Bad brain

It is humiliating to be at the mercy of one's brain chemicals, and yet here I am, desperately trying to tamp down what was until a couple of days ago shaping up to be another manic episode. Maybe "just" hypomanic, I don't know. Certainly I'm glad I didn't have to find out, but I know that despite my religious adherence to my medication schedule and general self-care regimen it can and quite likely will happen again. 

It is that despite that kills me. About a year and a half ago I experienced full-blown psychotic mania for the first time since 2015, seemingly out of nowhere, despite. And frankly it was a magnificent feeling: having been raised atheist-agnostic and never having felt a connection with any sort of spiritual deity, I suddenly discovered that God himself was speaking through me, that as the reincarnation of the painter Francis Bacon I was put on earth to impart His message through my creative work. It is difficult to describe the incredible beauty of not only realizing that there was a God but that He had chosen me as his singular conduit, had put His pure love and trust in me. Never mind that as I prayed He eventually revealed to me that to do things right I had to move to Death Valley and, once my mission was complete, kill myself the way Hunter S Thompson did. If it was my God-given destiny, then fine. I'd do it.

When the episode suddenly ended I felt through my intense catatonia a strange sense of grief, not only for my sudden lack of connection with God – I was alone on earth now, no one was looking over me – but for the work I had done to fulfill His wishes. The work in question was, of course, a novel. I managed roughly 25,000 words in it over the course of my episode and have not touched it since.

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Always a damn novel. It happened this past week, too, albeit without the psychosis... yet? Left unchecked, would I have found myself once again spiraling up, up into the heavens, shaking with an electric and desperate need to do the work that God was dictating to me? As it stands, the psychosis wasn't present this time, but the obsession with writing a novel was, as well as the wild hubris that often arrives with my own mania. I knew in that moment that it was going to shake the very foundations of literature, peg me as this generation's James Joyce. No one understood but me – you all just wait, I'd think as I tussled over this or that passage, spent hours moodboarding and pacing back and forth squeezing every idea I could onto the page. I took extensive notes, I made a playlist. I truly lived and breathed it. The characters existed clear as day in my mind and I felt guilt for what the book was going to put them through. Sometimes out of both excitement and fear I found myself in tears.

Well, I'm down to earth now, maybe a little too far down for my comfort, but I'm once again eating and sleeping well and getting necessary "life things" done. The hypomania has vanished and left me with what is functionally a shell of a book, one that is left with 1,387 words to speak of – throughout most of the episode I found myself intensely frustrated with the fact that I couldn't quite get it "right" and subsequently deleting entire chapters in sheer anger. I tried again and again and again, sometimes staying up all night polishing up each paragraph and perfecting dialogue, all to little avail. There was an urgency to write that I couldn't reconcile with what felt like my repeated failure, an inability to write exactly what I wanted to write, but I had to do it. I had no choice.

I do have a choice, of course. The novel (or, I guess, its remaining scraps) still exists on my hard drive, as does all the obsessive research and world-building I poured so much time into. The urgency, though, is gone, replaced by a sense of relative calm and, to my surprise, some lingering motivation: I would still like to finish writing this particular novel, still find the plot something I would like to master, find the characters and their relationships too intriguing to abandon altogether. 

What is difficult for me, sometimes agonizingly so, is trying to find a mental stasis in which I can finish writing a book – ideally this one – without having to be any form of manic to do so. When I'm depressed (often!) I have no interest in writing anything whatsoever; when I'm manic, it's all I want to do. But lately it has been hard for me to find any sort of stasis in general, to move through the world unencumbered by any sort of severe up- or downswing that holds me back from building the type of life I'd like to live. Needless to say this intense cycling of my head-state does not help with writing a book, at least one that I'll feel proud of. 

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What now? I'm not sure, at least not yet. I have gently put the novel aside for now, have not been moved to look at it or add to it over the past couple days. This is both crushing and a huge relief, this acceptance that writing while manic produces nothing that I feel good about and, I've noticed, tends to nudge the mania higher and higher. Just as well, though, I miss the motivation, the devotion, even the embarrassing hubris I felt last week as I devoted my entire soul to the book. I don't know when I'll take another stab at it, or if I ever will again. 

