#so I might have this not be a fully depressive moment but rather a psychotic episode due to Other Reasons

[bellysoupset]

Just scrolling through your posts and seeing you mention that some anon had requested some super angsty Leo fic.

Quick question cuz Leo-angst is something I'm a bit obsessed with: D'you think that the angsty Leo fic would come before or after Leo and Jon's wedding??

Hi anon!

I'm not a 100% on it, the request was quite plotty and would require my mental health to be in a good place, but ideally this would take place before the wedding, as they're wedding planning.

The original plan was to have the request happen while Jonah is away in his trip, but I'm tweaking things there and I don't know for how much of it Jonah's gonna be present.

[jaydier-blog1]

A Guide to Writing PTSD & Psychosis

Something I’ve noticed over my (too many) years on Tumblr is that sometimes, first-hand accounts of mental illness can be hard to come by. It’s totally understandable, and it took me a long time to get to this point, but it can put writers in a bit of a bind who aren’t satisfied with only the DSM-5 and Wikipedia to accurately portray their muse(s)’s MI. That being said, hi, my name is Holo, and I’ve been living with PTSD and comorbid psychosis for almost a decade at this point, and I’d like to share some of my experiences.

This is by no means a complete or exhaustive guide. The thing about brains is that apparently they’re complicated, and that means that everyone develops MI differently. While there are broad strokes that are generally consistent across diagnoses (and said broad strokes are typically what make up the ‘criteria’ of any MI), not everyone will have every single symptom, and not everyone will display the symptoms they do have the same way. I really do recommend using these sorts of guides as guides to writing MI, rather than actual rules.

I’mma start with some basic definitions. PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a disorder that develops after witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event. Not everyone who goes through trauma will develop PTSD, and I believe the actual statistic is somewhere between 20-30% (double-check my factcheck before you quote me on that, please). Comorbid mental illnesses (or comorbidities) are MIs that occur with or alongside the ‘primary’ illness, usually because of said ‘primary’ MI. For example, my psychosis is comorbid with my PTSD; it is because of my PTSD that I have psychosis.

Psychosis itself is more of a broad term than a specific diagnosis, and it will generally assume one (or more) of three forms: 1) delusions, 2) hallucinations, and 3) disordered thoughts. I personally struggle mostly with delusions and hallucinations, and I don’t particularly experience disordered thoughts, so that’s what I’ll mostly focus on.

Before I move on, though, I want to share something that an old psychologist of mine told me and that I’ve never really forgotten: it’s possible, and even common, to experience and exhibit occasional symptoms of MI without ever actually having that particular mental illness. A random delusion or general panic attack does not mean your character has psychosis or PTSD. Again, brains are complicated, and what defines a MI diagnosis is the consistent, pervasive presence of multiple symptoms that interfere with the patient’s day-to-day life. You can have obsessive-compulsive tendencies without having OCD. You can be anxious without having anxiety. You can be depressed without having depression.

Another thing is that a lot of MI have symptoms that overlap (which is why comorbid MIs are, again, pretty common). My PTSD comorbidities include depression, anxiety, claustrophobia, and psychosis. In fact, when I first started displaying my PTSD symptoms, I was diagnosed with depression because that was the comorbidity that showed up most prominently at the time, and it took several more years before my doctors and I realized that my depression was a symptom and not the full illness.

Alright! Let’s see if I can break down things into more manageable chunks to talk about.

PTSD

PTSD symptoms are wide, varied, and incredibly subjective from person to person. In my experience, this variance starts with what exactly was the trauma that the PTSD is originating from. Someone who was in a war, for example, will have different triggers and experience different symptoms than someone who was abused (and even then, someone who was verbally abused will once again have a vastly different PTSD experience than someone who was physically abused). Figuring out what your character’s trauma was that caused them to develop PTSD is your vital starting point.

In my experience, PTSD tends to develop slowly. One of the things doctors look for when diagnosing PTSD is that patients are still suffering after six months have passed from the initial trauma. After my initial trauma, I thought I was fine. I was asymptomatic, until months later when symptoms started to creep up on me (and as I mentioned earlier, at first it appeared primarily as depression, and I didn’t even connect it to my trauma at the time).

I experience hypervigilence with my PTSD. I am always aware of where I am, looking for possible exits and escape routes. I get nervous and anxious if I feel trapped in a room or area. (I tried going to a corn maze once. It was a bad time.) I also have an exaggerated startle response. If someone sneaks up on me, accidentally or otherwise, I’m going to react much more dramatically than other people. It’ll frighten me a lot more than it would someone whose startle response isn’t so pronounced. At worst, I’ve had experiences where someone sneaking up on me and startling me as a joke sent me into a full panicked meltdown. (I’d been having a rough time before that, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.)

To which I’ll segue rather smoothly into things building up! I find it really difficult to ‘destress’ and relax if I have a lot of small triggers and uncomfortable situations pile up on me within a short period of time or without respite, to the point where something rather minor can set off an entire chain reaction and end up with what looks like an extreme overreaction.

