Delusional

[darkemeralds]

A year ago, my oldest friend called me from her home on the east coast to say that "they" were tapping her phone and intercepting her emails, and that I probably shouldn't email her for a while.

So I didn't email, and she didn't call, and to be honest, I was glad about it. Our conversations had become stranger over the years until they were nothing but one-sided diatribes about the weird stuff people were doing to her, the men who were secretly in love with her, and the unique talents that made her so eminently employable if only people weren't so intimidated by her.

Her email address, when I finally tried it eight months later, no longer existed. I thought about tracking her down but never got around to it. Though I felt strange not knowing what had become of her, those bizarrely boring phone calls had become the whole of our relationship, and I didn't miss them at all.

She called me this afternoon from a number right across the river.

Her persecutors drove her from the east coast and harried her all the way across the United States, causing electrical shorts and flat tires in her car, interfering with her Kindle, tapping her mobile phone, and hacking her laptop whenever she got online. The story involved uranium mining and billionaires, bugs and taps and cameras.

I'm not a psychiatrist and god knows I'm aware of the hazards of labels. But the more I google, the more "delusional disorder" seems to fit her case--at least, it gives me something to pin my frustration on. If your good friend really was the object of persecution (not to mention romantic longings and glamorous corporate recruitment), she would be the most interesting friend in the world. You'd meet secretly and she'd show you some of the evidence--you know, the bug she found in her house, the screenshot of her rapidly-self-wiping hard drive, the recording of the wire-tapped phone call...And she'd probably have that amazing job by now. And a really impressive lover. And probably would have written that book, too--the one about all her amazing experiences.

But other people's delusions are boring, especially if you don't share them. She's back in town and I'm trying to figure out how to tell her that I can't take part in her stories anymore.

Mind you, if she shows me actual proof, this could get really interesting!

Comments

[ravurian]

I find the whole idea - in the abstract - very interesting: a synthesis of story, driven by the desire for narrative coherency, with few distinctions between the source of information and its direct relevance to your experience. By which I mean, the gradual erosion of distinction between information derived from personal experience, and information derived from media (books, TV shows, films, the news, etc), so that it becomes to all intents and purposes a contextual whole, of which you are a constituent part. It's the equivalent of someone hacking your database and merging files, or taking up your painstakingly typewritten manuscript and not only shuffling it, but inserting pages of other novels at random points. Or that's how it seems. She's living the novel of her life.

In the abstract, it's interesting. In the specific, highly unnerving.

[darkemeralds]

I'm quite rattled, actually, by the weird coincidence of having just finished reading Misery at the time she called. Stephen King is no master of deep intellectual subtlety, but in that novel he does tackle, more or less successfully, the point where writing, madness, imagination and reality converge. (In it, the novelist is the one living the novel of his life--the insane person is simply insane.)

As always, your oblique dive into the problem has given me some real perspective. You know me: I see the whole, smooth sphere and have a hell of a time distinguishing constituent parts. So it's useful to me to think about narrative coherency here. My friend is trying to make sense of a difficult life, using highly flawed--and yet remotely plausible ["As seen on TV!"]--notions.

A key characteristic of the disorder is the term "non-bizarre delusions". The literature treads very carefully around culturally-shared delusions (presumably things like religion), and specifically places "bizarre" delusions (such as the physically impossible) outside the diagnosis.

This leaves shit that's conceivable but that most people don't use to give their lives narrative coherence. If she needs it to make sense of her life, who am I to argue? It's intellectually dishonest for me to label it crazy. I believe in several things myself that I can't justify rationally.

Mostly, I'm just done with the thirty-year conversation that has ceased to be about anything else. You've helped me clear my head on the matter.