The Fairytale Apocalypse That Healed My Medical Trauma.

How misdiagnosis, pickles, and LARPing changed my life.

With never-before-seen photos of Az's LARP origins.

​In 2014, I went to see a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, California. I had just decided to take a break from art school, which was scary, and I was having anxiety. I wanted to take acting lessons, which really weren’t helped by the anxiety.

That psychiatrist prescribed me an anti-psychotic.

If you’re thinking, “Wow, that seems extreme,” you’d be right. You may also be thinking “If you have no form of psychosis, that doesn’t seem good.”
And you’d be right again.

That same year, I attended my first real LARP event. That’s Live Action Role Play- a curious hobby in which people play a game kind of like DnD, but not. A game of pretend, played in costume, acted out in real space. My first events were local, home-made, charming high fantasy games in the woods and parks of Southern California.

Between acting and improv classes, I found a local foam-sword-fighting practice group on Facebook. In a public soccer field under buzzing park lights, Devin and John (skilled in actual martial arts and swordsmanship) taught me not to be afraid to hit people with weapons made of pool noodles and EVA foam. For the cost of simply showing up, they opened the doors to the entire subculture for me.

A few weeks later, I was in an elevator in 1920s flapper attire with a fake bullet wound drawn on my temple in eyeliner, thinking: I maybe have found something really special.

Az on their way to a parlor game at WyrdCon, 2014

Az after the parlor game with the hastily drawn eyeliner bullet wound, 2014

Weeks after that, I crammed camping gear into my little white VW Beetle (named Marvin, because he looked like Marvin the Paranoid Android) and drove three hours into the Idyllwild mountain campgrounds for my first weekend-long event.

I got lost in the mountains at night. I stress-cried so hard my vision blurred. My tent collapsed on top of me right as I noticed a large white spider unlike anything I had ever seen, trapping us both inside.

It was one of the best weekends of my life. (A brand-new friend, Katt, traded tents with me.)

Az with NPC friends on his first weekend LARP ever, 2014

Az NPCing as a home-made Harpy, 2017

I played as an NPC which was free, fun and low-commitment. I loved facilitating immediately, and I NPCed games for over a year before ever making my own character. I’d never played an escape room or DnD, and I didn’t even like board games much. But I was a glutton for storytelling and fantasy. That was enough.

​Playing together made a group of strangers from vastly different walks of life into a tight-knit community unlike any I had ever experienced. Not a perfect one, but a real, ‘let me cook you dinner for helping me with a garage sale’ and ‘sure I’ll come over and make art with you for a week’ kind of community. I’d never been part of one that wasn’t attached to a church- which is… a problem, for someone who doesn’t really belong in church.

Still, my anxiety didn’t improve. It also didn’t feel like ‘me.’ I felt happy when I thought about my actual life. After a year of acting lessons, I felt ready to try and go back to school for illustration and concept design. I started a Patreon for my art, which would have previously been a heinous and bombastic idea.

Yet I had this out-of-the-blue anxiety that hit me like a ton of bricks on the daily. With no source, and therefore no solution. The psychiatrist’s solution; add another medication. I had no reason to distrust doctors, so I did what he said.
​
Through LARP, I made my first openly queer and feminist friends. (I’d definitely had queer friends before that in High School, but it was High School in Florida, so. Rough.) I learned some gorgeous variations of humanity through them — and started to discover little variations in myself. I met people I cherish to this day. I met people who scarred me. I did their makeup at games and drew their character portraits like I’d wake up from a dream the next morning and forget them. I fell in love, got my heart broken, and fell in love again. With all of them, honestly.

Az NPCing between doing makeup behind the scenes, 2014

A canoe full of LARPers at Disneyland's Magic Kingdom, California, 2014

And my body slowly began to fall apart. By 2015 I was at the heaviest weight I'd ever been. My ADHD worsened. If I missed a dose of the anti-psychotic by minutes, I felt poisoned. The mysterious anxiety found something to latch onto and mutated into death anxiety. I was dizzy, exhausted, and increasingly disassociative. This time, the psychiatrist added Xanax to my medical cocktail.

Going completely unheard for so long, and being in my first real community where I was not only throwing parties but being invited to them, I developed an alcohol problem. It truly snuck up on me. The weight gain had my values of body positivity in a daily fistfight with my very not-positive feelings about my body. I felt tired often. Alcohol added new levels to the emotional rollercoaster that I could not seem to disembark.

Suddenly I was hanging on to school by a thread, and needed to take a lighter load. Strangely, I couldn’t watch any media about outer space without spiraling into a paralytic state of dread. On one alarming day, I could only see in black and white, for no reason anyone could guess. On a visit with my family, I fell asleep at the dinner table and almost faceplanted into my ice cream.

My parents got me back to Florida to visit the Mayo Clinic.

​The doctor looked at my medications and her jaw dropped. She said she’d never seen someone physically healthy and so young on so many medications. We spent the day doing tests to confirm I didn’t need any of them. She didn't fixate on my weight, thankfully, but was concerned about it's sudden change.  We read the actual side effects of the anti-psychotic together, which included weight gain so severe it could trigger diabetes.*****

Az in 2014, before the medication. In 2015, during the sudden weight gain, and in 2016, after quitting the anti-psychotic.

