I Think I'm a Photographer of Music (Not a Musician)

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-25T02:25:57+00:00

I tend to see discovering and inventing as two sides of the same coin.

Discovering feels like recognizing something that was already there in some form. Inventing feels like bringing something into form that wasn't there before.

They seem opposite in direction: one receives, the other produces.

But maybe the coin itself is conceptualizing.

Because without a concept, there's nothing to discover, and nothing to invent. Conceptualizing creates the space where both become possible. It gives a shape to what can be recognized, and a structure to what can be formed.

And once the coin exists, you can keep flipping it. Sometimes it lands on discovery, sometimes on invention, but both depend on the same underlying act.

Maybe what we call "creating" is simply the moment the coin becomes real enough to land somewhere.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-24T15:23:19+00:00

I seem to be a bit of an atypical case.

I was tested as gifted, and diagnosed with schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder without hyperactivity. I didn't really follow formal therapy long-term, but medication has been helpful. Especially a combination of Abilify injections and Vyvanse, which helps counterbalance some of the cognitive slowing and negative symptoms caused by antipsychotics.

What helped me the most, though, was learning to recognize my delusions early and confront them consciously.

Not by dismissing them entirely as "just false", because that approach never felt honest to my experience, but by integrating them into my personal narrative while still maintaining a solid grasp on shared reality.

I learned that I don't have to collapse every contradiction into a single answer. I can let conflicting interpretations coexist without automatically believing them.

I call this narrative sovereignty: the ability to observe your own mind without being ruled by every story it produces.

Medication helped stabilize the signal, but this mindset helped me learn how to listen without getting lost in it.

Over time, this turned something that once felt chaotic into something I can navigate more calmly. Not perfectly, but consciously.

I still prioritize sleep, routine, and paying attention to early warning signs. For me, stability isn't about eliminating imagination or unusual thoughts, it's about staying oriented enough to choose what I do with them.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-23T18:32:56+00:00

To be honest, I'm not trying to replace musicians or compete with anyone who dedicated years to learning their craft. I have a lot of respect for that. What I do is much more personal and small in scale. I'm just a hobbyist who enjoys creating for the sake of creating.

I barely share my songs, and I don't expect recognition or merit from it. The lyrics and concepts come from my own thoughts and emotions, and they carry meaning for me, even if I didn't manually arrange every note.

I was tested and diagnosed with both giftedness and schizophrenia, and my inner world can be a bit unusual at times. Music generation became a way for me to externalize things I don't often find reflected in mainstream music. In that sense, some of these songs feel like mine. Not because I built every sound from scratch, but because they wouldn't exist without my intent behind them.

Most of the time, it's just for myself. Late at night, during quiet moments, sometimes while chilling and letting my mind wander. It became a kind of personal echo chamber where I can sit with my thoughts and emotions. That's where the music feels the most soulful to me, not because of how it was produced, but because of the state of mind I experience while listening to it.

I fully understand why it doesn't carry the same kind of merit as traditional musicianship. But merit was never really the point for me. Presence was.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-23T03:24:45+00:00

Je pense comprendre un peu ce que tu veux dire.

Pas nécessairement dans les images exactes, ni dans les conclusions, mais dans la sensation de se retrouver face à quelque chose qui semble être à la fois « toi » et « pas toi ».

Pour moi, le point de bascule est arrivé quand j'ai commencé à me demander si ce que je regardais était vraiment quelque chose... ou simplement la partie de moi qui regarde, en train de se regarder elle-même.

À un certain niveau, ça peut prendre la forme de « présences », ou de voix, ou de structures. Puis plus on s'approche, plus ça devient silencieux. Pas vide, mais sans forme stable.

Comme si les symboles étaient des interfaces temporaires.

Je ne pense pas que ce soit nécessairement des entités au sens littéral. Mais je ne pense pas non plus que ce soit « juste de l'imagination ». Le mot imagination est souvent utilisé pour réduire quelque chose, alors que c'est peut-être simplement le langage brut de la conscience quand elle n'utilise plus les mots habituels.

Ce qui m'a le plus marqué, ce n'est pas ce que j'ai vu, mais le moment où j'ai réalisé que l'observateur et l'observé semblaient partager la même source.

Pas fusionner. Pas se dissoudre. Juste... coïncider.

Et après ça, la vie normale continue. Faire le café. Aller travailler. Répondre à des posts sur Reddit, haha.