Panic attacks can look different from person to person, or even day to day. Sometimes, panic attacks show up for me as in inability to focus, irritation and snapping angrily at every little thing while my hands shake to the point where it’s difficult for me to hold things. Other times, it’ll look like a screaming, crying mess, huddled up in a ball in a corner on the floor. How people express panic attacks varies greatly, and no one way is an ‘incorrect’ portrayal of your character’s panic attacks.

Flashback episodes are an easy, prominent way to showcase PTSD in media, and so it’s something that a lot of people are familiar with, but in a very narrow way. While it’s possible for someone experiencing a flashback to completely lose touch with their current reality and experience an exact repeat of their traumatic incident, that’s rarely the case. More often than not, my flashback episodes feel more like an overlay, where both reality and my flashback are happening at the same time. Innocuous things will suddenly seem much more ominous and dangerous, I’ll mistake the people around me for those who were present during my traumatic incident, and I tend to experience hallucinations (which I will go into more detail about later on). Someone in a flashback episode could even experience age regression, usually back to the age they were during the initial trauma. Flashback episodes and how someone experiences them are extremely personal, and I strongly suggest doing more research on the topic to find more varied accounts, and piece together how your character would respond to these events, if they even experience flashback episodes at all.

I’d like to take this next moment here to mention triggers. Triggers are highly subjective, depending on the person and their trauma, and they can often be obscure and strange. A particular scent or a familiar name could easily be enough to make someone extremely uncomfortable. Sometimes, triggers are only marginally connected to the initial trauma, or not seemingly connected at all. Conversely, something that might seem like an obvious trigger might not be a trigger at all! Brains are fucking weird like that. Also, a very common experience with PTSD (or any MI with triggers) is that day-to-day life is disrupted in favour of specifically avoiding known triggers. Crowded places will trigger my aforementioned claustrophobia, and so I will often avoid social outings, to the detriment of my friendships and familial relationships. (Which is a good example of triggers having nothing to do with trauma, actually. I was alone when my initial trauma happened. Why the hell am I afraid of crowds. @brain explain this) And not only this, but some days a trigger might not affect me at all! Triggers are so, so subjective. They’re a minefield of possibilities and dangers that can shift on what sometimes feels like a daily basis. It can be a real headache to deal with. Taking the time to get into the mind of your character and deciding what triggers them and what doesn’t it another important part of defining how you write their struggle with PTSD.

Psychosis

Since it’s what I have the least experience with, I’ll talk about disordering thinking first. Disordered thinking is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, and people experiencing disordered thoughts can appear distressed, confused, and have issues articulating their emotions, even to the point of not being able to form full sentences or fully acknowledge questions being asked of them. I strongly suggest doing more research on this topic outside of this post if you think it might apply to your character.

Delusions are, again, fairly self explanatory. Delusions are probably my most prominent version of psychosis that I struggle with on a daily basis. Personally, the most frustrating part of delusions is that I’m well aware that they aren’t real, but I can’t shut them off anyway. In general, my most common delusions is that Person X is out to get me/is trying to sabotage me. Logically, I know that this is ridiculous, but I still have the anxiety and panic that that situation would induce. While I’m sure there are psychotic people out there who cannot distinguish their delusions from reality, and that is absolutely a valid way to portray it, I have personally never met someone like that. It seems to be a lot more common that delusional psychotics are aware that their delusions are not real, and yet we are still forced to change our patterns of behaviour to accommodate for that delusion as if it were real regardless.

Hallucinations are broad and come in way too many forms. Media likes to portray hallucinations as full-bodied apparitions that are indistinguishable from real life, and while that can be correct, I find that I rarely experience those. Most of my hallucinations are tactile hallucinations. These are hallucinations where I feel as though I’m being touched by someone or something, usually in a negative way (these hallucinations can even trigger or be triggered by a flashback episode). There are also auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, and even olfactory and gustatory hallucinations, although I’ve never had experiences with the latter two. Often, I find I can fairly quickly differentiate hallucinations from reality, just by doing a quick check around me. If someone is not touching me, the feeling of a hand on my arm is a hallucination. Visual hallucinations (of other people) tend to not interact with the rest of the world the same way a real person would. Auditory hallucinations do not have an obvious source, and those around me won’t react to the noise. And, of course, the usual disclaimer of everyone who experiences hallucinations experience them differently applies here too, this is just my personal experience with hallucinations.

In conclusion

PTSD and psychosis are both broad MIs with a lot of complexity that vary from person to person. I fully encourage you to continue your research into these MIs and discover what is right for your character(s). I’d like to reiterate that this post is non-exhaustive and has focused on my personal experiences with my day-to-day life as someone who has these MIs. This post is absolutely available for you to reblog if you’d like, and my ask box is right here if you have any questions or discussions you’d like to direct to someone willing to be a first-person source on these topics.

I hope I’ve helped! Now go forth and write! :D

[a-woman-apart]

Trusting Myself More and More

TW: suicidal ideation

Just a reminder—if you are thinking about self-harming or taking your own life, there are lots of resources available. I will list the two main ones here.

Crisis text (U.S.): 741 741

Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

I just realized that I haven’t written a journal-type post on here for a while, so I am going to take a stab at it.

