I’m Starting a Kindle Vella Serial!

Hey! Does that book look familiar? Dear god, I hope note. I revamped the FUCK out of that thing.

The original book had a way more of a focus on romantic relationships and a certain i-word that has been scrapped entirely because wowza…what a mess that whole project was.

Okay, this book is more about the general directionlessness of one’s early-mid twenties and (the part I’m most excited about!) the problems with the psych industry.

Like I talked about in my livestream a couple months ago, I have some experience with the psych industry. I have all the diagnoses.

Okay, I’ll do a meme watch:

Me: doctors which psychiatric illness do I have?

Doctors: YES

I told y’all to stop teaching me memes. I can’t be trusted to use them responsibly.

Well, anyhow, I don’t actually think I have all of the disorders the doctors threw at me. Let’s see Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major Depression, Catatonic Depression (that one was temporary-I think it usually is-I started moving and talking again eventually-I don’t think most people could remain in a state like that more than a few weeks), boderline, bipolar, and schizoaffective.

Whew! Was I playing bingo or what?

Really though, once you know all about pharma’s influence in the creation of the DSM and the diagnoses of patients, it kind of makes you suspect that half those disorders are even real. And the bipolar diagnoses they gave me when I was 14, 2 days after my grandfather beat the fuck out of me and I was in the ER in this highly-charged emotional state, and they diagnosed me right then and there. So….yep, I’m not too sure I trust that.

I definitely have some emotional issues. I definitely have strange perceptions and ideas at times, and I do weird shit as a result. (Although don’t mistake me: I’m not blaming my general assholery on my mental health issues. Like yeah, I have mental health issues, but I also have impulse control issues and I tend to be a tad self-involved. When push comes to shove, I can always keep the crazy in check when I really need to. I never had a meltdown while working with kids. I never had a meltdown working with alzheimers patients. I know how to sit quietly and wait for the emotional storm to pass when the stakes are high enough. So I’m not saying my mental health problems are the reason I act like such a shit sometimes. My reasons for wanting to act like a shit might stem from mental health problems-then there’s still me making the active choice to act like a shit). Anyway, emotional issues and problems with weird ideas don’t automatically correlate to all of those labels. I take the psycho-social perspective: I think I’m a little screwy because my childhood was sort of fucked. It wasn’t the worst, I guess. It’s not like I was locked in a basement and beat/starved/raped constantly. It also wasn’t the best. It used to make me sick to my stomach when my mom would be affectionate: when she would hug me or say anything nice to me. I felt like I was walking cautiously around a wild animal and one wrong move would send her feral. But to be objective for a second, as far as people-fucked-up-by-childhood go, I think I probably score just a little higher than average. I think the violence and screaming in my house was just a little more than average. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t upsetting or that it hasn’t made it difficult for me to manage my emotions and form relationships with people over the years.

Anyhow…the psych industry…all of that was a horrible experience. So absolutely horrible. I feel so deeply hurt when I think about my time in-patient, the drugs, the doctors, the way they didn’t listen to me and sided with the adults abusing me, the way they GAVE my mom tools and language to tear me down further. God, I wish there was a way to show people what that was like for me. How isolating and horrible it was. How the drugs made my weird thoughts worse and instead of taking me off them, the doctors gave me new diagnoses based on the symptoms that the drugs gave me.

The psych field made me feel so small and alone. It was so dehumanizing.

Anyway, that’s my new goal for the rewritten version of this book. I want to highlight those problems. I want people to fully understand the systemic issues with the psych industry and I want people to treat mentally ill individuals with respect and dignity.

So yeah, ‘Incel’ is now ‘Feels Bad, Man.’

I like this new direction a lot better and I hope that it actually does some good in the world. The book is going to be far more autobiographical and the focus is no longer the male experience, but the psych patient’s experience.

Or idk, maybe it won’t do anything and I’ll go stick to monster girl porn.

Okay! Well, Vella is supposed to open up to readers mid-July. I’ll update once the rewritten book is live.