Comic for July 13, 2018
 Gah.

Out of everything I deal with, that’s probably the one symptom I hate the most. To put it simply, I can’t tell when I’m being too vague or too specific when talking about something, and this results in me either leaving a lot of details out or flooding the other pony with too much information at once. This leads to a lot of miscommunication, and all the “fun” that brings with it.

Anyway, I’ll try and list off everything I can think of really quickly here, just to make sure everything is out in the open. I’ll also try to keep things simple, since I know that the average pony isn’t familiar with the jargon.

To start, being too vague or needlessly specific is part of a general problem called “disorganized thought”. It’s like trying to do lots of homework on a messy table being shared among several students; you’re trying to do one project, but you keep getting other people’s papers mixed in with your own. This can make it hard to put what you’re thinking about into coherent sentences, and sometimes leads to thought blocking; a symptom where a thought sort of just falls apart in the middle of a statement. It’s like forgetting your line in a play or losing a word while writing, except it’s your train of thought that’s slammed to a halt.

Occasionally, instead of coming to an abrupt stop, my train of thought will jump the tracks and appear go in a completely different direction. To me, this usually seems like a natural progression of ideas, but to other ponies, it’s a sudden switch to another topic. Often, I can trace the jump back to the original idea via a “Kevin Bacon”-like system. I’m assuming here that you’ve heard of the “five degrees of Kevin Bacon” game; it was popular when I was a colt.

Another set of symptoms revolve around my “affect”; that is, my overall demeanor and behavior. I tend to be pretty static, or “flat”. I don’t really act on my emotions, so it tends to look like I’m not feeling anything. This can be problematic, as it can trick others into believing that I don’t really care about anything. An additionally issue here is that sometimes I’ll sound dejected or angry when neither is the case, and that leads to some pretty awkward conversations.

Of course, I’m quite the introvert, and this is technically a symptom as well. Personally, I don’t think it is in my case, or at least, not to the degree that it would be classified as “social withdrawal”. I mean heck, I’m talking to all of you, and nobody had to force me to do so. If I was actually dealing with social withdrawal, I’d wouldn’t be able to do this without putting a lot of effort into it.

One last thing comes to mind, and it’s probably the most well-known symptoms of schizophrenia: hallucinations. I do have to deal with these from time to time. In my case, it’s usually either a visual or tactile hallucination, meaning that I’m seeing something that isn’t there or that I feel like something small is crawling on my coat. I’ve never had an issue with hearing voices or the like however.

Fortunately for me, the visual hallucinations aren’t very elaborate; they look like little black spider-like objects moving about at the edges of my vision. Though now that I think about it, calling them spiders gives the impression that they have a definite form; they’re more like a foal’s scribbles than an actual, fixed shape. Sort of like the soot sprites from Studio Ghibli films or the shadow vessels from Babylon 5.

Regardless, I’ve known for a long time now that, for whatever reason, they can’t be viewed directly. Thus, a quick glance in their direction instantly dispels them if I’m finding them to be too annoying. This goes for the tactile hallucinations as well; if I don’t see anything there, I stop feeling it move about.

Well, that’s all of the day to day stuff I can think of. I’m not going to lie; there have been some much more serious psychotic episodes in the past, and they followed the pattern of the symptoms I’ve already mentioned, just taken up to eleven. I’m also not particularly keen on talking about those in much detail – bad memories aren’t something I like to dwell on.

One last thing: my symptoms tend to be proportionate to how stressed I’m feeling. You might feel like this hospital’s ridged rules and schedules take away a patient’s freedom, but in reality it’s intentionally designed to be as stress free as possible. And as a direct result, I’m as close to asymptomatic as I’ll ever be while I’m living here.		 



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