you are double bookkeeping

okay. today i'm going to talk about my thoughts and experiences in regards to double bookkeeping. let's make one thing very clear first: i am not diagnosed with any psychotic disorder. and because we live in a society, i will never allow that to happen if it can be helped.

no matter how much i struggle with my thoughts, i firmly believe that:

if you are not on the psychotic spectrum, you read about something like this and it seems like an incredibly frightening and confusing thing to experience - like it's a force suddenly and dramatically tearing you away from life; an unimaginable disaster like a tornado or a flood. in my case, i had the same read to filth emotion as the first time i read about executive dysfunction. also the feeling of, "oh, i guess i'm not just exceptionally stupid and bad, i have a condition that makes me think in certain patterns." at the end of the day, because you have been swimming these waters your whole life, it feels incredibly banal. if the walls are breathing it's no more concerning than having myopia because it registers as the same thing, which is that my eyes suck. a common thread that seems to connect myself and others who experience this goes something along the lines of: well, i know that i'm struggling, but it's still difficult for me to conceptualize my condition as some kind of horrifyingly serious debilitating illness. i'm also reluctant to accept that the things i love, my ability to be creative, and much of what i could say defines me as who i am can be boiled down to a handful of named conditions. but i think that "look at all the crazy things i can do, even without being seriously crazy!" is a product of stigma and ableism, so i want to foster a balance between awareness and neutral existence.

from my perspective, in my words: it feels much like you are participating in a play, with full awareness that there is a world outside of it (and of course, full awareness of exactly what that world is like). the shared reality or intersubjective world is not the world outside the play - it is the play. you are aware that it's important to play your part in this production because otherwise, it will impact everybody else's performance and the show will be ruined and it will be all your fault. so while there is something technically more important happening outside, it doesn't matter because nobody is calling "fire" and you would be an idiot, a traitor, and just an overall jackass for simply walking off the stage. and i want to emphasize as much as possible how INCREDIBLY EASY it is to pass off your own experience of this as just "neurodivergent masking" / struggling within the context of this shit society. to be explicit, i think that many of us (not only schizospec) are handwaving our own psychotic symptoms, which are only worth pathologizing insofar as they are an issue we are otherwise unable to identify without knowledge of these terms and patterns. i really want to be hopeful that someday, people's concept of these highly stigmatized illnesses can become grounded and integrated into their understanding of the world around them, and themselves. more on that later.

generally, whenever i try to explain double bookkeeping to people i always think of pokemon blind and deaf. what i find the most hilarious about the term double bookkeeping is that the number of realities does not always end at two. much of my ambient anxiety stems from not just the fact that i must succeed on all planes of reality, but the vague and constant awareness that i'm doing a terrible job at all of it. i am forgetting my lines in the play AND i left the oven on at home. over time i've ground my sense of valuing my own inner world into dust, so if and when i succumb to it it's not because i think it's more important, but because i haven't noticed that i've already gotten sucked into it. i cannot underscore enough how much this is happening almost exclusively in the undertow of my ~awareness and whenever i am ~aware of it, it is only through context clues, environmental storytelling and historical breadcrumbs.

i also think there's a deficit in recognition and understanding in regards to this phenomenon because currently schizophrenia in particular is almost exclusively diagnosed as a condition that overtakes you once you become too dysfunctional to hide it anymore. it is typically seen as an invading force that infects you via foreign mind control with no warning, in spite of the fact that everybody who experiences double bookkeeping has been experiencing it their whole lives (i know i have, in various permutations). it really doesn't help that the label of schizophrenia is purposefully fucked so that it can be used as another tool to marginalize, manipulate, and suppress already very disadvantaged people, particularly black leftists.

on top of that, the documented presentations of total breakdowns/powerful delusions/parallel understandings of reality have a tendency to follow common patterns easily dismissed as conspiracy theories or persecution complexes - you think the CIA is after you, you think a sniper is poised to shoot you, you think aliens are probing your mind, you think other people's behaviors and speech are carefully constructed in a way to undermine you, etc. and yet it's close enough to how crazy this world actually is that the mere threat of going insane can be used to gaslight the entire modern world. this post from /r/schizotypal is literally it:

on the other hand, for me the paranoid end of things is sometimes a bit different, if not inverted, because my emotions/beliefs tend to originate from a point of feeling that everything is my fault and if bad things happen to me then i deserve it. you see... i am. the danger.