So much has happened. Today I will be attending my Bipolar Support Group and a therapy session that is long overdue. I’m still doing my level best to be at my Bipolar Support Group twice a week, but I always make it at least once a week as long as I’m not out of town. The resources that have been provided recently have been amazing. A lot of the material we are currently using comes from a website for Self Esteem Anonymous. I know that the site looks really outdated and some places don’t have SEA groups, but the resources on the website are invaluable. I highly recommend it if you have issues with self-esteem or emotional regulation, even if you don’t fully buy into the 12-step “higher power” emphasis.

I spent one week in the hospital earlier this month. I found out earlier that morning that there were some issues with my cars and repairs would be in excess of $300. Due to my situation, that might as well have been $3 million. I was afraid/ashamed to ask my family for help.

While that definitely wasn’t why I was hospitalized, it played a role. I went through work that day in a daze. The moment I got there, I thought, “As soon as I’m done, I’m going to get an evaluation. I don’t feel right.” This was on a Friday and after hours so I knew my regular clinic would be closed. I went to the after-hours clinic and they recommended that I be evaluated by someone at inpatient, because the after-hours clinic intake process would take over 2 hours, and by then they would be closing and unable to help me further.

So, I went ahead and packed a small bag of clothes and necessities and my phone charger. I could not explain it, but I knew that I could not remain at the house alone. I didn’t trust myself to be safe. I thought multiple times about calling my mom, but I knew it would take her 2+ hours to get to me and I really did not trust myself to last safely until then. I did not know whether the intake specialist would recommend me for admission, but I still wanted to be ready.

Intermission: I have been terrified of being re-institutionalized for years. I had not been to a mental hospital in 6+ years. Everything I was taught was that every time you become unstable and return to the hospital, your level of functioning becomes lower and lower. You lose your independence and autonomy and it becomes that much harder to re-engage with life outside the hospital. Maybe I misheard that—maybe this is only if you aren’t taking your medicine properly (I was) and you have to come down from a severe manic, depressive, or psychotic state. Either way, I took it to heart, maybe more than I should have.

Ultimately, the hospital did very little for me. It was incredibly loud, which only made my insomnia worse, despite the medicine they gave me to treat the insomnia. The food was horrible most of the time, and so it did not encourage my already poor appetite. We have to get special doctor permission to use our own hygiene products—as I suspected—and all I wanted was my deodorant, but it was never given to me and I had to use the one they provided. I didn’t bring my birth control pills, but if I had I think there was probably some red tape to get through and it has to be taken in a timely manner. If not, you have to start a new pack and they do not provide new packs in there (which I think is a travesty). It was primarily for regulating my period, so of course coming off of it messed up my hormones. The anxiety medication they gave me made me more anxious. I had to meet with my outpatient psychiatrist to get everything corrected.

The hospital really only had one purpose in my mind, though: keep me in an environment where I could not—or would not-- harm myself.

In that, it was a perfect success. When I was talking to my brother and his family on the phone, I just felt so inspired. I really would have missed it all. I cannot even begin to fathom how horrible it would be if my nephew was asking where I was, and I wasn’t able to tell him. Or, if my Mom had to bury another child, especially with there being so many unanswered questions. My whole family—siblings and all—would’ve wondered, “Why didn’t she just talk to us?”

When I was in the hospital, I made a list of goals. This is nothing spectacular or remarkable. I am a list-making queen. However, I did notice some things coming to the top of my list. Quitting my job, attending school in 2020, having healthy boundaries with others, etc. Some of them were more abstract, but some of them could be put into action right away.

So, I gave in my two weeks’ notice even though I had nothing lined up. I kept the details of my hospitalization to myself from most co-workers, but I was very candid and open with management about what happened. I thought it was foolish to hide because my doctor’s note had the hospital name on it, and if it was viewed with any scrutiny at all they could easily work out what had happened. Also, I wanted to be honest, because I wanted them to know that I really do love all the staff and I like serving the patrons, but it is really just time for me to move on to something new.

It was really scary, taking that leap, with nothing lined up and myself still so fatigued. Without going into details, though, I will say that I do now have a job lined up—one that is part-time and low-stress—that will take me at least into January. I am leaving the apartment and I am being offered a safe place at a low cost by a friend of mine. In January, I will start my classes at a new university—one that is much smaller and more affordable than the 30,000+ campuses all around.

My life was a big question mark when I left the hospital. My main goal had been to just make more money so I could pay the skyrocketing costs of living in my apartment and reclaim my financial independence. I have received nothing but silence from nearly all of the full-time jobs I pursued. There was no “sorry we can’t offer you this job” or on the opposite spectrum, requests for interview. It was the weirdest thing. Just silence.

I know I have emphasized that I do not think that things are predetermined or foreordained. I just think that life is chaotic, but sometimes it forms itself into orderly patterns. You have to flow with the moving energies of life, rather than resisting them. As Don Estill said, “You don’t need to suffer. If something is not working, try something else.” I was desperate for at least one thing in my life to stay the same. I wanted to at least live in the apartment that I had worked so hard to keep.

There was a problem, though. My mom had come over after I got out of the hospital to buy me food, help me with expenses, and most importantly, keep me company and offer support. We talked so much. After she left, I realized how empty the apartment had started to feel. I realized the toll that coming home to an empty place every day was taking on my mental health. The whole reason I went to the hospital was because I could not stand the thought of spending the night alone with myself and my terrible thoughts.

