Comment by throwaway920102
1 month ago
My life wouldn't be improved at all, I mostly just wanted to get your reaction because I was curious. I have a person I care about who suffers from schizophrenia and I struggle to tell when they are exaggerating or saying something for comedic effect or hyperbole or if they are making an analogy or are saying something literal, so my question / comment was mostly to hopefully gain some perspective. I could just ask them "are you saying you literally believe X" every few minutes but it's hard to get a word in with them sometimes.
I guess the other point of my comment is potentially for your benefit in that if you want to have many people read your book, I have a fear that a large portion of potential readers will hear your story, open up the book, falsely conclude "oh this guy is still just crazy, this is a sci-fi/mythology text" and close it without reaching the parts that to me were the most interesting. But I would understand if you decide that you don't really care to change anything, just sharing in case it turned out to be helpful.
I appreciate the feedback. I can definitely see people thinking I'm crazy by the first few chapters and not getting to the good part.
I was trying (and failed) to be clever about improving your life.
What you say about exaggeration vs hyperbole vs analogy vs literal resonates with me. Have you considered they may not, themselves, have an answer to this? For example, I often throw out (hyperbolicly) really wild numbers at work that are off by orders of magnitude to illustrate what happens when stuff grows to an extreme; yet, I'm also very cautious to get precise numbers when building. My co-workers may be bothered by this (so I'll be more mindful now that I've probed for this insight), but I would like to think that hyperbole is easily detected.
Honestly, I don't know if I can help with perspective without witnessing you with your care-person. Everyone's different and the nature of the beast is you only interact with really ill people when you yourself are out of commission. I wouldn't want to generalize me onto someone else. Perhaps you just show them the post I'm replying to and ask what they think?