WIP / Author's Note #1

I actually really enjoy writing characters who deal with things that they're completely unable (or at least unwilling) to articulate to themselves, let alone other people. Fanfiction can make this easy to pull off because readers are meant to be familiar enough with the character's source material to be able to pick up on even vague allusions to things; original fiction is a lot harder to play coy with.

Luckily for me, I guess, I also choose to indulge in writing characters and narratives that will never make it in any mainstream, mass-appealing market, so I'm free to indulge in the personal site format instead of strict book-novel narrative to convey whatever the hell I want, instead of forcing a character to articulate something inarticulatable ♡

Veronica has some Voices that call her "Beast" -- this isn't a dig about her appearance, but at her childhood history of extremely destructive meltdowns. Veronica was a child who screamed and cried "for no reason"; who tore pages out of books when she got frustrated with them; who knocked over furniture and broke things and hit them (and occasionally herself and others). Veronica is someone who has hurt people before and is never able to forget that she might hurt someone again -- not least because the tapering off of these meltdowns has far less to do with any strength of will / self-control, and much more to do with being lucky enough to have been granted the autonomy needed to start avoiding major stressors.

Veronica, textually, has never been diagnosed with anything (no, not even for the open wounds in her palms, but that would necessitate a much longer note to get into lol), but if I had to pick any diagnostic labels to use, I'd say that Veronica is Autistic. Maybe that she has a mild cognitive delay in addition to the developmental one. And then I'd stop there. This is because tend to think of "psychotic traits" more as something that is simply a natural part of the human experience -- any and every human's experience -- than a "symptom" of anything aberrant.

Veronica hears Voices, and has more or less always heard Voices. She wouldn't refer to them as "hallucinations"; they're her Voices, an inextricable part of her own internal dialogue. Sometimes, when she's particularly stressed or burnt out or exhausted, she begins to "unravel" -- that internal dialogue begins to lose focus and coherency, she gets fixated on beliefs that are "unusual", she has visions and overwhelming experiences and the world gains a sometimes nauseating fourth dimension.

She still wouldn't consider those periods as something "pathological". She doesn't really consider them something she wants to eliminate from her life altogether either. These "unravelings" are unpleasant, negative experiences that simply are part of the "normal" human experience -- the same way illness and grief and regret and injury are. They end because everything ends, and they'll begin again, because everything does. She knows other people don't experience the same things she does -- at least, not to the degree that she does -- but who has the "same" identical experiences as anyone else? She manages, even when she doesn't really, so that's all that matters.

Does that clarify anything at all? Who can say, but isn't that the fun of it? Some things simply evade neat categorization; some things can never be fully articulated. And who doesn't love trying to communicate things that can't ever be fully articulated? ♡♡♡