I do not need a babysitter. I just want to have someone there, even if we don’t talk about mental health. Just someone I can say, “Hey I’m going to Whataburger, do you want anything?” or gush to about my niece and nephew. I want someone to watch TV with and share meals with. Even though I have friends, it can be so, so lonely to exist like this.

One thing I do notice, though, is that “my spirit” (metaphorically) rises up in me and often will tell me something. 2 days before I was hospitalized, something rose up in me to say, “That’s enough.” I know our individualist, merit-based culture tells us to just keep trying, that motivational speakers say “never give up until you win” but sometimes you do have to practice healthy detachment. I had been searching for a full-time job for 2 months (or more). I kept taking on more responsibilities at work. I was hyper-concerned about people in my life, relationships, etc. As Iyanla Vanzant said, surrender is different from getting frustrated and throwing in the towel.

I was ready to surrender.

Even going to the hospital was a surrender. I was leaning into one of my greatest fears, because in my gut, I knew that my life was more important than money or any of my achievements. I knew it was more important than a reputation.

After that, I started to make changes, even though they were so risky. I started reaching out to people I knew, asking about housing and work opportunities. I weighed the possible consequences of my actions. My mom had invited me to return home if things did not go well, but I knew deep down that wasn’t the right choice, and I also felt “No, I think I can make it work here in the city.��� I didn’t know how. It was just “a knowing.”

I am learning to trust that so much more. I am realizing that I am highly intuitive about people and situations. I am not going to pretend that I am clairvoyant or anything like that. I do know, just from living life, that what you anticipate almost never happens exactly that way. I am a firm believer in hoping for the best and being prepared for the worst. Usually, even if something bad happens, it is not The Worst. Sometimes, too, expectation fails again, and your needs are met beyond your wildest imagination. I must emphasize—your needs are met—not your wants. My experience has been that I often do not get what I want, and if I do, by then I don’t want it anymore. We are so out of touch with what is really going on most of the time.

Just know that no matter how low you are, you don’t have to give up. You need to learn to not be fixated on a particular outcome. Absolute statements like, ‘If she leaves me, my life will have no meaning” or “If I don’t get the job, I don’t know what I will do.” In Johann Hari’s book on depression, he lists “Disconnection from a hopeful future” as one of the top contributors to depression and mental illness. It is so important to have hope. There is always another path. There is always something you haven’t tried. When you are in crisis-mode though, you can acquire an extreme case of tunnel vision. I know I am that way and I have to stop and say, “Do I trust myself to get through this?”

You can have a second chance at life. Please do not think that if this One Thing doesn’t work out, there is nothing left for you to do. Please keep exploring your options. I know that there are many things bad about this country, but we still have TONS of resources available for people: food banks, homeless shelters, boarding homes, rehabs, and churches and organizations that will help with childcare and living expenses. If you are in legal trouble, there is free or low-cost legal help available for you.

DO NOT SABOTAGE YOURSELF.

That message is for me as much as anybody else. If you don’t know where to start, try to make it to a local library and just start asking questions.

You don’t have to suffer.

[funkymbtifiction]

Healthy / Unhealthy Head Triad:

Pulled off PersonalityCafe. Saw no cited source. (Know it? Tell me.)

Enneagram 5

At their best: profound vision, objective insight, innovative exploration.

Mid-levels: comprehensive knowledge, intense preoccupation, cynical argumentation.

At their worst: eccentric nihilism, phobic delirium, psychotic paralysis.

Healthy 5w4: more able to participate in life. When the fiveish desire to withdraw and sort things out is no longer compulsive, the consciously chosen time alone becomes a tool for understanding the world, rather than an entrapping habit. The fourish passion for beauty emerges as the conscious result of harnessing the emotions rather than being their slave. Begin to deeply understand the simple, elegant way the awesome complexity of the world emerges from fundamental principles. They find great joy in watching and learning. When the perception of five and the passion of four are augmented by eight's power and leadership, plus one's intuitive wisdom, clear comprehensions can be transmitted to others.

Unhealthy 5w4: gets lost in the details. The compulsive analysis of five can lead to elaborate pseudo-logical constructions designed to explain everything. The four-wing's emotionality adds a flavor of dramatic hopelessness. Others Simply Do Not Understand. No one could understand. Retreats to a place of safety, hoping to escape from view, continuing to uncover the truth. There is little to no social involvement. The panic and scattered mania of seven combine with twoish self-congratulatory hysteria. Can come back into the world, awkward and excitable, ready to bolt but ready to passionately defend a bizarre, baroque fantasy world. As inner tension builds, schizoid withdrawal becomes more and more likely. The end result is a kind of terrified fugue, completely cut off from reality. The only escape from constant overwhelming chaos is inward.

Healthy 5w6: gains social ease. Deep perception and serene faith combine for a kind of knowing that focuses on the truth of human interactions. Overcomes the fear of intimacy and finds satisfaction in genuine relationships. Strikes a balance between the urge to withdraw to sort things out and the desire to feel safe among trusted friends. The need diminishes to protect against deceit by constantly analyzing people, leading to greater comfort and depth in friendship. Brings together the powerful insight of five, the stamina and leadership of eight, the deep faith and genuineness of six, and the inner peace of nine.

