this blog is to externally express an internal experience. though i have tried, i have no logic or language for my experience

angelene • schizophrenic • lesbian new account 12.31.25 (gougeddoll terminated)

this is difficult for me to explain, but i am going to try to explain it simply.

when i am in psychosis, one of my primary delusions was that i believed inanimate objects were communicating with me. i also experience intense apophenia, so in a sense, all images became embedded with coded meaning.

as a result, i became obsessed with the power of images, and the agency of the inanimate. the inanimate are not “alive” in a real sense, but they are not totally passive. images and objects act on us through a system of meaning, we project meaning onto them, become attached to them, fear them, fetishize them, preserve them, and sometimes allow them to stand in for people or things that are no longer there. i think psychosis made me aware of this strange relationship, as when i was acutely psychotic, the distinction between something having meaning and me giving meaning to it became blurred. an object could feel like it possessed an intention. i felt possessed by objects. at certain times i wondered if i was an object. and i began to wonder if part of this unreality is based in a very true reality, though less literal, all the more real. obviously i understand those experiences differently now, most of the time at least, but the questions they created for me never really left me. what gives an image, an inanimate object, power? why can a representation sometimes feel more powerful than the thing it represents? why do we treat certain objects as though they have personhood? where exactly do we draw the boundary between a body and an object?

so i think that is also where my fixation on dolls, mannequins, artificial bodies, corpses, robots, even artificial intelligence. (i am not pro ai and i never experienced ai psychosis, but i’m fascinated by the psychology behind how humans interact with computers.) they all sit around that boundary. for example, a doll is an object which pretends to be a body… a corpse is a body becoming an object. basically, they are different versions of the same problem to me.

so i don’t know that there is one specific thing i want other people to understand... perhaps that the inanimate have more power than we ascribe to them and we are not so different in terms of agency, the lack of control we have around the systems that give us meaning. possibly, more accurate to say that i just keep returning to certain questions regarding the boundary between subject and object? the boundary between these is less stable than we think. if this sounds too abstract, idk, i don’t mean it to be.

i also became obsessed with this book, “what do pictures want?” which i highly recommend. it expresses what i mean by “objects having agency” so thoroughly, and what i mean when i say “images and objects are not passive.”