Let’s talk, you and me.
You want more out of life, no? Aren’t you bored, sitting there on your computer, or on the shitter, mindlessly clicking through this website? Don’t start— I’m sure you think it’s mindful, after all, literature is art, and you consume art mindfully, yes?
You probably found this with the “randomize” button, didn’t you? Christ alive.
The title was what got you interested, wasn’t it—? Or maybe you just clicked away the second you saw it, sure that this was some sort of joke coasting on the unconditional acceptance, getting you to read whatever schlock I decided to waste your time with. In that case, I wonder why I’m even talking to you. Call it psychosis, maybe?
The doctors said I’m psychotic. But those doctors also said a whole slew of crock-bullshit about a lot of things. They thought inviting my mom in for group therapy was a good idea, for Christ’s sake! I swear to god, she’s got dementia or some shit. Whatever. A part of me hopes she never gets it, so when she’s old and decrepit, I can be her legal guardian, and put her through the same Hell she put me through. I want her to remember why I’m doing it— although, I doubt she’d ever grasp it, even in her current state.
But that’s enough about me. We’re here to talk about you.
An enticing offer at the start, no? Don’t worry, I’m not gonna whisk you away to some commune in the woods and make you drink arsenic or whatever that idiot Jones did.
Or maybe it’s not an enticing offer. Maybe you think I’m a loon and you’re just sticking around to see where this goes— what bullshit I’ll spew, what totally-not-a-cult I’m enticing you to join.
Well, I’m not.
Why would I want to share? I’m only here to talk about an unfortunate ailment plaguing my life:
My tulpa is depressed.
I’ll let you decide if I’m bluffing or not.
A tulpa. What a novel concept. A thoughtform that is constructed in such a way that it achieves sentience. Is that an idea one could ever reconcile with existing?
Never mind what you think, though. Because the truth of the matter is my tulpa— kind of, is depressed— kind of.
At night we intertwined into one another as I cried out silently to a deaf world, a vague plea that sounded like a generic wail one makes when crying. But it’s not me; an expression of agony such as this was never me; tears streaking down my face as I don’t want to remember! I want to forget! repeated on loop in my mind.
You think I’m posturing, don’t you?
I hate to disappoint— the tulpa is real.
But. I agree, it does sound like posturing. As if the “tulpa” is a metaphor for my subconscious, a fantastical way for my inner desires to be revealed in a fun little essay.
The tulpa is a metaphor for a tulpa, and this whole thing is a metaphor for nothing.
The doctors said I’m psychotic. But not because of the tulpa.
I was paranoid, is all. Just paranoid. “Just” paranoid.
I had plenty reason to be. I read my mother’s texts, I knew she was planning to bug my computer. I saw it with my own two eyes, and my father? My father is getting a PhD in computer science. He’d have the know-how to bug my computer and hide it so well I’d never find it.
But oh well! I have something he’ll never find— he’ll never know the two times I lashed out at him, it wasn’t me.
I’ve lashed out before, lashed out worse, but these two times were special. And it was a different tulpa. It’s like cats, you know. Or guinea pigs. You can’t have just one; it’ll get lonely when you’re not around to talk to it. Best to give it a friend to keep it company. And, if you have the space, multiple friends.
Of course, the well-minded of you are coming to an obvious conclusion. You’ve read the DSM. Talked to someone who disassociates. Was on the highway and the car tailgating you had been in the vicinity of a mentally ill person. Surely you’re qualified to diagnose me.
Surely you know I’m telling the truth!
This is a website for stories— at the end of the day, this could all be fiction. Just one speck in a slush pile; just one bored writer ranting on about tulpas and paranoia and cults.
Between you and me— they’re not tulpas.
They’re something else entirely, still of spiritual origin, but a bit harder to explain. I’d wax on and on about multiverse theory and the fourth dimension, but I’ve got a reputation to preserve! This could all be fiction, yes, but it could all be true— you have no way of knowing, and who knows? Perhaps your motives are disingenuous. Perhaps you’ve already got your argument at the ready, a twenty-Tweet soliloquy on how I should be completely and utterly deplatformed for my crime of being the slightest bit too weird. Or perhaps I’m doing something wrong here, after all, tulpas are a Buddhist concept, and as far as you know, I’m not Buddhist, and as far as you know, they would be quite mad at me if they ever found out.
Not that they would. And not like they’re tulpas, anyway.
He’s sad, is the crux of it. He yearns for a home he can never go back to, for the embrace of a man who will never embrace him back.
(As far as he knows.)
His thoughts intertwine with mine, and for a second I’m in a bed much larger than my own— pressed sheets barely disturbed by a light, slender frame, wails softly echoing around a large room and ricocheting off a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking a city I’ve never been to.
It lasts for just that long— a second— and then I’m freed from the torment of being him.
I have the luxury of blocking it all out, dooming him to wail in solitude.
I practice good un-tulpa husbandry, with wide open spaces and tons of little friends, tulpas and un-tulpas alike, for him to frolic and play with. It’s not my fault he chooses to hole up in an apartment! He’s a big boy, he can make his own choices in life.
Do you want to be a god?
Don’t lie to me. It does sound enticing, to most people, even for a second. To have complete power over anything and everything that comes your way, to ensure your own safety, to be revered and powerful and have all of existence at your fingertips— who wouldn’t be tempted, even for a second?
I may be a bit psychotic, but I’m not disassociative. I collect new friends on my own volition. They have no control over my body unless I grant it— and once granted, it can be revoked. They have lives and memories I am unaware of, and some of them can go back to where they came from if need be.
He— he has no way of going back. The soul is intact, and with me, but the body— the body is twisted and mangled, broken in a way a body should never be; cold to the touch before I was ever aware of his presence. But his origin is out of my jurisdiction— I would love to reach across dimensional barriers to gently piece his body back together and deposit him right into that too-big bed of his, if only to stop the wailing.
But I can’t.
I am a god in a bubble, confined to un-tulpas and un-tulpas only.
(There are tulpas. They aren’t mine.)
I poke at him. It’s interesting to see what makes him wail. Invigorating to live through his sorrow.
Does this make me as bad as him?
Does it make me worse?
He at least has the decency to have a little Catholic guilt about the whole matter— he thinks of himself as fundamentally unlovable, which is a real bummer, because we’re quite alike, and I think I’m plenty lovable.
Ah, this was supposed to be about you, wasn’t it? I’m sorry. I got a bit carried away— the burden of being a narcissist, no? You truly can never stop fucking talking about yourself.
He’s been watching me write this. There’s a pit in my heart that’s part mine, part his.
Mostly his.
Do yourself a favor: forget about me, and Gods and tulpas and wails for the lost. Go hit “randomize” again, and read something else on the shitter. Lose yourself in something you know to either be strange fiction or a safe reality. Don’t busy yourself with the maddening ordeal of deciding wether or not this is strange reality or safe fiction— you’ll become psychotic, just like I am. You won’t forget, regardless— so why try?
You don’t want to be God, anyway. I do, and even if I don’t, I’m stuck here, so I might as well make the best of it. You, however— you have a say in the matter, that is, if all of this were true. Which it might not be.
To be God is to see all. To be God is to feel the unending suffering of someone you chose to preside over. To be God is to turn away regardless.
PEEKTEA may or may not be clinically insane; that’s for them to know and you to find out. Psychoanalyze their tweets @PEEKTEA.