anorexia – The Schizophrenia Diaries

Kabbalah for Schizophrenics (Or: Spending Too Much Time in Atziluth)

Around the beginning of August, after some dabbling in it, I unexpectedly got really into tarot reading. Down various related rabbit holes I went, often trying to generally get (back) in touch with my skeptical spiritual side, with my cultural roots, with the philosophies that had called to me, and maybe add a bit of witchcraft. From sigils to synagogue to Stoicism, I explored.

This month, I landed somewhat close to my cultural origins and, via looking for tarot resources through familiar venues, ended up attending two Zoom classes at least half about Kabbalah.

Kabbalah is an esoteric method, discipline, and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. It’s really fascinating, if kind of mind melting, stuff. Kabbalah’s not really a primary Thing of mine, and I’m far from an expert (I seem to be setting up camp somewhere in witchy Stoicism), but it gave me a new spin on my deck (A. E. Waite) to consider, and other things to ponder.

Which brings us to the actual subject of this post.

In Kabbalah, we have the concept of the Four Worlds. Put simply, Atziluth is the world of the divine, the spiritual, of wisdom and the big picture; it is precreation, things not yet taking shape. (In tarot cards, it correlates to the suit of wands.) Briah (in tarot, cups) is the world of feelings and morals, of the first stages of creation, where ideas start to take shape and take up space, just start to ossify. Yetzirah (swords) is the world of planning, thoughts, mental constructs, and refinement of ideas. Assiah (pentacles) is the world of the physical, of primality, of the created, of action, manifestation, of the day to day mundanity we often call reality.

Each of these worlds has its place. To stay in Assiah all the time would be, well, rather simple, to the point of (dare I say) boring. But to neglect it is to end up impoverished and (eventually) physically die. To never visit Atziluth is to never connect with your highest self, to never gain a divine view and wisdom, to never go beyond.

This may sound a lot like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from psychology to some people (and I think you’ll find a lot of spiritual/mystic concepts sound a lot like something from psychology, and as a bit of a skeptic, I like to stick close to those, viewing tarot cards as something like thought prompts). While you can jump around the hierarchy, things tend to go better with first things first: physical needs met now, security in that long term, then the emotional/mental: relationships with others, love, and the security that comes with that, then reaching for achievement and esteem, and finally self actualization.

As I revisited these concepts, I hit on a way of phrasing a large problem of mine: I spend too much time in the world of Atziluth.

This may sound lofty and pretentious, but it’s a real problem, and I think frequently, for me, what sounds pretentious at first is actually a mental illness thing. If you’ve seen the phrase I reject your reality and substitute my own on a coffee mug or tee shirt, it can sound pretentious at first read (and it’s often a joke), or, if it’s a little too true, like a little thing medical professionals like to call schizophrenia.

In any case, spending too much time in Atziluth. This manifests for me in several different ways.

I typically feel a large disconnect between my mind (more accurately, all of my nonphysical self) and my body. I feel more at home deep in my thoughts than in my body, and I frequently view having any physical form—being pulled back into Assiah—as a required nuisance. (My ascetic leanings—see Stoicism—don’t always help.) It’s not (just) a matter of appearance or fitness or health—even my idea of the most perfect human form would still make me feel this way.

Because of this, I unwisely tend to neglect or even abuse my physical self, view it with disdain—why can’t it keep up with what I consider the rest of me capable of? Imagine what I could do, it wasn’t for all this sleeping and eating and drinking water, and what happens when I don’t do those things. In the physical world, this looks a lot like poor self care (though I’ve gotten a lot better on that front), active self harm (same improvement here), and an eating disorder (this is the big one, currently, and it has other roots in my psychosis). The occasional manic episode also puts me more in tune with lofty dreams than physical reality.

There’s an irony in this. Oh how wise and intellectual, spending too much time in Atziluth, I ponder, chew-spitting cookies and eyeing the enema kit again because I resent needing calories to manifest my ideas in the physical world.

My wife and I have had several conversations that contributed to the formation of this post. She basically posited that if Atziluth is where ideas are first conceived and creativity runs limitless, it’s kind of like that’s where your ideas live, and you have to visit to retrieve them. Some people struggle to visit for long, or to find much there, or to bring that back with them. But me—on the bright side—I seem to have an almost unlimited pass, and basically whole books up there ripe for the picking (typically manifesting as dissociative/maladaptive daydreams on the border of hallucination), and after a brief run back through Briah and Yetzirah, (if I’m properly medicated) I manifest them into reality/Assiah with apparently astonishing speed (publishing eight full length books among other writings in the last—less than—two years.)

