ANYTHING i read rewires my brain, that’s just like. literally what reading is to me. it’s like a magic charm that wears off after only a little while, and the only way i can back to it is to read more of whatever the thing in question is…i have no idea if this makes ANY sense, it’s super hard for me to articulate bc it’s so innate

garden-ghoul said: 

ugh what DOESN’T completely rewire my brain. I literally can’t even listen to music 95% of the time for this reason. the one thing I read specifically to rewire my brain is “If I” by psilent on ao3, which is a story about rocket raccoon escaping from a torture facility and trying to make a life as a guy with OCD. it’s very cathartic for me because of the progression from terrible to okay
when I was younger I’d read YA books and especially if they were written in first person I would spend like half a day legitimately thinking I was the protagonist? I think this is a DID thing

yeah i get very– i think of it as an altered state of consciousness almost, it’s more dramatic than being drunk and… ok probably not actively more of a change than being full acute sleep deprivation depressed, but i notice it more bc it’s a non-habitual thing/has an obvious external source.

at its most dramatic i feel like i’m both talking differently and processing emotion differently; i associate it with being almost manic/euphoric, funny in even weirder and more high-concept ways than i usually am, and sometimes with phrasing emotional and social concepts in a technical/unecessarily sciencey way if what i was reading leant itself to that. these are all states i can kind of access/behaviors i have regardless, but it feels qualitatively different and is clearly induced by what i was reading. i usually really enjoy it, though sometimes it totally rearranges my priorities in ways that– don’t usually have significant repercussions, but certainly can be inconvenient if i’ve just rewritten myself to be very strongly into manic makeup experiments and sweeping statements about the structure of reality, and what i need is to finish my dev bio assignment.

mostly it happens to me with fiction, especially fiction with a really strong, distinct, unusual diction, especially funny/witty diction. it’s happened with nonfiction pieces, more rarely, partly because standard science writing is a mode of thinking i have to engage anyway and so it doesn’t feel distinct i think in the way . it happens with long backreads of people’s blogs pretty frequently, which is actually my easiest go-to if i want to create specific aesthetic/subject-matter interests in myself: i have a mental list of people whose blogs to backread if what i want is “very funny, smart about character-driven fiction” vs “significant introspective access and high-vulnerability lyricism” vs “highest-integrity art opinions and mean jokes” vs “quantitative interests and gender shitposting” vs… etc. it’s actually super useful, or would be if i didn’t occasionally derail myself from actually writing the thing i wanted to write (or whatever) because i got distracted by the thing i was reading to put my brain in the right mode.

relatedly, if you (general you, not just you two) see a chicago ip address reading 20-200 pages of your blog, it is very plausible that it is me, doing that. pls feel free to let me know if i should stop, i absolutely will. i try to limit myself to ppl who seem to have a more archival/backread-encouraging ethos anyway, but it’s possible i’ve misread someone’s blog intentions and if so i am genuinely sorry