When Metaphor Stops Being Figurative
(How Language Begins to Believe Itself)
Psychosis doesn’t begin by inventing new meanings.
It begins by removing irony.
In Chapter Two of Fought Disorder (“Blunts and Roses – Use Your Delusion, Part I”), language hasn’t yet become hostile. It has become earnest. Too earnest.
Metaphor stops gesturing.
Reference stops hovering.
Meaning starts to commit.
The Shift From Expression to Evidence
At this point in the book, nothing outwardly dramatic is happening.
There is:
Cannabis use
Grief
Breakup
Academic pressure
Cultural noise (music, social media, quotes)
All familiar. All ordinary.
But something subtle changes in how language is handled.
Metaphors are no longer ways of speaking — they become ways of knowing.
Lyrics don’t resonate; they apply.
Quotes don’t inspire; they diagnose.
Cultural fragments don’t decorate thought; they explain reality.
A Short Passage
“I suppose, in an attempt to hold everything back and focus predominately on the work, I toked on. But I wasn’t in any sense coping, just kidding myself, smoking into sub-feeling.”
This sentence is doing two things at once.
On the surface, it’s reflective.
Underneath, it’s laying the groundwork for something else.
What’s Happening Linguistically
Here, we see the second major distortion:
Metaphor becomes literal without announcing itself.
In healthy language use:
Metaphor compresses complexity
It remains reversible
It never claims authority
Here:
Metaphor hardens
Emotional language starts to function as diagnosis
Description quietly becomes explanation
“Smoking into sub-feeling” isn’t poetic colour.
It becomes causal logic.
Language begins to believe itself.
This is crucial:
The narrator isn’t losing words — he’s over-trusting them.
Cultural Language as Raw Material
Chapter Two is saturated with:
Song lyrics
Quotations
Internet phrasing
Pop-cultural shorthand
Under ordinary conditions, these function as:
Shared references
Emotional shortcuts
Aesthetic texture
Under psychosis-adjacent cognition, they begin to act as:
External validators
Explanatory frameworks
Moral signals
Nothing is dismissed as “just a song” or “just a quote”.
Everything feels relevant.
This is how meaning density increases without increasing truth.
Why This Matters
Most clinical descriptions of psychosis talk about false beliefs.
What this chapter shows instead is:
beliefs emerging naturally from language that has lost its brakes.
No hallucination is required.
No delusion is declared.
The system still feels rational — even insightful.
That’s what makes it dangerous.
The Reader’s Position (On Purpose)
If you find yourself nodding along while reading this chapter —
if it feels uncomfortably reasonable —
that’s not accidental.
Fought Disorder doesn’t ask the reader to judge.
It asks the reader to inhabit a linguistic environment where interpretation slowly stops being optional.
You are not yet trapped.
But you are no longer standing outside.
Why This Can’t Be Skimmed
This chapter doesn’t pay off immediately.
Its function is cumulative.
Later, when images feel accusatory,
when coincidence feels targeted,
when language feels punitive —
this is where it began.
With metaphor losing its provisional status.
A Note on the Title: Use Your Delusion
This phrase matters.
It sounds playful.
It sounds ironic.
It sounds like advice.
But advice is already beginning to harden into instruction.
Language isn’t just describing the narrator’s inner life anymore.
It’s starting to tell him what to do.
Why the Book Sustains This
This post gives you a glimpse.
The book gives you duration.
Across Fought Disorder, these micro-shifts accumulate until:
Meaning feels inescapable
Language feels sentient
Interpretation feels like obligation
That experience cannot be reproduced in fragments — only simulated over time.
That’s what the book commits to doing.