I told her a story about when I was a kid. I had an imaginary friend who was a witch. In hindsight, I was a little too old for imaginary friends and a little too convinced of her having some form of existence (hello, early warning signs of schizophrenia?), but in any case, she was a witch, and also a ghost, a wise girl about my age, and she lived with her ghost family under my house. (There was no basement or anything, but, well, they were ghosts, so the fact it was all dirt under there wasn’t an issue for them; they had a ghost house.) She was going to teach me how to be a witch. As part of this, I had to visit a ghost library under her house, and read the appropriate texts on the subject. The way for me to visit was to close my eyes and visit it in my mind. And I did. At night, I’d go down there and read the witchcraft textbook of the week, sometimes writing things down in the morning. (However, my daytime practice results were iffy, and at some point, I stopped engaging with… whatever that was.)

But I’m in my witchy phase again—and I don’t think it’s just a phase this time—I have schizophrenia, and I still seem to have a library in my head to go visit, so, y’know… yeah, I’m not sure how that sentence ends, either.

But, too much time in Atziluth also has some pretty big social effects, that look a lot like what we call negative symptoms of schizophrenia, lack of normal functions. Or, I’m a pretentious space case.

I struggle with spending too much time grounded in the physical world (eventually, my brain will rebel and dissociate, rendering me flat or nonverbal), and struggle to find joy or stay engaged in what most people consider the mundanities of friendship—playing games, watching television together. I prefer extended freeform conversation focused on ideas, or coexisting in the same space as we both engage with our own ideas in some way (the adult version of parallel play, frequently associated with autism, which I also have), visiting Atziluth together, in a way, but most people do not. Relatedly, I also just don’t have much motivation to interact with people (outside of larger groups) I’m not already very close with, who are more compatible with that kind of interaction; I prefer my friends to be more like family, and I want more of that (though I’m grateful for the people I have), but struggle with getting to that phase with new people.

I swear I’m still an extrovert, overall (I used to be an introvert)—I get my energy from the kind of social interaction I prefer—but I’m an atypical and mentally ill extrovert who struggles to get that preference met. So, sometimes, I lack the energy to try to get that need met (have you ever been just too hungry to cook?), or to engage at all, and prefer for the moment to just play with my ideas and visit Atziluth by myself. (Which, incidentally, looks a lot like workaholism, since, when generally properly medicated, I’ve made something resembling a career out of it, instead of getting stuck in Atziluth the whole time and staring into space blankly).

None of this is a major news flash, just a new connection, a new way of thinking about symptoms (although, reading over this post, I don’t think it’s an explanation suited to casual conversation).

Schizophrenia can be almost as hard to pin down as Kabbalah, so new explanation frameworks that make any kind of sense to me, at least, are something I always welcome.

Tracking the I’ll Give You Series vs. My Mental Health at the Time

I wrote a post a while back: “Tracking Contrivance vs. My Mental Health at the Time,” an exercise in tracing changes in my writing versus changes in my mental health.

For this post, I’m doing it again, with the emphasis on the I’ll Give You series.

(Note: this post was updated to go through the current month, after the original post.)

May 2020

It’s been most of a year since the whole “my father died suddenly at fifty-eight and I found his ten day old corpse in his house” thing. I seemed to be over the worst of the trauma response for a little while, but the pandemic struck full force two months ago, reports about overstuffed refrigerated trucks dominating the news. My grandmother passed just days ago at home in hospice care; I arrived just moments after her death to sit with family.

I’ve spent most of a year buried in Contrivance, my dark, primary original fiction project of most of a decade, writing instead of sleeping. My fear of beds—too many bodies in too many beds, memory and flashback and nightmare and hallucination—is so bad, I’ve taken to sleeping on the floor in the loft (after scaring the daylights out of my best friend—now our quarantine roommate in the guest room—by unexpectedly sleeping on the couch, in the house we closed on the first day of March). I’m not on meds, and I’m Zooming my therapist weekly. The world is burning. I just got engaged.

And I need less doom and gloom.

The idea for a new writing project is slowly taking shape. Daydreams—erotic and otherwise—start to take real shape, the same characters, situations, themes, showing up again and again. I could use a distraction, a little side project. Maybe eighty-thousand words, I tell myself, a few months, one book. Just a detour while I figure out a few things about my real writing love, Contrivance. (It’s not you, it’s me. Maybe we just need a break.)

I start hashing out character basics, scroll Zillow for setting inspiration, combining random ideas into a plot. I sit on the couch and talk it all out with my best friend, also a writer in need of distraction.

I’m taking an online writing workshop, and our prompt for a freewrite one day is company from out of town could mean trouble. I misinterpret it slightly—though the instructor stresses that it’s open to interpretation—and a plot is born, an enemy, a cause, an ending to the story.

I start writing for real, and it’s like a dam bursting. I struggle with titles for a bit, but eventually settle on I’ll Give You Everything I Am (You’ll Give Me Everything I Want to Be). And I start posting it on Archive of Our Own to a silent reception for a full five chapters, because why not?

