Soulsickness [Crow&]
Jun. 23rd, 2025 04:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bodyetalRiley has come to believe that we absolutely can get sick in headspace, have for a long time, and that the rest of us are just in a bizarre sort of denial about this. I didn’t agree with them. As we’ve said before, our headspace is not “real.” It’s not tangible or self-sustaining. “It’s the same thing as picturing an apple” has basically become our catchphrase.
But there is something we’ve been failing to mention (and honestly ignoring): our inner selves are affected by our outer selves’ condition. When we say people “collapse out of front,” sometimes it’s just kind of a metaphor for dropping out quickly because of fatigue or stress or whatever. But sometimes we will also see them literally collapse in the void. Sometimes getting kicked out of front would mean someone appearing and falling like they’d been thrown. I can cry when the body can’t, because my inner self does.
I worked myself sick last week, and the body got sick along with me, but I kept symptoms both in and out of front and when I fronted the body was worse. That wasn’t the first time—I’m the undefeated champ of psychosomaticism—but it was the first time that I was able to see my inner self as being sick too, rather than just stressed.
This is something we need to poke at as a concept more. Honestly, we’d have liked to make this post a breakdown of it (because more diverse interior experiences need to be represented in general), but it would require so many definitions and so much deconstruction that it’ll have to come another time. For now, we’re mostly just acknowledging it.
(The title is misleading. Soulsickness means a different thing for us. It was just a cool word—post title will change if I settle on something more accurate.)
But there is something we’ve been failing to mention (and honestly ignoring): our inner selves are affected by our outer selves’ condition. When we say people “collapse out of front,” sometimes it’s just kind of a metaphor for dropping out quickly because of fatigue or stress or whatever. But sometimes we will also see them literally collapse in the void. Sometimes getting kicked out of front would mean someone appearing and falling like they’d been thrown. I can cry when the body can’t, because my inner self does.
I worked myself sick last week, and the body got sick along with me, but I kept symptoms both in and out of front and when I fronted the body was worse. That wasn’t the first time—I’m the undefeated champ of psychosomaticism—but it was the first time that I was able to see my inner self as being sick too, rather than just stressed.
This is something we need to poke at as a concept more. Honestly, we’d have liked to make this post a breakdown of it (because more diverse interior experiences need to be represented in general), but it would require so many definitions and so much deconstruction that it’ll have to come another time. For now, we’re mostly just acknowledging it.
(The title is misleading. Soulsickness means a different thing for us. It was just a cool word—post title will change if I settle on something more accurate.)