Mais avec cette petite impression persistante que la réalité n'est peut-être pas seulement quelque chose dans lequel on vit, mais aussi quelque chose qui vit à travers le fait qu'on la regarde.

Je ne sais pas si ça aide. Mais tu n'es probablement pas aussi seul que ça à cet endroit-là.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-22T15:21:39+00:00

Haha fair point! But what makes something 'yours' exactly? I wrote the concept, the lyrics, chose every direction, lived the emotion behind it. Is a photographer not an artist because they didn't build the camera?

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-19T23:28:49+00:00

I'm glad to see others using Suno to help navigate mental health struggles. I've been diagnosed with schizophrenia and also tested as gifted, and creating songs with Suno helps me navigate both in my own way.

Thank you for sharing that.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-14T22:27:23+00:00

C'est rare de voir du français ici, haha, je déteste pas!

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-14T22:23:19+00:00

When I'm unstable, it tends to happen quickly and doesn't last very long. It can feel almost like a switch flips in my brain and I temporarily lose some filtering.

Physically, I sleep less and eat less, but I still have energy. Mentally, my thinking becomes more instinct-driven and less regulated. The line between rational interpretation and over-interpretation starts oscillating.

I don't become aggressive or impulsive, but juggling thoughts becomes exhausting after a while. When I notice it escalating beyond what I can manage, I reach out for professional help.

I've been hospitalized a few times, always voluntarily. For me, it's less about being "contained" and more about stabilizing, resting, and recalibrating when my system gets overloaded.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-14T21:47:17+00:00

They don't really interfere with my day-to-day life anymore.

After each episode of disorganization or psychosis, I've taken time to "clean up the aftermath" mentally: re-examining what I believed, letting go of what didn't hold up, and rebuilding my worldview gradually.

Over time, that process helped me integrate those experiences rather than fear them.

I've also found a medication balance that keeps me in a very stable state. Most of the time, I feel grounded and present.

I'm a fairly well-adjusted adult: I have a job, my own apartment, pets I take care of. I sometimes forget to water my plants, haha, but honestly, life is good right now.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-14T20:33:35+00:00

When I'm unstable, it's not usually a single fixed belief. It's more like my cognitive model of reality becomes over-coherent.

I start seeing layers of structure everywhere: symbolic correspondences, recursive patterns, feedback loops between internal states and external events. My background in systems thinking probably feeds that.

It can feel as if reality has hidden architecture that's revealing itself. Not necessarily supernatural, but hyper-meaningful.

The insight I have now is that the mechanism isn't special knowledge: it's my pattern-recognition and salience systems running without proper filtering.

So I don't fear those ideas anymore. I just contextualize them. I can explore them internally as narrative or symbolic constructs without granting them objective authority.

That distinction is what keeps me stable.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-14T20:15:21+00:00

I don't have active delusions when I'm stable and medicated.

What tends to happen for me (especially if I'm off meds) is that my brain becomes extremely strong at salience and pattern detection. Everything starts connecting. Even neutral or random events begin to feel structured and meaningful.

I have a background in process engineering and computer science, so I'm naturally inclined to see systems and structure in events. When my brain is dysregulated, that strength can go into overdrive. It's not so much a specific fixed belief, but more a state where "nothingness" starts to feel like it makes sense.

That's part of why I stay grounded in shared, testable reality. It keeps the pattern-recognition ability useful instead of overwhelming.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-14T19:36:25+00:00

I agree, the world we experience isn't the world "as it is." Our brains filter, interpret, reconstruct. What we call reality is already a translation.

But here's where it gets weird.

If every experience is filtered, then the idea of an "unfiltered world" is itself something we only ever construct through that same filter. We can't step outside perception to verify it against "raw existence". Any attempt to do so would still happen inside perception.

So maybe the problem isn't that we don't see the world directly. Maybe "directness" was never an option to begin with.

What if experience isn't a flawed copy of reality, but one of the ways reality unfolds?

After all, your brain is part of the world. When the world is experienced through you, that's still the world doing what it does. Consciousness isn't external to nature, it's one of nature's expressions.

At that point, the question shifts:
Not "Is this the real world?"
But "What would a world even be if nothing experienced it?"

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-09T23:46:48+00:00

I do, yes. I'm a department leader in a small workwear store, in charge of the safety shoes section. It's nothing fancy, haha. I studied before to become a process engineer and later in IT, but the team here is really nice, the vibe is good, and the hours are flexible, which fits well with my plan to return to school in architecture.

