#rip grace

Now with a PART 2

feat. depersonalisation

ok so first depersonalisation can be experienced for a number of reasons including but not limited to chronic stress, anxiety, depression, hormonal shifts, ocd, and various other mental and personality disorders. and i’m sure we can all agree that grace has been chronically stressed for a long while and also probably has ptsd. so he totally could experience depersonalisation.

and here i’m referring mostly to the feeling of being disconnected from your body and/or inhabiting your body kinda like a ghost. sure you’re in the body but the body isn’t you.

and then of course all the things that come with depersonalisation of that flavour like treating your body and brain as separate entities from yourself that you sometimes need to wrangle into submission or negotiate with to get things done.

idk my thought process was that maybe the rock aliens feel more solid in themselves since their brains are made of crystals and they never forget, etc? i just think it could be fun to watch eridians be baffled by the concept of feeling like the body and brain aren’t part of yourself. it’d probably start with the lil phrases.

“sorry, my brain is being stupid.” -> maybe for anxiety grace can’t seem to shake despite consciously rationalising his feelings and deciding it’s not that scary

“c’mon brain work with me here.” -> maybe grace forgot something and is trying to remember

“my brain is being mean to me.” -> nightmares/intrusive thoughts/anxiety

“my body just can’t follow orders right.” -> perhaps said in reference to his clumsiness

“my body just won’t get the memo.” -> said in annoyance when his body gives him hunger cues that he can’t follow because he’s trying to ration

“it feels like my body is betraying me.” -> when they’re getting close to erid and grace is getting sick

and if you wanted to go even deeper you could even connect it to the fairly widespread human belief that our consciousness or soul is seperate from our bodies and can move on to other planes of reality or inhabit different bodies or linger in places without a body after we die. or maybe tie it back to having a brain that’s mostly water making us feel much more fluid and we therefore can easily feel disconnected from ourselves? there’s lots of ways you could take this tbh.

you could also play with different severities of depersonalisation if you’d like! maybe it only feels mild during the mission when it’s kind of helpful to disconnect and just work as hard as possible. but then once there’s suddenly 4 years of downtime with no particular objective to work towards and with the lack of focus and direction to keep grace tethered the disconnect feels much more like a problem. maybe rocky gets really concerned because sometimes grace just loses connection with his body and sits trapped in his mind looking out, and that manifests as lots of spacing out, dissociating and sitting very still staring off at nothing.

go for your life really

“Wh-- Jeremy--?” A surprised Grace stutters, her arms whipping up to wrap themselves around her boyfriend’s neck. “What’s going on?? Is something wrong?”