On the other hand, having broken out of my manic state has forced me to contend with the fact that the book was not nearly as fleshed-out as I now think it ought to be. I had the concept but not the full story; only a few scenes existed fully in my head, and I had no clue how to propel the plot forward steadily and intriguingly. The best thing for now, I think, is to simply sit on it and wait, go out and live life and let the book grow in scope and concept as time passes. I'd thought I could "raw-dog" it (sorry), but in my case, at least, blindly sitting down and cranking out a novel won't work if I don't know yet exactly where I want it to go.

So I am patient, at least somewhat. Maybe the mania will come back and I'll get all wired about the novel again, maybe I'll find myself so dully depressed that I don't think about it again for months. As it stands, I know now that the book requires more time and thought, and my awareness of this can only help eventually turn it into the book I actually want to write over time. Ideally the brain chemicals won't get in the way, at least not as much. Ideally. I will simply have to wait and see.

Who do you think you are?

In ten days, provided everything goes properly to plan (please God), I will be undergoing top surgery. I've been ping-ponging from doctor's office to doctor's office, tithing samples of blood and piss, listing all the medications I take and what they're for, having my heart and lungs listened to, getting weighed; there has been a sense of loneliness to every one of these visits that I cannot shake, and one that only increases as my surgery date grows closer. It took a conversation with a friend to help me tease out why this is, and ultimately, it's pretty obvious: making an active choice to undergo an elective surgery to alleviate the dysphoria that's dogged me for over half my life is one that, no matter how much support I have, is my choice alone. I am lucky enough to have quite a lot of support in this instance, but I myself made the decision to make a consultation last year, and next Friday, I'm the one going under the knife.

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People keep telling me that I will feel "more like myself" once the surgery is done. I understand what they're getting at and don't fault anyone for saying it. Obviously, though, this has sent me into a giant mental vortex about what my "self" is, whether there's a "pure" and "true" Will that's waiting to be discovered once my tits are removed and what that new understanding will entail. 

I don't know, though. I can't really speak fluently on any theoretical version of the self, but I know my own experience with desperately trying to uncover my "true" identity, the real, authentic "Will" over the span of literal decades, and I've had no luck whatsoever. Perhaps this is because my own life has been a wild zigzag of unusual and distressing experiences – moving abroad and back, mental health issues, addiction, and, of course, the ramifications of losing my legs. How do you pin down a true "self" when you keep getting whipped this way and that as life rapidly changes in ways you can't control? Is the search for the "true self" a needle in a haystack sort of thing, a drilling-to-the-earth's core mission, or maybe some sort of Escher drawing where the very point is how baffling it all seems?

But...! On the other hand, I have control over this particular major change in my life, and barring some medical incident or surgery cancellation (again, please God), it will be a net positive experience. I almost fear the emotional intensity of it – the mental state of dysphoria I've struggled with for two decades will be physically culled from me, like necrotic flesh of the soul. Right now I can't bear to look at a photo or reflection of myself that includes my chest. It is a literal physical sensation of anguish. How will it feel to go to sleep with that and wake up with it gone, permanently, for the rest of my life? 

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Tomorrow I have to go to the cardiologist for one final test. Assuming I'm not dying of a heart thing, I'll then have full medical clearance for the surgery, and after that I'll go pick up my oxycodone from the Myrtle Wyckoff CVS and probably get a taco from across the street and come back home and rest. I will be by myself the whole time, likely stuck in my head, likely anxious and a little lonely as I pick my way across the icy pavement. 

Often enough I'm asked how I feel about the upcoming surgery. Frankly, I don't give a shit about the thing itself – this will be something like my twenty-fifth one (I wish I were exaggerating for effect). I know how to prepare and what to expect in the strictly medical sense, I know how it feels to be rolled on a gurney into the surgery theater and told "three two one" before waking up hours later with my body changed. That's fine. What leaves me anxious is the fact that I am about to face another clear-cut mental and physical "before" and "after", another bodily alteration that will fire me out of a cannon into very much uncharted emotional territory. I'm not sure I'm ready – honestly I'm not even sure what "ready" entails.

