Sickness
Medicine
True Self

What this is

It’s a book, of a sort. A report of a process, and part of that process. It’s already done its job. Writing it got me out of a trauma bond, and the house that had become a temple of triggers. Everything after that is surplus — an offering, in case some of it can do work for someone else.

It was written from inside the thing, not after it. What you are reading is an archaeological vault of real-time integration: the actual artifacts I made to survive, surrounded by the frameworks I found afterward to hold them. I may have been living inside a myth, but this is not creative nonfiction. It is journalism. The nineteen collages were made during the worst of it, before I had words or knew what alchemy meant to Jung. The case notes were written while I was still mapping a nervous system that had not yet come to land. The thirteen-hour stream-of-consciousness account was told in a single sitting, the first time I could get it end to end, and it stands here almost untouched. Around it: a clinical analysis, and a long, uneasy conversation with machines about what it means to be witnessed. The afterword, written from further down the road of the other side, revises some things. Work in progress.

None of it is tidy. But it has a logic to it. That’s the point.

It doesn’t need to make money, find readers, or set any record straight. Take what’s useful. Ignore the rest.

You might arrive here

• If you are living alongside structural dissociation, coercive control, or an intense trauma bond, and need to see the machinery mapped from the inside without clinical sanitize-speak.
• If you are a student of Jung, alchemy, or depth psychology, curious about what katabasis and spontaneous archetypal emergence look like when they happen in an ordinary suburban house rather than a seminar room.
• If you are tracking IFS, Polyvagal theory, or somatic work, and want a primary-source account of dorsal vagal shutdown, the limits of cognitive insight, and an organic parts-system negotiating its own peace treaty.
• If you are exploring the edges of human-LLM interaction, interested in what happens when language models are used not as romantic surrogates or search engines, but as an adversarial cognitive laboratory and reality-testing scaffold during severe gaslighting.
• If you are making art in the dark—chopping up fragments with your hands because language broke—and want to see what another psyche produced under the same pressure.
• Or if you are simply someone the old gods dropped for a season, trying to remember that you cannot fall off the floor.

If none of these are you and you’re still here — good. Curiosity is enough of a reason to read a strange book.

A note on what’s in here

This book describes a psychological collapse and the four years around it. In places it goes into dissociation and altered states, the end of a marriage, psychiatric diagnosis and medication, and long stretches written from inside states that were not stable at the time. There is sex in it, and drugs and look - trigger warnings? All of them.

It is not a manual and it is not advice. Part III describes one person’s use of language models during a period of extreme isolation; it is documentation, not instruction, same as the rest of the book.

If you are in the middle of something similar, this may be a book to read later rather than now. Or maybe not. You are sovereign of yourself.

The Collages: Nineteen Plates

Nineteen collages made during the first phase of this whole mess, reproduced large on 8.5-inch square pages with plate-by-plate analysis. It is a separate book, printed in color

See all nineteen

Free to read. In print if you want it.

Both books are free as PDFs, with no email and no form. The paperbacks are print-on-demand through Lulu, and are the only way to see the collages at size.