i believe - on some level, in parallel with my other understanding of reality - that whenever i do or say literally anything, it's like i'm cookie clicking my way to making [in the absolute broadest sense possible] Things worse. staying completely still and doing nothing is still doing something, so that also makes things worse. anything involving people is 9999999999999x worse. something i try to look for is the uniformity of the perceived consequence of every action and thing i could say, because i find it particularly telling in the way that it points to this being a delusion as opposed to the truth. this is especially difficult to navigate when i'm experiencing a mixed crash after being manic, or i guess it's more that it becomes way harder to ignore. the other day a leaf smacked me in the face while i was biking and it felt totally personal. this would happen to someone who shouldn't have been there. a sign that i am intruding into a situation that never needed nor wanted me. but i was also like... it's a leaf that arbitrarily fell from whatever tree and anyone could have been there at that moment. and then after i subconsciously process all this in a split second i have the gall to think to myself that i don't experience ideas of reference.

imagine, for a moment, that the year is 2012. the DSM-V was just a twinkle in the eye of the psychiatric community, there was no "autism spectrum disorder", and for better or for worse autism was still seen as a diseased state that traps its sufferer in Mind Jail. over the course of my lifetime, i've watched it develop into the sterilized, over-diagnosed monster phenomenon it is today. all those "low functioning" autistic people alive then still exist and have been here, every moment leading up to this day, watching all the other more palatable autistic people sprout up around them. but as the culture acclimates to the concept of people actually being autistic and what that looks like, it fills me with a bittersweet feeling. there are always good and bad things about being considered useful to the machine of capitalism. and so: i do think that people are really for real autistic even if they are "high functioning", whether they come to this conclusion earlier or later in life, and really, whether or not a psychiatrist agrees with them. they ostensibly have some reason(s) for resonating with the diagnosis and personally, i would rather 100 allistic people call themselves autistic than leave 1 autistic person in the dark about their condition because they're worried about being another like them. it behooves us to be wrong first if it brings us closer to figuring out what's right. i see similar discourse in lgbt/queer circles and i feel exactly the same way about it. you are trans. you are lesbian. whatever. you already possess the hubris of thinking of yourself as an individual even though you are made of trillions of cells and your life relies on quantitatively more bacteria that come and go inside(?) you. if it helps you to understand yourself better by thinking of yourself or things about yourself in whatever way then do it, whenever possible. if you're a kinnie i'm pointing at you

the reason diagnostic labels exist today is to serve the healthcare industry. you know - the healthcare industry. everything that goes into diagnostics is a feature, not a bug, of market forces. i don't feel like i can trust myself or anyone else, so i try to find as much information as i can from different sources to get a feel for the bigger picture. when referencing specifically the DSM and ICD manuals (generally, opposite for other systems of medicine) i think it's especially helpful to take a symptom-first (as opposed to diagnosis-first) approach to understanding yourself because it's just literal descriptions of consistent, observable phenomena. we know that X Treatment helps with Y Symptom, independent of whether or not Z Diagnosis includes that criteria or not at a particular point in history, if it still exists at all. even when treating depression we still, in 2026, see high rates of relapse and non-responsiveness. that's partly because psychotic depression and literally just being anhedonic are being caught with the same net, and so is just being in a really shitty life situation and/or world. if a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder requires meeting five out of nine criteria, someone who makes the diagnosis with just five is going to have more in common with someone who demonstrates only four - someone who supposedly doesn't have the condition at all - than someone with eight or nine. and how do we know someone with three isn't just coping really well? they still know what those experiences are like, but they're managing them better. maybe that's why BPD is actually very treatable with a high rate of remission once treated properly instead of being stigmatized to the point of high mortality! :D