An "emotional journey", I guess. I roll my eyes: another one? Yes, Will, another one. Having thought about it, though, I have to let it be a journey and not a search, not for the meaning of my life or the essence of my self or what I "really" want and need. I know myself, know that if I put too much onus on trying to find absolutes I'll just keep flailing in feelings of disconnect and failure. My accident turned me into somewhat of an absurdist – I don't think the universe really gives a shit – but I see it as a positive turn. I give a shit and I continue to discover shifting forms of meaning as my life passes. And so it goes with this surgery.

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Ideally there will be a part two to this blog post in a couple of weeks or so. Maybe three, I don't know how long it'll be before I have the mental and physical energy. We'll see. As I'm pretty sure I've made clear, I have no idea how I'm going to feel afterwards. I mean, after all this rigmarole about my life changing radically once it's done, maybe I'll just heal up and get on with things. Who knows!

To be honest, I'm a little scared, a feeling I'm sure will only increase as the day grows closer. I know I'm not alone, in the sense that people I know will support me while I'm resting after the procedure, that thousands of other people have had the same surgery as me and so on, but just as well, this whole process coalesces into a sharp and visceral understanding that I and only I exist in my body, and that my actions are mine alone. I've decided to do this to and for only myself, whoever that "self" might be. That's how it should be, and in two weeks, if I have my way, that's how it will have been.

Species of sequences of spaces of pages of books

I like books. That is obvious. If you know me you're thinking "water is wet" after reading that first sentence. I strongly prefer a physical book over anything on a screen, though shorter-form papers or essays I'll download and save in a Zotero folder so that I can highlight and annotate things in it. I don't like writing in paper books.

I have been thinking about books a lot, not what's in them but what makes a book a book, the physicality, the layout, the material, the design of the thing, the way it expresses its content, its existence in physical space. I have also been thinking about words, not in a strictly linguistic sense – I'm not going to pretend I know jack shit about linguistics – but rather as shapes, forms that take up space on a page or surface. Not every book has words in it, of course, but right now I'm thinking about the ones that do...

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What the hell is a book anyway

Per the Oxford Dictionary:

"A written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers."

Per Wikipedia: "A structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium."

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When I was studying design in undergrad I found myself particularly taken not just by typography – I'll define that as individually, intentionally designed glyphs – but by the practice of putting entire words on a page or a screen or a wall or a sign or wherever a word can go. This interest coalesced into something a bit more concrete when a teacher of mine handed me Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec, the beginning of which explores the concept of page-as-space, not just a repository for words:

"Before, there was nothing, or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn't much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, a right and a left, a recto and a verso." (p.10) And then: "This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page." (p. 13) I think it's interesting that Perec uses the word "signs" as representation for what takes up a page; he doesn't really elaborate, and I'll take it to mean (maybe incorrectly but I'm trying) the shape itself of the word rather than a word pertaining to a specific meaning. His cascading set of glyphs in the first image that spell out "horizontal" – which has more weight, the definition and contextual usage of the word or the way in which it's laid out on the page?

Ulises Carrión conveyed his thoughts on what artists' books (or, as he called them, bookworks) can be in his manifesto entitled The New Art of Making Books. The very first sentence is funnily similar to the title of Species of Spaces: "A book is a sequence of spaces." Carrión was particularly interested in the concept of structure; he later says that "every word exists as an element of a structure - a phrase, a novel, a telegram", and that "space exists outside of subjectivity. If two subjects communicate in the space, then space is an element of this communication." (emphasis mine...)

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I am so deeply sorry to say it but all this does in fact have me thinking about the written internet. The New Art of Making Books was written in 1975, 18 years before the internet was available to the public, and I think it would be remiss of me to simply transfer various quotes to the present and equate them to how we use the internet in 2025. That's way too vague, anyways. All the same: page-as-space, words-as-structure, space as an element of communication; or, back to Wikipedia, "a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium." What the hell counts as a "medium", though?

