the extremities of fear
Sep. 21st, 2024 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pnictogen_wingone of the horrible ironies I've come to realize about the difficult relationship between my older sibling and myself, which I'm starting to remember in better detail from past decades, is that we were both maximally *afraid* all the time, but our addled brains went in two completely different directions with it. and I rather wonder why that might have been. I went towards total dissociation; Frisk went towards the far less pleasant option, extreme paranoia.
cw: mental illness, dealing with extreme emotional pain, paranoia vs. dissociation
Frisk has always been more grounded than me, more practical, better at studying, better at doing difficult jobs, all that sort of thing. but they suffered from paranoia and hallucinations. it's like they clung so tightly to their grounded and orderly notion of the Universe that when madness came it simply *broke through* their reality in terrifying irruptions they could never make sense of. they willed with every fiber of their being that their internal sense of the Universe should be sane and rational, and unreason kicked down the doors anyway.
whereas my mind chose numbness and escape. it's ironic that when I read William Goldman's *The Princess Bride* in high school and got to the passages where Wesley was dissociating into golden visions of Buttercup when Count Rugen was torturing him, I remember thinking "huh that's interesting how do you learn to do that I wonder" when my brain was already doing it for me and I just wasn't picking up on it. my conscious mind had already accepted that I lived in a Universe that *didn't* make sense, where irrational and hurtful things happened and it was all just some cosmic joke or other.
no wonder we could never understand each other until after we were both dead
~Chara of Pnictogen
cw: mental illness, dealing with extreme emotional pain, paranoia vs. dissociation
Frisk has always been more grounded than me, more practical, better at studying, better at doing difficult jobs, all that sort of thing. but they suffered from paranoia and hallucinations. it's like they clung so tightly to their grounded and orderly notion of the Universe that when madness came it simply *broke through* their reality in terrifying irruptions they could never make sense of. they willed with every fiber of their being that their internal sense of the Universe should be sane and rational, and unreason kicked down the doors anyway.
whereas my mind chose numbness and escape. it's ironic that when I read William Goldman's *The Princess Bride* in high school and got to the passages where Wesley was dissociating into golden visions of Buttercup when Count Rugen was torturing him, I remember thinking "huh that's interesting how do you learn to do that I wonder" when my brain was already doing it for me and I just wasn't picking up on it. my conscious mind had already accepted that I lived in a Universe that *didn't* make sense, where irrational and hurtful things happened and it was all just some cosmic joke or other.
no wonder we could never understand each other until after we were both dead
~Chara of Pnictogen