now, let's be honest. for quite a few reasons, many of which i have already discussed, schizophrenic intelligence will never achieve the status achieved by cogwashing. it is a condition practically defined by being directly at odds with the machine of capitalism, rendering its features perfectly non-useful to its workings. it's literally not a coincidence that the stigma has remained, if not worsened in some ways. like WHY DID THE DIFFERENT SUBTYPES, WHICH MAY AS WELL HAVE BEEN ENTIRELY SEPARATE DISEASES AND HAVE BEEN DEMONSTRATED TO NEED DIFFERENT TREATMENTS, GET THROWN UNDER THE SAME BUS BY THE DSM-V????? it's such a fascinatingly opposite effect of people diagnosed with the more acceptable ASD conditions sort of pulling the "autistic" label up with them once it started applying. it's also not a coincidence that schizospec folks and people on psychedelic drugs experience similar things, and that world governments and the deep state *starts bleeding from mouth* have encouraged suppression and stigmatization of both to discourage ways of thinking that are dangerous to *pukes blood* the... system. sigh. it's true and i don't know how else to say it i'm sorry

when people who mostly identify with the autistic struggle talk about masking, i can't help but wonder what it would be like to drop my mask the way they can generally drop the mask around other autistic people. the dance i perform to manage my double bookkeeping makes me feel like a liar and a pretender because i am caught between not wanting to bother people with my condition and yet being forced to be around other people in order to not completely isolate myself and all the consequences that would have. there is nobody who makes me feel completely safe, though my roommate gets close. for everyone else, i always feel like i'm intruding into a situation and into lives where i do not belong - and in a large way i feel that i am intruding on my mental illness for hypocritically being around other people and disregarding my own thoughts and feelings, just as much as my mental illness intrudes on me, and everyone through me. when my fear wins out over my guilt, the next-best thing is to hide it all and be a liar and a pretender. when my guilt wins out, i erratically and inarticulately spill my guts; it's hard to not conflate opening up with losing control because usually that's the only time it happens. i'd like to hope that this blog post falls into neither habit. i've just been coming around to the fact that i've never meaningfully engaged with this stuff before because i felt like it was cringe or appropriative. i can try really hard to believe that this will do something good instead of just being a huge mistake. i won't ever recover from poison if i don't walk it off first.

from the moment i wake to when i fall asleep, there is no point in the entire day i do not doubt my thoughts and feelings on the most fundamental level. everything makes me feel like "i think", "i guess", "probably", "maybe", because of my vague perpetual awareness that my insight is shit, most of my thoughts do not feel like my own and my understanding of everything is very fluid moment to moment. historically, because i've had little in the way of a mental foundation i've been left with the worst possible combination of being extremely paranoid and extremely easy to exploit. when i'm having an episode it gets so stupid that it's like, "okay, well, i know i need to drink water to live, but i also know that i need to lay completely motionless in order to keep my thoughtform alive in the most literal sense - so let me feed it first and then myself." or "*beaming information at people directly* oh i wonder if this is super rude actually." as silly as it feels after the fact it completely sneaks up on me in the moment.

on that note, sharpie also pointed out something i'm still chewing on: schizospec mania is very different from bipolar mania. in his words: "with bipolar mania, you feel invisible. when i'm in an episode, it's the polar opposite." my experience with mania does seem different from the way that my friend with bipolar i experiences it. for me it's like i'm getting sucked into a whitewater current, this is the most important idea ever but it's also the most dangerous idea ever, and it's some kind of terrifying secret that wants to burst out of me in a bloody explosion and it's my job to protect it and us. i always fail at this. even when i am manic i'm actually just successfully outrunning the terrible feeling that i'm getting away with something, possibly everything, and as much as i'm enjoying the taste of god's cerebrospinal fluid i also know on some level that it's abhorrently wrong for it to have passed my lips. i am driven only by the sense that whatever i am doing is something of importance beyond any ability to articulate it, and that i have to keep it alive because otherwise i will have killed it and then it will kill me and then we will both be dead.

