The colourblind artist
A friend of mine at Uni has a shaky grasp on reality. This makes talking to him very frustrating, as a lot of the time in lectures he will get exactly the wrong end of the stick and will then tell you the inverted message he gained from it immediately afterwards. However, when you straighten him out as to the correct interpretation, he will, even if halfway through a sentence then say EXACTLY what you've just said to him as if he's correcting you and has known what he was talking about the whole time. This works retroactively. Whatever he says at the time he is speaking is the view he's always had, even if you've just seen him U-turn in mid-flow.

He also projects very heavily. Whatever he is feeling, he interprets as what the other person is feeling, ie: if you question him on something he's said which is obviously wrong and he starts to get frustrated he'll tell you to calm down and not get agitated...in an agitated voice!

However, this is not his fault. Why, you may ask? He has quite bad schitzophrenia and is on medication for it, combined with other secondary learning difficulties like severe dyslexia. This is why he's only partly aware of what he's doing in terms of consistency and truth. Oh, and we're art students (painting, sculpture, printmaking etc) and he's, yes, colourblind. Not actually such a handicap for an artist as you can do anything 3D or black and white etc, but he insists on trying to use colour in his work, mainly because others are.

Despite the fact that this is all partly brought on by his illness, it doesn't make him any easier to deal with, or the consequences of his direct lies (which he does know are lies, I've asked him about some and he said it was just "y'know, for a laugh") any less damaging. Last year we all lived in the same dorm building. Halfway through the year one of the guys from the floor below me took me aside and asked if he could talk to me about something delicate. Oh dear, what had I done? This guy was quite quiet, very nice, a bit mad but only in the way that students are a bit mad - I didn't think I'd done anything to upset him. He closed the door.

"Look, I know you're friends with *insert colorblind artist's name*, I just wanted to know why he hates me, all the things he's been saying, because I haven't done anything to him and I just don't know and..."

by this point he was close to tears, so I asked him what was up as I hadn't heard anything about him.

He told me that the CBA had been telling everyone that he was dangerous, that he'd grabbed this girl and raped her and that he had a history of rape. The police knew about him and he was actually only out on probation, that nobody should go near him because of the danger. Of course, people who didn't know the CBA for the liar he was believed this, and the way the lies were told so frankly made it easy to believe. CBA didn't even know this guy at all. I can't think of a more shitty thing to do to someone.

Of course, now none of us know whether to ignore everything the CBA says. Is his backstory true? Did he have a girlfriend who killed herself, was he really in the army and did he really shoot a 13 year old kid in Northern Ireland. All of it is possible and not too far-fetched, but when reality is that malleable, who do you trust?
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Fri 30 Nov 2007, 11:56, Reply)