Unhealthy 5w6: becomes afraid of people. Mistrust interacts with reductionist analysis, and the world begins to seem more threatening. Threeish competitive urges might emerge, combining with sevenish mania to create a kind of intense, argumentative combativeness to hide a deep sense of inadequacy. This turns people away, leading to a greater sense of isolation. Tends to rationalize that most people are not honest anyway, and since other people fail to recognize the value of their brilliant ideas, they are not worth knowing at all. Paranoia and anxiety lead 5w6 into a terrifying spiral in which increasingly bizarre fabrications may be used to explain meaning into even the most mundane events.

Enneagram 6

At their best: self-affirming courage, faithful affection, responsible discipline.

Mid-levels: dutiful loyalty, anxious ambivalence, belligerent scapegoating.

At their worst: needy conformism, paranoid obsession, self-destructive panic.

Healthy 6w5: becomes free of anxiety and reductionist analysis, allowing their endearing gentility and good humor to emerge. Laughs easily, with a sense of relief. Can it really be so simple to live and enjoy life? There is a feeling of relaxed good nature and certainty. This is a person you can trust, someone to rely on for true friendship. Turns into a warm and deeply loving person, someone in touch with a real universal authority, internally and externally available. Acts with quiet confidence, coming from a place of peaceful faith. Essential sixness brings deep interpersonal bonding, essential fiveness builds penetrating perception, and nineish tranquility combines with eightish personal power.

Unhealthy 6w5: begins to feel anxious and wants to run away to a protected place. Unable to trust inner or outer authority, they search for an explanation for the constant tension. Others are easy to blame, and by projecting the causes of anxiety outward, 6w5 can find a temporary release. With increased stress, 6w5 loses faith in the blaming. No explanation for the anxiety satisfies, and the world begins to seem like a horrible, frightening game. Paranoia escalates. Bounces rapidly from fearful withdrawal to tense, overconfident pretense. Everyone is out to get me, and there is no place to run. I'm frightened out of my wits, and I know I am headed for a complete breakdown, but maybe if I can get myself into enough trouble someone will come and rescue me.

Healthy 6w7: has a feeling of firm steadiness, sure-footed and quiet. Sevenish impulsivity and sixish anxiety diminish, replaced by a calm deliberateness. Although fun and companionship are still highly valued, the desperate longing for security converts into inner strength. Finds a deep sense of belonging to the universe, and to mankind. Nineish calm and sixish faith combine with sevenish joy and fiveish perception. Shares with others a sense of eternal companionship and security.

Unhealthy 6w7: visibly desperate. Anxiety and insecurity become powerful controlling influences. Jumping from one colorful emotional state to another, trying to find any way to quell the increasing sense of uncertainty and vulnerability. They looks for someone out there who will help, but finds no one to trust. Will try anything to escape from the increasingly intolerable situations that arise. Physical illness, car troubles, boyfriends, girlfriends, landlords, all become scapegoats for the real problem of inner helpless dependence. You are either all-good or all-bad, and whether I like you or not can change from moment to moment. My very identity splits into fragments as I desperately cut myself into pieces to escape the horrible sense of impending catastrophe.

Enneagram 7

At their best: ecstatic gratitude, spontaneous enthusiasm, passionate accomplishment.

Mid-levels: active materialism, restless superficiality, addictive excess.

At their worst: irresponsible debauchery, manic hysteria, burnt-out debilitation.

Healthy 7w6: finds a new kind of centered calmness, as impulsivity and the desire to entertain fall away. Instead of shifting to another mood, they wait and see where this one leads. The slippery, happy-go-lucky quality is replaced by a smooth feeling of attentive watchfulness. A kind of directed, joyful intelligence like a sure presence, with an unlimited attention span. Becomes the master of many talents because of fiveish perceptivity, combined with deep fulfillment and pleasure from the experience of being fully present. Profoundly grateful for the continuing opportunity to take part in the unfolding drama of life. What a gorgeous, unpredictably fantastic world! What incredible beauty there is in even the smallest details of this universe! How excitingly alive I feel, and how at-one with the world! Let's celebrate together the deep abundance of life and love.

Unhealthy 7w6: the search for ever-increasing levels of excitement and stimulation seems like a way out of the apparent trap of boredom and unease, but it brings only temporary relief. Maybe another kind of fun will help me avoid this increasing sense of hopeless ambivalence. Maybe I should start a new company, or have a great big party! Tries to find the answer in increasingly grand plans for great, exciting events. As the ever-growing fear and boredom keep coming back, excessive stimulation approaches dangerous levels. Without increasing awareness, this course of exciting overload leads to extreme exhaustion, and an incapacitating despairing depression. At the bottom of the scale of health, 7w6 becomes a worn-out husk, utterly debilitated by drugs, sexual excess, and general over-stimulation, and totally incapable of self-care. At every opportunity, every means available is used to provide some escape.