July 2020

I am still writing like crazy—even winning Camp NaNoWriMo, writing over fifty thousand words in July alone—though I dropped out of the more structured writing workshop. (I finished a shorter one on dialogue, and I notice that this project’s dialogue is much more relaxed, natural, than in Contrivance, something I want to take with me to my edits.) I’m also picking up a bit of an audience, which is exciting, and a little nervewracking—I’ve never really written erotica before, not even something centered on romance.

I’ve also picked up two tricky, additional main characters, whom I battle with—they want to throw grenades at my plot, and I would like them to go away and leave my three-month, eighty-thousand word, one-book side project alone. I retcon them out of past chapters where they’re not strictly needed only for them to pop up again, more significantly, later, until we’re seriously throwing the word polyamory around.

I’m spending a lot of time at the park, on the swingset in triple digit heat, listening to music and trying to figure this project out. Who on Earth are these two, and where do they fit into my beautifully simple, tiny project?

And so Jen and Clara are born.

Meanwhile, my mental health isn’t going so well. I’m hallucinating regularly—mostly Dad, dead, and, of all things, a mysterious golden retriever puppy named Farrah. I’m catatonic for hours at a time, occasionally delusional, and generally a mess.

I also start this—The Schizophrenia Diaries—because I sure have mental health things to talk about. I’m still maintaining my older blog—more alternative sexuality education—too, and that’s now picking up attention from my erotic fiction audience.

My therapist thinks I should go back on meds, but I can’t even get in to my old psychiatrist.

Everyone is a mess right now.

August 2020

I’ve accepted—mostly—that Jen and Clara exist. In Chapter Fourteen, Clara tells Lalia a story that just begs for more, about a time she ran away. In the middle of the night, in the dark, I fire up a new document and title it bluntly “The Night That Clara Ran Away”, a title which oddly sticks permanently, and has a few more stories titled in something like parody, like the later “The Night That Clara Just Wanted to Sleep” and “The Night That Evan Ran Away.”

So I begin writing companion stories.

September 2020

I’m back on meds, and it’s mostly great. I’m sleeping at night, and all but bouncing with energy during the day. I stop seeing my therapist. My best friend moves in with my mom, and I get my own swingset in the backyard. Vaccines are on the horizon, my wedding is in two months. I’ve been posting Contrivance bits on their own website. A neurologist rules out the idea that I’m having seizures.

In that process, I’m required to do a sleep deprived EEG. So I pull an all nighter. My appointment also happens to be right after Yom Kippur. So I start fasting at sundown, sleep, fast for about twenty-six hours total, eat dinner, and then stay up all night, snacking, and have my morning appointment and then a full afternoon and evening awake, for a total of thirty-eight consecutive waking hours.

If one wasn’t psychotic at the start of that, they would be by the end.

And, y’know, I was schizophrenic to start with.

In the middle of the all nighter, I create a Discord server to chat with myself, like a normal person, figuring out I’ll Give You plot bits. In that crazed night, the plot of what becomes Book Two—by now I’ve accepted a Book Two is coming—is born.

November 2020

I get married. It is one of the best days of my life, and another one is close on its heels.

I finish what I now acknowledge is only Book One of what I’ve hesitantly started to call the I’ll Give You series/trilogy, and, for fun, have a few copies vanity printed for me and friends. But now that I’ve put all the formatting work in… why not self publish?

So I do. It’s surreal, to hold a published book that arrived in the mail, with hundreds of pages, a real cover, a summary on the back along with reader reviews, a dedication page with my wife’s name on it, and my (pen) name on the front.

But… that looks like a book, my mom says when I send her a picture. She had a vague understanding that I was posting erotica online after my best friend blurted it out at dinner, but is surprised—as am I—by the almost four hundred page hardcover in my hands.

Yeah. My quick little side project, indeed.

To my shock, people who aren’t my mom even buy it.

December 2020

Encouraged, I start posting Contrivance in the same manner—serially, in order, as a book, on Archive of Our Own. It doesn’t get quite the same engagement, which is funny to me—Contrivance is still my precious baby in a way, not the I’ll Give You series, but that’s okay. Sex sells. I accept that. I’m also accepting I might actually know something about these things I’ve been writing about, and schedule my first classes as an alternative sexuality educator.

I think I’ve just about got things figured out—I know how Jen and Clara fit into my no longer so simple plot, I know how I like to post things, I know how self publishing works, I know what has an audience, I know how to talk to my mom about it, I know what’s coming in Book Two—and then, Clara tosses another grenade.

She has an eating disorder. Anorexia, specifically. Well, mostly recovered, but it’s been there this whole time.