AT THE VERY SAME TIME, i also know that i'm just a guy and i'm just here and all my thoughts and feelings are just spaghetti floating in pasta sauce. at the end of the day it's mundane because it is normal. it is human.

as a person with a strong desire for independence, kindness, and responsibility, the uncertainty is the part of my illness that bothers me the most. it doesn't register as a feature of an illness; only that i must be incredibly stupid. i do really hate not being sure of anything, ever. and i especially hate doubting myself every single time i think to myself "would this help or hurt?" about the smallest, most basic things. it's been near impossible to build or maintain close relationships (and many have gone very, very wrong) because i just don't know, and that freaks me out. and there is another side to this: when people know more things about me, i become very claustrophobic. i feel everyone's awareness compressing the bubble of my existence down, somewhat like collapsing quantum waves to particles, but with a palpably unhygienic edge. maybe i'm just out here trying to be a wave, fuck, is that so much to ask. seeing that it is in my nature to believe fundamentally different things about reality at different points, i don't want to become limited to only one, as realistically speaking i won't be able to maintain it. it feels like the most natural version of myself to be nothing and multiple, in this way. if only i could have my brain cake and eat it with others too.

if i play back the tape of my life, i can watch myself folding and unfolding and re-folding the various proteins of my dreamlike knowledge of the world in fast forward. when i was a kid i believed very strongly in portals to other worlds. i emotionally relied on their existence. but i didn't tell a soul about this, and i still went to school and whatever. i practiced my psychic powers. i astral projected. when i was a teen i believed in the power of sigils, and couldn't shake my conviction that two well-connected people could perform telepathy. as an adult i can still watch myself mundanely believing that sometimes a... stream(??) has swallowed me, like i accidentally walked into a path led/taken by ghosts, and that i have no choice but to become the flesh vessel of a prophet's energy to fulfill a prophecy that might do something good or cool if it manifests successfully. now that i'm typing it out it sounds ridiculous but I REALLY CANNOT POSSIBLY UNDERSCORE ENOUGH HOW INCREDIBLY NORMAL IT FEELS

psychotic features also aren't exclusively disruptive or even unhelpful. i have this innate drive to understand where everyone is coming from, as much as possible. i want to connect with everyone's reality, and i can see a sort of visible light spectrum-esque band of sandwiched realities - because after all, there are plenty of layers i can't see. i'm not aware of them yet, though i am driven to become aware of more layers. these layers include dimensions such as interests, the other person's beliefs (all of them down to the individual fibers), my beliefs, life history, how they use their voice, the fact that they are a writhing living human organism and all the other ways they exist as themself in the semiosphere. fandom/shipping has historically provided a healthy outlet for these tendencies where i feel like everything is actually an onion of layered realities; which regardless of everything else i'm saying here, you can't actually tell me that it's not. everything is made of layers of understanding and connotations, e.g. diegesis and metatext and audience bias/perspective, and within this safe place to do so i love recreationally bailing on the play to go streaking in the world outside it. it's such a relief, letting myself sink into these frivolous delusions. i know, vaguely, distantly, extremely unimportantly, that akira toriyama probably didn't "actually" mean to all but imply that son goku is a girl because saiyan girls just look Like That, and in the same way i know that chichi probably isn't actually married to yamcha and krillin isn't gohan's father and etc etc etc. but then again, literally all evidence points to this and dbz makes way more sense when you watch it this way so maybe.........

because this has been an ever-present fundamental aspect of every thought and feeling since i was born, it feels synonymous with myself to the point that the idea of successfully "treating" it is bizarre; not that i haven't tried before. medication seems to EITHER exacerbate my anhedonia/avolition/apathy to the point that i can barely perform basic life functions OR exacerbate my psychotic symptoms. the only medication i'm on right now is for my insomnia. as i hope i've made clear i'm not living my life every day thinking "i wish i wasn't psychotic", because intrinsically, i don't notice it unless and until i miss deadlines or think back on the fact that i'm not taking care of myself. the physics of my thoughts feel like they exist independently of me much the same way that estonia has nothing to do with me, so it's hard to feel an impulse to change anything about it. it's just There, Always, [Neutrally,] and it doesn't feel dramatic or silly at all. it feels like the most natural and logical thing possible. if there's a problem, it's just because i am the problem. leave my psychosis out of it, it's not hurting anyone.

BACK