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The Amnesia Thing, In Creative Nonfiction
Nov. 10th, 2025 09:26 pmWritten by Jude Rook-Machina on November 10th, 2025.
I’ve been having a really bad week while trying to write an essay about my experiences with amnesia in-system, specifically amnesia across gateway world barriers, so it’s not getting written right now - which sucks because the essay’s got some really interesting stuff I want to articulate!
But I already wrote this part, the creative writing, and honestly some of the nuance gets lost when I’m explaining what’s going on mechanically instead of showing the experience in more of a raw take, so maybe this isn’t a problem after all.
This essay is really putting the creative in creative nonfiction, because I’m transcribing internal conversations and visits we’ve had back home into prose, and I really get to play around with the medium when I’m writing something out like a scene! It’s a different sort of writing than we usually share, but it’s honestly way more fun to do, I like the challenge of trying to put the mental sensory impressions into text! It’s easier than usual when we’re not trying to flesh out the details I forget, and it’s interesting to put into words.
are you real
November 3rd, 2025
Example of an internal call with someone outside the system while I’m in-system; neither of us get to remember much about what our visitor is doing out-system, even if they usually get more than I do, which feels really disorienting when you’re having anxious doubt spirals about whether your friend is real. (The real answer is “stop worrying about the existential answer and focus on the person who’s talking to you,” apparently.)
( Read more... )a walk in the park
November 4th, 2025
Example of how it feels for me to be outside the system while still tethered to it – basically, our brain seems to only have so much rendering power, which means I go back home and wind up having dissociative episodes where I’m losing memories, chunks of time, and the ability to comprehend a lot of words and people and places. I have an anxiety spiral about some of it near the end, but honestly, most of this is nice! My loved ones know I have this problem sometimes, they do their best to accommodate me, and having memory problems doesn’t mean my life is plain miserable.
( Read more... )
