone is telling him he’s just crazy, and how “ridiculous interdimensional dumbass sci-fi quest” is something that’s reserved for other people, because he’s already been there like four times already and it has extremely different implications for him

In terms of mental illness, all my protags have patches of the story where they make it through kinda “in spite” of their struggles with mental illness (though that’s a sentence I fuckin hate) and other patches where mental illness is just a thing they deal with alongside whatever plots they have going on…… but their experiences with mental illness are also something that gives them specific skills and perspectives and ways of understanding the world that are invaluable, and some of the most important parts of the story are the parts where they make it through specifically BECAUSE of those skills and perspectives

Which is kind of the Whole Thing With The Unreality, that’s its whole deal

The unreality is a fucking huge turning point for Tris as a character, because it’s specifically because of his experiences with psychosis that he’s able to navigate it so effectively, it’s because of the specific skills he’s developed and the practice he’s had in similar circumstances

not, like, the SAME circumstances, but things from other contexts that kind of, transfer, circumstances where the same skills are applicable

‘cause like, turns out, he’s really good at navigating confusing frightening hellscapes where nothing makes sense and mis-stepping can get you killed, because he’s had a whole lot of practice just like. existing as a person with psychosis in a weird apocalypse world where reality is collapsing in unpredictable ways. He spends a lot of his life trying to make sense of reality and figure out the rules and developing countless systems for navigating the world safely, which he often needs to adjust at a moment’s notice, or completely scrap and reconstruct. He’s had a lot of experience of just sorta waking up and whatever bullshit is going on he’s just gotta be like “ok cool so this is what we’re doing today, I have to deal with this, so how can I deal with this”. He’s used to grounding himself and problem-solving even under intense pressure and when he’s terrified and regardless of whatever objectively horrifying nonsense is happening around him. He’s used to sorting the horrifying things that are not dangerous from the horrifying things that are extremely dangerous.  

He’s basically the one character who can get tossed into the unreality and actually work with it and figure out the rules even though everything is screaming and glitched out and trying to kill him, he’s spent most of his life developing the perfect skill set for it

(and like, this is the first point in the story where he sorta realises that his specific way of viewing the world is going to be a strength rather than a weakness, but like. despite the fact that Tris is basically a walking panic attack he’s actually always been the one of the team who’s been the most adept at navigating daily life with the apocalypse, it’s just not something he’s ever really picked up on)

and uh

that’s kind of a vaguely irrelevant note to end on, actually

HEY THAT WAS SO MANY WORDS I’M SO FUCKING SORRY

I DON’T EVEN HAVE A NEAT WRAP UP TO THIS POST

MY WRAP UP WAS THAT SUMMARY AT THE START

IF YOU READ THIS FAR I HOPE IT WAS AT LEAST SOMEWHAT INTERESTING