itch.io

what a remarkable and wonderful comment to wake up to ^^ <3 a number of folks have told us our essay have meant something to them, but this comment, as people might say, "hit's different". i'm really glad it spoke to you, and gave you new and exciting ideas. i wish very much that i could offer a more coherent comment, but we're a little bit out of it as well, i suppose. 

thank you for the recommendation on "reclaiming your mind," though, and also, in terms of other essays from the jam i can recommend, i really enjoyed "[psycho].spiritual", which is about psychosis and spiritual experience and hypnosis and plurality. it had quite a profound effect on us. in terms of other essays about, as you say, "weird brain shit", we really love the writings of Devon Price, an autistic psychologist who's written a lot of really amazing essays and books about transness, ableism, neurodivergence, ageism, youth liberation, and other stuff, most of which i honestly have not evern read. in the theme of age and disability, i recommend abolish age. also, there's a book called "may tomorrow be awake" which is about autistic poetry, that had (and continues to have) a pretty big impact on me. it touches alot on non-normative 'art' and self-expression and even a bit on neurodivergent mysticism. i would *love* to find more stuff about ND mystic experience, really. a friend of ours who is kinda similar to us in being, Weird, wrote this piece about becoming. 

and i guess if you want to completely bite off more than you can possibly chew, "A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia" by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is an extremely dense work of what the authors call "schizoanalysis", a deconstructive approach to turning psychology on its head that is largely "pro madness" in alot of ways. i don't wanna pretend like im some philosophy student who understands it perfectly. many parts of it, especially those responding to other philosophers, are kind of impenetrably difficult for me to read, i haven't even read most of it, i've jumped around a lot (which is something they actually recommend, because they reject the idea that the book is even a "book" but rather a rhizome, a nonhierarchical, interconnected structure where every point is joined to every other point). it is quite deliberately confusing, i think they once said that they want people to "bring something incomprehensible into the world". sometimes i strongly disagree with things in the book and yet other times i feel like they understand perfectly what it's like to really *see* the world the way i do. the whole language of rhizomes, territories, lines of flight becomings, refrains, bodies without organs, etc has certainly permeated our vocabulary, and even if we might not fully understand how they were using it all the time, i think they would probably approve of a weird neurodivergent burnout trans creature taking their ideas and running with them.

mad pride is also a pretty cool movement against saneism and towards the valuing of "brain weird" experiences as a beautiful thing.

also, i really love the music of queer freak-folk artist noel'le longhaul. we first found their music as a teen, it was the very first trans music we were exposed to, and it's had a huge impact on us, i can't fully articulate articulate how big a part of who we are it is. it feels very 'queer brainweird magic' to us. our favorite album of theirs is called the meadow.

like i said, i wish i knew more, and had more stuff to link. probably there's things rattling around in our head that we just can't remember right now.

all of us here in our little world wish the very best for you, and hope you keep learning, and growing, and molting, and changing, and trying out new ideas, and learning who you are, and that you find lots of safe communities full of supportive, safe, and dependable folks. <33 ^^