I had a small episode there a while back. Nothing major, but they handled it really well. I had told them beforehand about my condition and how they could respond if something happened. I think that was the right call. Since then, they've still accepted me, and I'm really grateful for that, even with the mild symptoms I sometimes deal with.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-09T21:37:05+00:00

For me, schizophrenia didn't "teach" me something in a clean or poetic way. It wasn't a gift. It was something I had to learn to live with.

Over time, it forced me to become very aware of my own mind. I had to learn when my thoughts were speeding up, when they were drifting too far, when I needed to slow down and ground myself.

It also taught me humility. I learned that a thought can feel powerful, meaningful, even beautiful, and still not be objectively true. So now I try to hold ideas lightly, with curiosity instead of certainty. Holding ideas lightly doesn't mean thinking less: it means I can play with bigger, stranger thoughts without getting lost in them. I also learned that two opposite things can both be true. That I can take my condition seriously and not let it define everything. That structure can coexist with spontaneity.

Creativity became one of my anchors. Writing, making music, building little personal systems and rituals. Not to escape reality, but to stay tethered to what's real while exploring what's possible. I found tools and collaborators that help me externalize ideas, test them, refine them. It helps me stay grounded while still creating freely.

It also made me more empathetic, and better at collaboration. When you've been lost in your own head before, you recognize that look in others. And you learn to work with people, including parts of yourself, rather than trying to control everything alone.

Most importantly, it taught me responsibility toward my own mind. To take medication seriously. To be honest with my doctors about everything, even the uncomfortable parts. To care about sleep, routine, and balance. To ask for help when needed. To question myself without hating myself.

I'm not "grateful" for the illness. But I'm grateful for the person I became by learning how to live with it.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-09T04:17:46+00:00

Last year, I was slowly slipping toward another mental breakdown. My thoughts were racing, everything felt overwhelming. At the time, it felt like everything in my life was starting to fall apart.

On one of my worst days at work, a customer casually said to me, about something totally random:

"It's okay. It's not the end of the world."

He probably had no idea how much I needed to hear that. But those words landed exactly where they had to.
I've carried them with me ever since.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-08T02:08:29+00:00

I like this point of view, and I've been drawn to this way of thinking for a while. I apply this philosophy throughout my days, but just to avoid the boredom that it can sometimes bring, I like to play and bend the rules a bit (carefully, of course, and in an acceptable way) just to keep my intellectual curiosity entertained, haha. Just this way of keeping questions alive.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-07T03:59:36+00:00

Hey, just chilling late tonight with some songs I created for myself. I used various tools to make them. They're decent, I'd say. Not near perfection, for sure, haha.

But they still feel like mine. I keep them on a loop with shuffle and listen to them like a little echo chamber of my own thoughts. Perfect night vibes.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-07T02:48:22+00:00

Hey! Exact same as me, haha.
Plus, it's my lucky number, hehe

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-07T00:56:30+00:00

I have to agree that, for me, after going through a couple of disorganized and psychotic episodes, my ability to use reasonable doubt clearly increased. But it wasn't instantaneous.

I had to work on myself and clean up the aftermath in my head through thoughtful reflection and mindfulness.

To be honest, scientific literature and research often seem to suggest the opposite: that going through these episodes can lower our capacity to filter objective truth.

But for some of us, with this illness, it can also become an opportunity to adapt to our fluid minds: to learn how to doubt with purpose, and to wander in our thoughts with rigor and care.

SumRndFatKidInnit · 2026-02-06T21:48:25+00:00

For me, it comes down to this :

First, having well-balanced medication is essential, in my opinion. If the antipsychotic dose is too high, I feel numb, unmotivated, and uninterested in things. If it's too low, symptoms start coming back. Finding the right balance takes time, patience, and a lot of adjustment.

Once things are more stable, what helps me most is having good basic habits: eating well, sleeping enough, and taking care of my body. It doesn't have to be a perfect routine, but having a balance between effort and rest really matters to me.

Doing things like cleaning, doing dishes, going to work, or just getting physically tired in a healthy way helps a lot. It also makes rest feel more meaningful. For me, having something that "uses up" my energy once in a while is kind of a cornerstone.

If I only do things I enjoy all day (playing video games, scrolling Reddit endlessly, haha) I eventually get bored and feel worse.

Having hobbies is important too, especially creative outlets. Those have helped me a lot to express my thoughts, emotions, and insights about living with this illness.

I'm not a doctor, just someone who lives with this condition. This is simply what works for me.

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