Outside the Borders of Myself

November 13, 2024

Last updated: November 13 2024

It’s not really any secret that for many people in the alterhuman community, the lines between their mental health and identity blur. In recent years, there have been a number of advocates against sanism in the community, and plenty of individuals wishing to normalize physically identifying alterhumans and those whose identities are impacted heavily by psychological disorders. So it got me thinking a lot about my own experiences with how my nonhuman identity is tied greatly with my mental health.

There has always been a psychological paradigm for the origins of alterhuman identity in the otherkind spaces that I frequented during my early years in the community, but in comparison to those who subscribed to a more spiritual view of their identity, they were kind of a rare find. While I consider myself to be largely spiritual, I’ve never seen my alterhuman identity to be within the realms of spirituality, with the exception perhaps of my status as a psychic vampyre. Psychological otherkind often cite things like hyperfixations, imprinting, or delusion as explanations for their identities. Me personally? I think that it’s a complex form of introjection (which is not an experience unique to systems).

In the realm of psychology, there is a theoretical concept known as the “Ipseity”. So what is the meaning of this fancy word? In the simplest terms, ipseity is an alternate term for the “minimal self”, the name given to the most basic form of self-awareness and selfhood which we gain through sensory experience. The ipseity is responsible for your ability to know who you are. The ipseity defines the borders of yourself, it knows where you end and where the rest of the world begins. In those with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and psychosis, the ipseity does not function in the same way it would in a neurotypical person. People who fall on the schizo-spec and/or suffer from psychosis experience a disorder in their minimal self known as “ipseity disturbance”.

This lack of proper borders of the minimal self is hypothesized by some to be the root of delusions and ideas of reference. A common example of ipseity disturbance/ideas of reference which I experience is the feeling that when strangers talk and laugh, that they’re talking about me and mocking me. The individuals talking (the reference) and the thought that they’re demeaning me (the idea) come together just so because the ipseity is having disturbances in function and cannot differentiate me from the other people. To my perception, my internal experiences of anxiety and paranoia are no different from the laughter in the external world because the borders of myself are blurred.

When I say that my schizotypal personality disorder impacts the entirety of my identity and sense of self, this is what I mean. My nonhuman, fictionkind, and transspecies identity stems from the ipseity disturbances that I experience, my identity in itself is a kind of idea of reference. And then when you add in the phenomena of hyperfixations from my ADHD, it creates the perfect environment for introjection of outside media into myself. Normally it takes one or two traits in common with a fictional character before I realize them to be myself, in this case, I’m experiencing this thing, and said character is also experiencing said thing, so we are actually the same, and they were created to be me. This also impacts introjection in my system and helps to explain the large amount of fictives and autojects in our collective, as I believe it to be a more intense version of mundane introjection as mentioned earlier in this blog post, but that’s a ramble for another day.

Because of difficulties in my minimal self, I also have difficulties in my narrative self. Without my fictotypes and nonhuman identity, I don’t really have an identity at all. This being said, as difficult as it is to live with schizotypal, I would never accept a cure if it was magically created. I don’t consider my identity to be harmful in any way, I find it of no detriment to myself, or to others. And as such, I have found peace with it, as chaotic and ever changing as it is. But then again, there is no permanent state of self. I’m fine with being outside the borders of myself, sometimes.