There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth. — Doris May Lessing.
Initially I had considered creating a page that was dedicated to stories I've written, or characters who have been floating around in my brain. But I'm not interested in writing about the writing. It's the writing itself that I want to focus on. And the writing itself, lately, hasn't been happening. Lately, the writing itself has been more about surviving. Coming back to myself after a long period of being ill.
It recently occurred to me that I need to try different ways of coming back to myself, after this last psychotic break. It's not like when I was younger, and I could — not necessarily should have; I did a lot of things when I was younger that I would never recommend another person do — go back to class 72 hours after a suicide attempt and just keep to myself how terrible my own thoughts were. There was no privacy in my father's house, and if I wrote something that another person found and disagreed with, it was open season on citing sources at the dinner table. I stopped keeping a paper journal when I was in elementary school because I never got good at hiding my notebooks; we had a computer, and starting in the '90s I would write stories on floppy disks that I hid in a shoebox in the closet. Had a magnet taped to the lid as a kill-switch. It was one of the stupidest things I'm willing to publicly admit, but I didn't want anyone to read my Deep Space 9 fanfiction. Not even people on the internet.
From a young age, when I was first sent to therapy, my prime directive was to get better, but that directive was at odds with the other directive, which was don't let anyone know. Don't let anyone know how fucked up my family is; don't let anyone know the nature and quality of the thoughts that I have; don't let anyone know how out of control my thoughts and emotions are, because they'll lock me up and I'll spend the rest of my life in a Haldol stupor.
It's been more than twenty years since my first psychotic break and I have never gotten my shit together. Because I possess coping skills and self-awareness, because I have shown the motivation to improve, it seemed in my twenties and thirties as if there was a chance I might one day finally recover. There has been medication, and there have been periods of improvement, times in my life when I'm doing better. But I have never gotten better.
There have been periods in my life where I have been "known" by the community. Either I have been active on social media in some capacity (Diary-X, Livejournal, Tumblr, Reddit) or I was actually active in the meatspace because I was stable enough to work. But for the most part, I don't enjoy having to create a user account and interact with other people. Whenever I develop a reputation, it clashes with my delusions of negation; when I am in a social situation, I experience anxiety that is secondary to paranoia. It is impossible to connect with someone who is dissociated; I have spent my entire adult life dissociated, in some capacity or another.
Given that I'm in decent health (rampant mental illness notwithstanding) I could potentially be looking at another 30+ years of circling the fucking drain. The next five years are going to be about recovering, for me. For using fiction, or creative nonfiction, coding, anything, to tell real stories. To be honest. That's what has been holding me back my entire life; I've been too afraid of the consequences if people in my life knew the truth about my reality. That I live with ADHD and schizophrenia, and that both of those conditions are unmedicated, and that managing them takes an awful lot of mental bandwidth.
Since we're in an era of stable totalitarianism, and we're only in the first year of Project 2025, it occurs to me that I am in a position to demonstrate to other people who maybe don't have the sheer breadth of experience how it is possible to get up every day and function with Serious Mental Illness.
My way of getting through my teenage years was to simply not think about them. Which I realize in hindsight I was able to do because my particular mental illness makes me oscillate between overthinking and not thinking at all. There are times when there isn't a single thought rattling between my ears.
Without a career, or a calling, or any kind of purpose, the spirit will wither and the person attached to the body will die. The etiology of my Cotard's syndrome isn't a mystery. It makes complete sense to me that I, having been sexually assaulted at a young age and then going through precocious puberty, being misdiagnosed with a personality disorder when what I have is a psychotic disorder, not having premenstrual dysphoric disorder diagnosed in a timely fashion, physically falling apart as a result of the PMDD treatment... I don't want to get into my entire medical history on an unsecure channel, but there are times when I think I might need to speak autobiographically. When I might need to describe what it was like to be moelsted and go through menarche at the age of 10, when I already had undiagnosed ADHD and psychosis. Because the assumption is that I had a normal childhood, and that everything was completely fine, and that there's no reasonable explanation for why I am such a fucking disaster at the age that I am.
I am no longer in the prime of my life. This is the period of life when I'm meant to be preparing for my retirement; this period of life isn't meant to be spent on disability, never leaving the house, avoiding talking to other people, swinging wildly between hyperfixation and avolition.