And… it has. It’s there, all right—in every time we see her interact with food. It’s there, every time she might want a coping mechanism. It’s there, in the way she looks in the mirror, in the way she lives in the dance studio, in her penchant for self destruction. It’s there, in the former perfectionistic, traumatized teenager without a mother. It’s been there.

So I do some research, and I make it work.

February 2021

This whole writing companions thing is kind of out of control, and now there’s a book’s worth of them, and I publish The First IGY Companion as almost an accident.

I’ve started teaching webinars, I’ve started going to butler school. Other areas of my life are picking up—not just hunkered down writing.

May 2021

I take a little staycation, a few day writing retreat alone at a nearby hotel, using rewards points that we got to keep through the pandemic.

I don’t take care of myself well, though, too lost in my words. My mental state spirals, and I self harm for the first time in many years.

Interestingly, the chapter I’m writing is the one where the main character, Lalia, tries blood play for the first time.

My wife takes me home early, and I recover quickly.

July 2021

By now, I’m running Las Vegas TNG, a local alternative sexuality group, and I publish Service Slave Secrets (Volume One), the first years of my blog on the subject, to a nice reception.

Book Two—I’ll Give You Everything I Want to Be (You’ll Give Me Everything I Need to Be)—is flowing, as everyone unpacks their issues in and out of therapy.

I try going off my meds briefly, gradually cutting down with the thought that I’ll stop when it starts to affect my sleep, as that’s the easiest way to measure the minimum dosage. However, my sleep doesn’t really suffer, but I abruptly realize, five minutes overdue for the first dose I’ve totally skipped, that I’ve been absolutely miserable, and can’t hear my own thoughts over the music hallucinations I mistook for a song stuck in my head, among others.

I go back to the full dosage that night.

November 2021

Several months into the “health kick” that’s taken an especially dark spiral recently—hint hint, healthy diets don’t include this much purging and fasting and overexercising—I accept that I have an eating disorder—all of the symptoms of anorexia, not quite underweight—and start the cycle of on again off again commitment to recovery. I don’t need to weight restore, but this cycle has got to stop. I start to talk about it with the people close to me, and write a post in which I theorize about where it came from:

Clara.

It’s been almost a year since my abrupt realization that Clara had an eating disorder, and I am now detangling my thoughts and hers. I write a post on this—the dangers of writing a character with a disorder I don’t have, as a schizophrenic author with a very fine line between character and self.

At some point in my research, the tables turned. Now I’m writing backstory companions to pour what my head sounds like onto paper—this many calories eaten, this many hours left to fast, this many pounds, BMI this, BMR that, that many minutes of exercise—thoughts that weren’t mine when I started.

I write about how I took an online eating disorder assessment as research early on, and got a very safe, normal score. Now, though: yup. Something’s not right.

Which came first? Was I already developing disordered eating habits, projecting them onto a character until I couldn’t deny it was me anymore? I’m convinced that the character’s disorder came first, but we’ll see.

Incidentally, I finish and publish Book Two instead of winning NaNoWriMo.

March 2022

I publish The Second IGY Companion along with Contrivance in the same hectic week, having recently finished my first (posted) AU for the I’ll Give You series: “Let’s Not Be Star Crossed Lovers”, a short multichapter of alternate backstory.

I’m also finally learning to drive, hallucinations under control, which is always an emotional roller coaster.

Book Three—I’ll Give You Everything I Need to Be (You’ll Give Me Everything I Am)—continues on.

It’s certainly an interesting month. I’m still bouncing back and forth on the eating habits, now with my wife’s help supervising three meals a day for a while, starting to sort out my disordered thoughts around food, focusing on the fact that skinny seems to represent productive for me, and that I’m actually more productive if I just suck it up and eat.

August 2022

Book Three is still in progress, flowing along. A few companions have gone up, but they’re slowing down, and I’m thinking of editing them into a future edition of The Second IGY Companion rather than creating a third. I have at least one more AU going on in my head to write.

I’ve gotten into hiking in the last few months, started donating plasma, and started a Little Free Library, and have been working on my newest blog, A Productive Hannah, and am eyeing a brewing sequel to Contrivance.

I publish Service Slave Secrets: Volume Two, breaking my personal royalty records.

August is a hard month for me, though. I’d like to blame it on hormonal, non psychiatric med changes, but I’m not sure. Right on the heels of some major anniversaries involving my father’s birth and death, symptoms, especially the eating issues, flare, and burnout threatens.

I take a week of vacation in Boston, and pledge to take September off from events.

October 2022

I’m back to events, but we’ve gotten into camping, a welcome reprieve from most of the world. I’m trying to find balance, and overall, my events and writings are going really well. I’m really feeling what’s going on in Book Three, and soon to publish The Schizophrenia Diaries.

We’ll see what the future holds.