I've decided to get a little obtuse with this. Is a blog or an online newsletter a book? Is a website? Is a forum? I'm thinking about how on all of these each chunk of text is placed selectively on the screen in a systemic form that contextualizes them within the greater space, whether we notice it or not. At design school we were taught, correctly, that placement conveys its own meaning, can manipulate – consider the common phenomenon of headline placement, what's next to it, how big or small it is, where it's located on a series of web pages. Think about the NYT's coverage on Palestine: how many times have you had to click through page after page on the website find a single article on the subject? It is direly obvious that tucking words away like this is a thought-out choice, that where they exist says just as much as the message they themselves actually convey.

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I realize I'm rambling. And, funnily enough, after writing that last sentence, I considered adding "but this is my space to do that." Blog as space! And, yes, mine, to an extent. I can write 

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within the text editor. I can make words bold or italic or struck through or red. I can pick a different visual theme for the blog and fuck with the layout a little. Back we go to page-as-space, back to space as its own form of communication. These words are mine: I thought of them and typed them out in Blogger's built-in post editor – this blog contains, via written text, a specific message I'm trying to convey. I also decided where to put line breaks, italics, links, images, and quotes – I choose what gets emphasized and where the reader's eye, your eye, should move to throughout this post, a message in and of itself. And you, the viewer, decide how much weight to lend to all of these things.

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In undergrad we were tasked with typesetting a predetermined text in codex format (classic pages-and-binding book), making every design decision – fonts, layout, spacing, words per page, leading, kerning, etc – ourselves. I cranked something out overnight that looked nice, but standing in front of everyone during crit the next day I had to acknowledge that at no point had there been any why behind the choices I'd made. I had treated the book not as a space or a structure but as nothing more than a repository for words, with no consideration as to who might pick it up or why. I still think about this a lot.

To circle back to my earlier paragraphs, I don't really know if a website or a blog or a forum counts as a "book." Some people don't even think that audiobooks count (they do) – it seems that "in this day and age" the definition can expand and contract at people's will. And far be it from me to say anything about this authoritatively. Maybe instead of thinking of a book as a form of space or structure I could turn it on its head – structure as book, space as book. Now I've got thoughts going all directions! It's all endless, an ouroboros...

As it stands, I'll close this out; if you've made it this far, thanks, and consider taking a look at Species of Spaces and maybe mulling over how, where, and why you write things in the format that you do. Maybe you will even learn something about yourself. Or not! I don't know!

First post

It's funny, starting a blog in July of 2025. Another one. Sorry!

This is not my first attempt – in the past five or so years there have been just about as many stabs at it – but as I've had more time to write in recent weeks I've wanted to find a way to branch out from the fiction I'm so comfortable with, push past the personal-essay grind I too easily fall into as someone with, as one friend put it, "a lot of lore". I am approaching my second year of a Master's degree, during which I've had to learn how to write like an academic at a freakish pace (my undergrad program, a design degree at an art school, had no formal classes or writing assignments at all), and think that keeping a blog that consists of more than just stories, whether true or made up, might let me explore and loosen the mental ligaments a bit.

I've decided to use Blogger as a platform rather than Substack because the latter gave me terrible performance anxiety and made me feel as if I had to hone in on one specific area of expertise which, beyond the experience of being myself, I lack. (I no longer have any remote desire to "tell my story", which has historically invited unpleasant voyeurs and forms of parasociality into my life.) The writing I did share on my old Substack blog was, to me, treacly and hastily-written, content for content's sake and little more, and I'm not very proud of it. The relative isolation of Blogspot appeals to me for now; rather than feel a push to self-promote that I myself don't like, I hope to have my own little corner of the internet where I can be a little less polished and a little less anxious while still pushing myself to write things that I'm willing to share publicly.

This Georges Perec quote, from The Gnocchi of Autumn or An Answer to a Few Questions Concerning Myself, sums up my thoughts, I think:

"How to set about avoiding, yet again, those games with mirrors within which a 'self-portrait' will be nothing more than the umpteenth reflection of a consciousness that has been well pruned, a knowledge that has been well polished, a prose made docile by the pains I have taken? A portrait of the artist of a clever monkey; can I say 'sincerely' that I'm a clown?"

I love Georges Perec. Maybe I will write about him soon. Lately, though, I have been thinking about existing as meat, and the idea of a "hedonistic reader". Whatever ends up on here, I hope you like it.