So during high school the class was reading a book called Noughts and Crosses. We never got that far in the book but it left an impression on me. It was what originally got me interested in persecution flips and similar tropes/ideas.
One of the characters in it is called Lynette, she is bodily white but has some sort of delusion/hallucination that causes her to believe she's bodily black. I remember reading the first scene where this was brought up, where Lynette looks at her skin and says it looks beautiful and brown. I remember later closing my eyes and imagining my own skin as black, hoping that if I imagined hard enough then I'd be able to hallucinate like she did andsee my skin that way when I opened my eyes. Even just for a moment, even if I knew it wasn't real, I wanted to look at myself and see black skin. It never worked but I kept trying anyway for a long time.
Lynette was the first time I ever heard about someone even a little like me in that way. I never finished that book and I remembered little of it but I always remembered Lynette.
I decided to go and start reading the the rest of it today, I'm about halfway through and sadly it turns out Lynette dies. What strikes me is how. She gets into a fight with her brother who reality checkss her out of her "delusion", a few weeks later she kills herself bc she can't "cope with reality". There is more to it than just the trace angle, Lynette had been through a lot of trauma she had also been supressing. But it just makes me sad thinking about it, I felt so bad at the time, my dysphoria so bad I was begging to hallucinate and it turns out the one character I had killed herself after losing those hallucinations herself.
I love you Lynette, thank you for making me feel less alone, I wish things had gone better for you. I'll keep going for both of us.