Healthy 7w8: settles down. Become aware of the compulsive nature of the desire for excess and learn how to moderate the constant power-trip. Finds other people are easier to get along with when they are not being pushed or receiving a hard-sell on some wild idea. Love and appreciation for subtlety become important aspects of a life that includes increasing amounts of silent, peaceful contemplation. Discovers by letting the mind's chatter come to an end, a new level of perception emerges, with a greater understanding of how the world fits together. Instead of exploding outward into impulsive activity, 7w8 harnesses enthusiasm for practical uses. Life becomes a joyful, loving celebration. Look how much we have been given! Jump into the universe with both feet! Find your power and become what you were meant to be!

Unhealthy 7w8: gets ever-wilder. When others fail to respond with enough enthusiasm to high-pressure sales tactics, and the high of the latest exciting trip begins to wear off, it's time for the next wild ride. Maybe just a little bigger dose will do it. New ideas seem to erase old problems, and each one is bigger and better than the last one. If it doesn't work, forget it and move to the next grand scheme. You've got to try this, it's totally fantastic! As the highs get higher, the lows scrape lower. The miserable mornings are soon forgotten, because there's an even better high coming. Heads into ever-deeper entrapment, promising ever-greater rewards to those who will finance (or otherwise support) rapidly exploding levels of excessive indulgence. It all leads inevitably to the great crash, and utter dissipation.

[the-knights-who-say-book]

The Foxhole Court

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

Short blurb: Neil Josten has been on the run from his murderous crime lord father for years, and signing onto a high profile college exy team is the last thing he should do if he wants to stay hidden. His lies will hold up only so long under this kind of scrutiny and the truth will get him killed. But Neil's not the only one with secrets on the team. Face to face with someone from his past, Neil finally has to choose whether to run or stand and fight.

The extent to which I have Opinions on this book is... frustrating.

I had problems with it. On a basic level, it started out with subpar writing, confusing backstory and exposition, and continued on to casually drop the word "r*t*rd" at least three times without blinking. To clarify: it’s not evil characters we’re supposed to dislike and know are wrong for saying it that use the word. It’s a good guy we’re supposed to like. Making it very hard to like him.

Another big point: the representation of Andrew and manic depression (according to the author, confirmed on tumblr, that’s his diagnosis. I don’t know enough about different disorders, but the internet says it’s called bipolar disorder now. The label we got in canon was “psychotic”, which appears to be one facet of bipolar disorder rather than his entire diagnosis. It’s very not clear in canon). It looks to me from reading reviews that the only thing this book's representation of mental illness accomplished was reinforcing some people's impression that mentally ill = dangerous. Probably because the author wrote Andrew as both psychotic and incredibly dangerous, and then gave him knives.

Now, I’d have to do more research on bipolar disorder in order to understand how much research Nora Sakavic did or didn’t do while writing Andrew, because as I’ve said, I don’t know a whole lot. But given that she flat out made up the medicine he’s on (which is kind of huge, because a lot of the book depends on you accepting that Andrew’s on medication that makes him high 100% of the time he’s on it), it seems like she’s... pretty okay with not having fully accurate depictions of mental illness. Which makes me wonder how sensitive this representation is, and I have the most skeptical of glares aimed at this whole area.

When the reviews are full of people casually using psychotic as an insult or stand in for “bad person”, and your book did nothing to dissuade people from that kind of view, that might be a problem.

Besides those easily pinned-down issues, it's harder to say exactly what my biggest problems were, but I'll try.

1. I don't understand Neil's decisions. The times when he chooses to react to the outrageous bullying and when he doesn't, how he reacts and how he keeps quiet — it never clicked with me, his reasons for responding one way or another.

But then again, I don't understand the actions of plenty of other characters in this book. The difference is that with those characters, I don't think you're supposed to. Which frustrated me, not getting answers, but the author choosing not to explain things mystifies me a lot less than Neil's decisions coming across as random. Of course every action a character takes must be controlled by the author to take the plot in the desired direction, but with Neil the author failed to create the illusion that his reactions were natural consequences of his personality and situation.

2. Branching off of point number 1: Neil's drive to hold onto the team would work a lot better if his connection to exy was more developed. It felt like we were told more than shown how important the sport is to him. I'll give the book this — it came across during the game scene. But before that, it was too surface level.

3. (Almost) Every Character Is An Asshole And I'm Bored. Probably what made the last 20% of the book the most (only?) enjoyable part of the book for me was that everyone were still assholes, but there was enough variation with the nice characters and the asshole-but-finally-more-developed characters that it was interesting again.

4. Due to suffering through another series with the same thing, I am extremely over the main character being drugged by their future romantic interest and that character never being held fully accountable for what an awful act that is.

Like I said, I enjoyed the last 20% of this book (interesting interactions among characters! Intense game scene! Interplay of hatred and just-starting-to-get-along!), and other scattered moments as well. But the only things that made me continue with this series were already owning the rest of the ebooks and being determined to finally understand the fandom of this series.

