A very queer, composite being

(CW: Altered states/psychosis/reality shifting. The discussion is academic and contains minimal details of our or anyone else's psychotic episodes, but I know the topics can be triggering nonetheless. Also, brief mentions of abuse.)

It is bad enough when one's self-knowledge is wobbly, thanks to the relentless exposure to people and situations that degrade one's ability to recognise oneself as a valid knower. Racism and sexism (which includes misogyny, homophobia and transphobia) are the commonest of these self-knowledge-destroyers; ableism, xenophobia and classism play a similar role. This is what we've experienced as a Black, transmasculine, disabled plural system. Everywhere we look, we marginalised people are told that our self-knowledge is invalid, that it is impossible for a marginalised person to step outside their experience and analyse a situation objectively and logically. It is, in short, the presumption that to be marginalised is to be less intelligent or rational. This hostility towards one's capacity to know oneself and understand one's experiences logically is called 'epistemic injustice', an idea introduced by the philosopher Miranda Fricker in 2007, in a book by the same name.
( Cut for mentions of abuse and psychosis, though with few details of either. )

This is both an explanation and an apology. We ought to have written it sooner, but we weren't in the frame of mind to do so until now.

You're probably wondering what happened to us after we disappeared from this site several months ago. Our mental health started to deteriorate in late March. It was a harrowing, bewildering time, both for us and for everyone who had to observe it. We started showing symptoms of psychosis and mania: distractibility, delusions, rapid speech, distorted thoughts, tactile hallucinations, grandiose plans, hearing voices, seemingly prophetic visions, sleeplessness, never-ending conversation and impulsivity. What was once coherent and lucid was now mangled, nonsensical, warped.

Worst of all were the delusions, especially the persecutory delusions. It is these delusions that led us to falsely accuse people of being antisemites and racists, among other things. We sent angry messages to people we considered dear friends, thinking that we were being betrayed in favour of hardened racists who wanted to deprive us of our right to exist. We saw imagined references in people's posts (eg, spelling errors and nonstandard usage) that were somehow linked to shadowy agendas, even though no outsider could see the clues. We posted false warnings on our old account that we later removed. We thought that all the abusive, controlling or merely unpleasant systems we'd encountered online were somehow in league with each other to harm us and our friends. Of course, the lot of it was nonsense, but we sincerely believed it back then. When we think of what we said back then, we are mortified. We weren't in our right minds, but people were still hurt, and we ought to make amends anyway. We don't know whether people will forgive us, but explaining and apologising are the right things to do anyway.

It was the first time we'd experienced fully fledged psychosis. We had no idea how to handle it. We've been hypervigilant before and have worried about people's intentions, but those worries weren't unshakeable beliefs. We also thought we were on a mission from God, so we were a bit wary of seeking medical advice. We were worried that they'd minimise the cosmic importance of what we were feeling at the time. We reached out for help, but those requests for help were incoherent and delusional. I know we frightened and confused people, and they probably didn't know what to make of what we were saying.

We deleted our old account during the episode. We allowed it to be purged when we came back to our senses, since there were a lot of posts from March and April that we were ashamed of. We felt that it was 'tainted' by what we'd posted.

We don't remember everything that happened during the episode, since the mania made it more difficult than usual to form memories, but we know enough to piece things together and acknowledge the harm we did.

We don't want to share all the details publicly, but our condition was bad enough for us to stay on a psychiatric ward for a fortnight. On the ward, we were prescribed antipsychotics and mood stabilisers. After our discharge, our normal psychiatrist diagnosed us with bipolar disorder, type I. (Before, we just thought we had depression.) Over time, the delusions faded, and we fell back to earth. And it was a hard fall indeed: after we were discharged, we had to reconstruct our life from the bottom in many ways.

We are truly sorry for the pain we caused during our episode. We hope you can forgive us.

—Jack, for all of us