About:
Ways to Read:
This project is a memorial to a five-year friendship and partnership I had with Will Pearson. I met Will during my first week of my freshman year at Brown University, and over the course of that year, I watched him from afar, observing that his life and lifestyle were different from others.
Will had recently been diagnosed with bipolar and schizophrenia, together called schizoaffective disorder, and was undergoing treatment at a local hospital while also enrolled in school, experimenting on himself with new medications while I and others were simply living our college lives. By the time I befriended Will, he was preoccupied with the management of his illness – a project that I too became involved with, maybe even obsessed with, to a degree that changed me and challenged my own mental health.
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Will died on May 21, 2015, while the two of us were living together in North Carolina two years after I graduated. His death, while not unexpected, was still a shock, and marked the end of a five-year battle that defined my life at the time as well as his. This project is my tribute to those years he spent fighting and the years I spent watching him, and is born out of the appreciation I've since felt for his life and his work, and just how many impossible things he tried to do.
Where to Begin?
The project may be read in a number of ways, and in different order. The early chapters rely on a unique storytelling software called Twine, and are formatted exclusively for online reading. Twine is a hypertext-based application useful for creating stories with many different moving parts, such as "choose-your-own adventure" stories or fragmented stories. The first five chapters of Pain make use of Twine's special storytelling capabilities and as a result are best read in this way – immersively. These stories include primary documents from my life with Will (videos, images, Tweets, emails) that Twine allows to be dropped directly in the middle of the story. These pieces of memorabilia will often serve as "arrows" when navigating a Twine. When moving from one panel to another, a reader will either select the hyperlinked text (rendered in blue) or a clickable image or video link in order to move forward through the story. Chapters are best read in order, but experimenting is encouraged.
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Because of the size of Twine files and the media within them, new users will occasionally be asked to download the file (.HTML) which will then ask permission to run on their browser. These HTML files are harmless – simply a hard copy of the web page for that particular chapter. They pose no threat to your computer. I simply wasn't able to find a site with enough storage to host the original file.
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Originally text-based pieces will only appear in PDF format, to be downloaded onto the user's computer. If the user prefers not to use Twine, each chapter from the project will appear in individual PDF format under the heading "Full Texts".
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The Twine form in particular is meant to simulate feelings of of fragmentation key to grief and illness.
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