[jessisremedy]

Change

     I’ve noticed myself changing in a way that I haven’t been thrilled with.  You have two personalities that you can get when you’re around me lately.  I’m either calm and content, or I’m extremely erratic, irrational, bitchy, and either on the brink of tears of a full blown meltdown.  The odd thing is, I’m not quite sure what the reason behind it is.  I keep trying to place blame on others around me, my surroundings, and situations in my life that are considered stressors, but are out of my control at the moment.  I don’t find joy in the things I once used to.  I’ve gotten to a point that each day is a struggle to face, and it’s quite scary.  Depression and anxiety are scary things to face on a daily basis.  There’s times where you feel like you’re pulling out of it, and for awhile you can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you can breathe without that shortness of breath you feel constantly from anxiety.  But then one day you wake up, and it’s almost as if a switch was flipped and you turn into a completely different person.  You’re percieved as moody, impatient, lazy, when in reality there is just so much going on in your mind that you don’t even know where to begin when someone asks “What’s wrong?”  or “Are you okay?”  There’s a fear that if you open up to them, you’ll be deemed as psychotic.  I used to keep this blog private from friends or family because I posted about personal things as an outlet, and I didn’t want anyone who knew me to know any of my struggles.  However, awhile back I decided to share it because I noticed a lot of my friends and family posting on social media with their struggles, and I felt as if hearing that they are not alone might help.  We always chose to hide our “stranger,” but on this blog, I chose to release it.  

     As I was saying before, I find myself placing blame on outside factors.  However, the other day something snapped in me.  I realized it wasn’t due to anything other than myself as to why I was feeling the way I do lately.  I used to read into Buddhism for a bit, and I truly believe, as cliche as it sounds, that inner peace is the only true way to become fully happy in life.  I, as you and every single person in this world, struggle with their own battles, their own struggles, their own demons.  It’s up to ourselves to either dwell on them and identify with them, or rather, rise up and change what it is in our lives that is making us so unhappy.  I always find myself finding happiness in something, whether it’s something small like reading a book or taking a walk, or something bigger like walking away from a life I was once content with to a new life, a life in which I built from the bottom up.  However, whenever I seek happiness in these things, it’s always short lived, and I find myself falling back into the darkness and making more excuses until all I want to do is lay in bed all day.  Not because I’m lazy, but because I’m having difficulty understanding this life.  I don’t understand materialistic things, which I too have found myself falling victim to on small occasions.  I don’t understand a 9-5 life chasing money only to realize one day that it’s worthless in the end.  I don’t understand why we’re living in a world where my future children will be raised by a small screen in their hands and scrolling through social media accounts and other nonsense, while becoming more detached from the world.  I don’t understand why we waste our time drinking when we should be learning new things.  Learning a new language, a new skill, a new hobby.  I don’t understand why when I’m with others, I become such a chameleon to those who I’m with that I feel like I lose myself in the process.  I don't understand hatred and ignorance.  I don’t understand people, and all together, I don’t understand society.  

     For me, I want to start making a change.  I’m well aware of the fact that I will have plenty of slip ups.  I will start something new, and later down the line, I will find myself in bed for the entire weekend in another one of my phases.  However, the fact that I am aware of this is a step in the right direction.  I want to read more, write more, learn more.  I want to visit new places, take up a hobby, brush up on my Spanish.  I refuse to fall into this society.  I’ll make many mistakes along the way, but one day I’ll get it right.  This post was very random, but I have said it in posts in the past that this blog is almost like therapy to me, and as I’m writing, I already feel the shortness of breath going away.  I feel my shoulders and my back becoming less tense.  I’m going to work on becoming the best person that I can be for myself.  I refuse to live a mundane existence.  

Until next time.

[how2to18]

IF THERE EXISTS a mental-illness diagnosis as scary as the physical-illness diagnosis of cancer, schizophrenia may be it. To the general public, it’s a monolith of a condition: the one where you hear voices in your head and talk to people who aren’t there. That Beautiful Mind guy had it, and he invented Ed Harris completely, remember? But the words and stories of those who live with schizoaffective disorder offer proof that it’s a spectrum illness, which manifests with great variety and defies stereotype. And though it’s a serious diagnosis, many of those afflicted insist that they are not doomed.

The classic schizophrenia memoirs include The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness (1994), by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett, and The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (2007), by Elyn R. Saks. Both books are frightening. Schiller’s illness manifested as voices shouting at her relentlessly to kill herself, and the treatment she was given early in her illness was cruel and unhelpful. Her account is perforated by memory loss because of trauma and electroconvulsive therapy. Saks’s book is a story of extraordinary willpower; rather than seek help, she hid her debilitating symptoms almost entirely while racking up degrees and honors in the legal and medical fields. Her writing voice is a little nerdy, but her achievements, which include a MacArthur “genius” grant, are extraordinary.

Esmé Weijun Wang’s new book of essays, The Collected Schizophrenias, which won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and a Whiting Award, warrants much of the hype and anticipation surrounding it. A Granta-anointed Best Young American Novelist for The Border of Paradise (2016), Wang is a highly articulate and graceful essayist, and her insights, in both the clinical and general senses, are exceptional.

Wang’s book isn’t much like the other two. The trajectory of schizoaffective disorder, in its progression, regression, detours, and stubbornness, is a common, looping thread among them, but the way the illness manifests in the three writers is profoundly different. Wang’s voices aren’t much like Schiller’s, and her delusional convictions (for example, that she is dead — also known as the Cotard delusion) are much more unusual. Saks is paranoid and manic while Wang leans to catatonia. Wang’s book is less alarming than the other two, in part because her voice is so measured and intelligent. The fact is, the three women have different illnesses, even though their umbrella diagnosis is the same — schizoaffective disorder varies as much as its patients do.

