<p>I will be the first to admit that it is difficult to write about mental health, as is certainly evidenced here already, and in countless other projects where I’ve tried to get that across. Even when talking about it, my voice is filled with ellipses and my words littered with hedges, fillers, and all sorts of metalinguistic dross.</p>
<p>That you later had to learn to use those consciously, to string like-and-if-um-but-so through your words like fairy lights to anchor your pitch is neither here nor there.</p>
<p>That I’ll be the first to admit that doesn’t excuse the way others treat it. Of course, there’s countless words to be spent on the way media treats it, or the way writers treats things like psychosis, but the experience is so often so poorly researched that it hits the point of not even wrong.</p>
<p>Much to be said on him, yes, but take <em>Xenocide</em> and <em>Children of the Mind</em> as examples on this topic in particular. Take the World of Path. Take this supposed obsessive-compulsive disorder that plagues some of its inhabitants.</p>
<p>I have a problem with compulsions. Not-even-wrong-ness surrounding them touches on a sort of meta-compulsion: a need to be understood strong enough that, when
<p>And yet the plot hook is that it was artificial in the first place. That’s sort of the point, right? Fei-tzu and Qing-jao are saddled with this form of compulsive behavior that’s the side effect of something else, not OCD in and of itself. Was it really so off-base, or are you just upset at seeing part of — but not all of — yourself?</p>
<p>Are you just upset that you can’t stay still; that you have other, unrelated problems with compulsion; and that these two are then correlated in a fictional genetic disorder where they are not correlated for you?</p>
