So, you find yourself here. That is to say, you don’t know where you are or what it is that happened to you exactly. First thing’s first: you will never be the same person again. A psychotic episode is too significant an event. You’ve seen and said and suffered too much. Well, good riddance anyways. Here is my advice on how to navigate this new world.

On writing – Who is writing for? This was a major concern for me. I busied my mind with the object and subject of my writing – for such and such a person or audience, or perhaps my idea of that person or audience. Of course, writing never occurs in the abstract, it must always be for or to someone. The whole world cannot be your audience, as then you write for no one. On the other hand, you yourself do not know who you are, you are fragmented to yourself. But did you ever really know who you are? What does it mean to “know thyself,” as inscribed at the Delphic temple of Apollo. So, we are back to square one, writing yet not knowing from where or to whom, and hence also not being confident in what end we write. This is the reality I occupy in my writing – writing as labour out of love – as a giving birth. Your whole life you didn’t know from whom to whom, from where to where and for which purpose. The madness of civilization is that they need you to be something; they cannot stand that you be nothing. Hence names, social insurance numbers, drivers’ licenses, credentials, work histories. The tragedy that many now are just becoming aware of is that when one is forced to be something, then they are really nothing. Is their labour out of love? Is their love out of love? My work is an emancipation of subjectivity, of the who.

A theory of gravity – Fruit falls from the tree because it is ready – because it is ripe. This is the meaning of labour – ripening. The fruit grows in heaviness, grows in subjectivity, until it gives of itself freely and falls. We thus interpret Love as the governing force of the universe, and it is only from the standpoint of narcissistic subjectivity that this seems wishy washy or pseudo-scientific. Our charge is that our Western understanding of the subject as an enclosed subsisting self is a foolish error, out of which one feels compelled to make a religion out of love, to externalize it as something apart from themselves. Isn’t this the meaning of humanity’s various efforts at making religions: to externalize what they lack in the form various gods, saviours, and messiahs? They need someone to save them from themselves because they themselves cannot – they have become too heavy yet still won’t fall from the tree. Oh, you are so heavy and rotten that you would explode upon impact!

Let us return to my madness, my concrete concern today. On the surface, there seem to be so many alternative realities for the mad. One could have been an oracle at the temple at Delphi, or an enlightened follower of Buddha, or a saint. What I wish to stress is that these are not the same phenomena – one does not simply “go mad,” as if one were a self-contained entity that is then subject to their social and historical contexts. The mad are mad in virtue of belonging to their social and historical contexts. In other words, they are created by them – the historicity of madness. They are our collective guilt, sprouting from our inability to be ourselves, from our inability to fall from the tree. The psych ward and the psychiatric institution is thus a concentration of the failings of human kind. It is a sort of torture device of subjectivities – on the one hand, nurses, doctors, and social workers, those who exist by virtue of being those things. The schizophrenic subject is the one who suffers so much precisely for their obscure subjectivity – wandering, fragmented, shattered. Be quick! They would have you get back on track to being someone – to being nothing like them.

Madness at the heights – possibly the most madenning thing one faces in the institution is the infantilization, the condescension. Their behaviour will not cease to remind you that they think that they know what’s best for you. So commonly, then, patients will adopt standpoints where their madness has validity and power. The whole system reeks of power relations, of who is higher than the other, of who is the master and who is the slave. Thus, in retaliation, ideas of sainthood – that one is closer to God. Or, ideas of enlightenment, that one sees the true nature of reality and that it is they who are the lost stupid ones. One maybe even finds the will to forgive them – “forgive them for they know not what they do”. You cannot stay in their torture device of subjectivity forever; you need to become someone. The answer to the master-slave dialectic – the material slave is the one who attains their spiritual freedom, their true subjectivity above that of a mere name and number. Thus, my will: I will never forgive you lifeless bastards.

To those like me, here is what I’ve learned:

On the various logical progressions of psychosis – One is still logical in psychosis. One still has realizations. When you feel like they are being watched and tracked, which seems to often occur in a psychotic episode – and which, frankly, is justified – who cares! Let them see if they would have eyes to see. Similarly with thinking that the play of the world is staged and revolves around you and those close to you. Doesn’t it?! Against all plausibility, you are here and joined by others at the same time, caught up in your various relations. Everyone plays their role in the play! I am a strict believer in destiny and fate – we end up exactly where we’re meant to be!

On confidence – The world will do everything in its power to make you distrust your intuition and your rationality. Your friends will lead you to distrust your intuition and rationality. If you distrust yourself, there is nothing left – you and everyone are lost. People would offer you ridiculous things like to “educate” you about your condition, about your mania and psychosis. What they have difficult understanding is that your “state” isn’t significant as a state but is a way of movement or process that you unfold along.

Against empathy – Empathy as an absolute law is the most destructive levelling force. It would have us always “be understanding of others,” to understand the causality of their suffering – for isn’t this the dark secret of defenders of empathy, that they are destructive logicians who don’t yet have a grasp of the nuances of logic? They would level the entire world into the causality of understanding. Everyone could live in hell but at least they would empathize with it – they would understand it. They can claim to themselves at the end of the day that they cared.

On attunement – There is wisdom and reason in the body, in madness. The whispers of the breeze and the murmurs of squirrels. What does one hear? Only what one is meant to.

The harsh truth of weight gain on antipsychotic medication – The outside simply matches the inside. All nimbleness of mind and spirit is gone. Very well, I have enough for both of us!

On identity – The ward is the last place that wants you to be yourself, as much as they claim that any treatments are to bring you back to yourself.

One law above all needs to be remembered: the psychiatrists, the nurses, the social workers, aren’t there for you. They’re there for no other reason than being psychiatrists, nurses, or social workers, and you’re there for no other reason than being mad. The slim chances that your entire lives leading up to this moment brought you together… Everything happens for a reason, every piece fits carefully in the unfolding of time. The truth is that they need you far more than you need them, because they wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for you. They would hand you the nauseating burden of their lost freedom – the nausea of psychosis. The last thing they want is for you to be yourself again; they will repeatedly confuse yourself with how you appear to the masses – your age, your name, your credentials. Not only that, but they would police your manners while spitting in your face; they forget about their appointments, your wishes to not medicate – which they call you “not wanting to get better” – your diet, your ability to go outside, to exercise. They’ll keep trying to bait you and ask the same questions over and over again – “so I hear you’re talking to spiders and squirrels”. They keep pressing the point – the next day, again, “you ´speak’ to them, right, right?” It’s their madness that’s truly dizzying. It is up to you to reclaim yourself, and that includes your passion – your anger. The bastards, they would steal it from you and make you polite!

They do not know me – I am only just teaching them about myself. A question for so-called friends who might claim to know me – am I being myself? Do you really know how I write and think? My advice to you: be careful in pretending to know me, you might underestimate my ability to drag you into my hell ;)

This is my fuck you to anyone who was “just trying to help”. When the world burns you hard enough, you have to come to terms with the new shape of your anger and hate. I love no one and nothing. There, now we’re getting a bit closer to our old selves!