In addition, while Schiller was largely swallowed by her illness and Saks threw herself passionately into her career, Wang gives the impression of having lived many lives. She started on the Ivy League track, attending Yale (the alma mater of Saks, as well), which was exceedingly unhelpful in managing her burgeoning illness, and then Stanford, which was closer to her family. She was a fashion blogger early in her adult life, and her knowledge of designers and aesthetics is likely to bewilder the average reader. One of the essays is about disguising herself as high-functioning by using visual markers of wellness: beautiful clothes and makeup from Chanel and Tom Ford. Her survival methods are necessarily elastic:

My makeup routine is minimal and consistent. I can dress and daub when psychotic and when not psychotic. I do it with zeal when manic. If I’m depressed, I skip everything but the lipstick. If I skip the lipstick, that means I haven’t even made it to the bathroom mirror.

A sexual assault lies beneath Wang’s daily experience for years, until her illness triggers PTSD, which complicates her treatment plan further. Then, after her physical health declines mysteriously and precipitously, she is diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease.

Bookstore shelves are crammed with PTSD memoirs, Ivy League reminiscences, fashion world tell-alls, sexual-assault survival stories, and chronicles of fighting against debilitating illness — Wang’s friend Porochista Khakpour even wrote an entire book, Sick, about living with late-stage Lyme disease — but Wang has been inside all of these identities, lived all of these selves and more. Her perspective in The Collected Schizophrenias is encyclopedic and prismatic even without taking into account how her primary mental illness may have fractured her identity.

Wang asks rare, necessary questions about her condition: “What happens if I see my disordered mind as a fundamental part of who I am? It has, in fact, shaped the way I experience life.”

She’s mildly arguing against “person-first language” that “suggests that there is a person in there somewhere without the delusions and the rambling and the catatonia”:

There might be something comforting about the notion that there is, deep down, an impeccable self without disorder, and that if I try hard enough, I can reach that unblemished self. But there may be no impeccable self to reach, and if I continue to struggle toward one, I might go mad in the pursuit.

She writes with clarity about how it feels when a psychotic episode descends upon her, an experience only a fraction of us will ever have. The entire passage, from “Reality, Onscreen,” is two and a half pages of captivating prose, but the conclusion is most gripping:

Something’s wrong; then it is completely wrong […] The moment of shifting from one phase to the other is usually sharp and clear; I turn my head and in a single moment realize that my coworkers have been replaced by robots, or glance at my sewing table as the thought settles over me, fine and gray as soot, that I am dead. In this way I have become, and have remained, delusional for months at a time […] What’s true is whatever I believe, although I know enough to parrot back what I know is supposed to be true: these are real people and not robots; I am alive, not dead. The idea of “believing” something turns porous as I repeat the tenets of reality like a good girl.

These essays are mesmerizing and at times bittersweet — not unlike The Border of Paradise, which is a horrifying family drama written in balletic prose. In other ways, the two books don’t feel very similar, but that’s a mark of Wang’s craftsmanship. Her novel is warmer, with shifting perspectives that dwell on human moments, where her essays are even and controlled. Whenever they feel too icily flawless, though, Wang reveals her sense of humor. When a stranger looks her up and down as she’s in a delusional (but functioning) state, she quips, “Yes, I thought, our eyes meeting, you may think I’m hot, but I’m also a rotting corpse. Sucks to be you, sir.”

Often collections like this gather essays either too independent from one another or too repetitive in their details to form a fully satisfying work. Wang’s book mostly avoids these problems, but it does have a sense of incompleteness, which derives, perhaps, from the sense that the author is leaving things out. It’s not a particularly juicy or grotesque book, and a jaded reader of sensational memoir may find this suspicious. Her book often feels like the equivalent of her makeup routine: she’s passing as a calm, informative writer with a sophisticated prose style when inside her head it’s chaos.

This is not to say it’s a dishonest book, but it does offer up Wang’s best and most beautiful self, for the most part, and only rarely shows her gibbering at the mirror or impassively giving away her possessions. Of course, that is no one’s business but Wang’s. She is not required to expose her interior horrors to the reading public just because other essayists and memoirists do. Besides, if the book seems incomplete, or unfinished, it’s because Wang’s life is, too. Not because her illnesses have lessened her — they certainly have not — but because she is continually evolving, and aware of it. The collection carries a sense of starting over, and over, and over, with each new diagnosis, each new psychotic episode, each new obstacle that Wang must cope with to survive and thrive. Her extraordinary precision as a writer helps her organize and describe the junk drawer of intention and failure and process and truth that is life.

The Collected Schizophrenias is a necessary addition to a relatively small body of literature, but it’s also, quite simply, a pleasure to read. The prose is so beautiful, and the recollection and description so vivid, that even if it were not mostly about an under-examined condition it would be easy to recommend. Esmé Weijun Wang is poised to become a major writer, and this is her origin story.

¤

Katharine Coldiron’s work has appeared in Ms., the Times Literary Supplement, VIDA, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in California and at kcoldiron.com.

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