Az in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Showing a slimmer silhouette as a result of chronic illness.

When another doctor saw my Xanax and alcohol intake, he slid a small stack of addiction brochures across the table towards me and said, “Frankly, I don’t know how you haven’t dropped dead yet.”

So I did something very, very stupid; I quit everything cold turkey. The alcohol and Xanax as well as the anti-psychotic, and never went back.

Note: DO NOT DO THIS. You can also just drop dead from doing this.

Luckily, I did not drop dead. I don't know why the cold turkey part wasn't harder for me, but I had no relapses and no desire to. The withdrawal from the anti-psychotic was the worst one, and made me feel like I was both going insane and dying at the same time.* But even as I huddled sweating under my covers in a camping bed I’d dragged outside, I knew I never wanted those substances in my body again. I just rode it out, and when it was done, it was done. I found new ways to be social at parties. 

A few short months and a lot of therapy later, something pretty amazing happened. That ‘chemical anxiety’ that came out of nowhere gradually fell away.  My therapist at the time, Tara Myers, together with the exposure therapy I inadvertently got out of LARPing, seemed to have eliminated it.**** I haven’t felt anxiety like that in the decade since.

Az's first LARP character, Petra, in 2014

Az's same character, Petra, in 2016

But then my appetite, once augmented by the anti-psychotic, vanished. Unfortunately as I slowly began to lose weight and appear a little more like the ‘me’ I was used to, I didn’t realize I was slipping into a new hell.

Soon my stomach began to hurt every day. It felt like it was boiling without burning. Like I was hungry, but eating didn’t fix it. Like that curse in Pirates of the Caribbean.

I went to a doctor. I remember sitting on his paper seat covering as he let a sea of trainees in the room, and diagnosed my hair twirling as some nervous tick for them before even speaking to me.**

He said my stomach pain was just anxiety.
I said I’ve had anxiety before. This is different. I feel okay mentally, and my stomach feels like it’s boiling.
He said okay, it’s heartburn caused by anxiety.

For months, I tried to get him to do anything at all. I went back three times. His only advice was this: He told me to stay away from acidic foods. Insurance would cover no more visits.

Every day by 2:00 PM, I was no longer functional. My stomach hurt so much that moving around meant vomiting or crying. This went on for months.

Then I started getting what I called “teeth zaps.” Bolts of searing electricity in my skull. I used to say it felt like being tased in the teeth. They kept me up all night, or happened in the middle of the night, half-waking me and triggering sleep paralysis.

One of my dearest friends, Bryan, once stayed up all night with me, timing the frequency of these zaps. They happened every minute and a half or so, for almost seven hours.

One night, on a trip for my birthday, I had an episode so bad that I thought it could have killed me. It felt like my brain was ‘going dark.’ When I explained this to the people I was with, one person dear to me said something I’ll never forget:

You’re not going to die, so I’m not going to take you to the hospital. You just like being a damsel in distress.

Hearing that re-wired my brain a bit. I tried to seek accommodations from my school, but when I explained my symptoms to the counselor, she said, “Step outside and take a breath, then come back in and do the work.”

Faced with the prospect of taking on American student debt for a degree I was increasingly unlikely to get, I left Otis College of Art and Design for the final time. I lapsed on my Patreon. A friend cancelled their pledge and wrote me a letter saying that if I wasn’t going to work, they weren’t going to pay. To my shame, I updated even less after that.

I started fainting when I over-exerted. I left the house less and less, except to go to LARP events, which kind of saved me. My friend Madison brought me texts and workbooks from her special effects makeup course at Make-Up Designory in Los Angeles, so I could learn from home. I devoured them. I learned about Puppetry. Fabrication. Theatrical effects. Anything that let me build fictional worlds with my hands. My friends Adam and Edward made sure my character (Petra) was still a safe space to inhabit even as I unraveled in real life.

I joined the staff of a local LARP headed by Bryan, as lead on fabrication and special effects. I was a beginner, but I had an art background and we were all volunteers. I never felt more at home than when I was building magic for other people.

Then three things happened;
​
First: I got a secondhand camera, and with the help of a dear friend, Anthony, we started recording tutorials and informative videos about LARP. I re-skinned my Patreon. The YouTube channel was called Larp House- named for the large rental I shared with between six and eight roommates. All LARPers. Anthony and I were like-minded lovers of the whimsical. An imperfect team that I remember extremely fondly. Even if  my invisible illness did nobody any favors, we were good friends and passionate creatives. Together we laid the foundation for the work that changed my life.

Az sitting infront of the camera for one of the first Larp House episodes, 2016

Second: I threw up coffee beans.
​I had not eaten any coffee beans. I barely drank coffee at all. And the pain had escalated, so I thought, better check it out. I went to the emergency room.

The nurse informed me that I had not, in fact, thrown up coffee beans.

I had thrown up blood.

Blood goes all coffee-bean-looking when it’s been sitting in your stomach.

Okay, I said as calmly as possible. Why did I throw up blood? My stomach has hurt for months but my doctor said I just have anxiety.

The nurse made a face and said, in a skeptical sing-song voice, That’s not always what it is.

When I explained the teeth zaps, which she informed me were actually seizures, they ran some tests. The nurse said, “I’d be surprised if you had seizures for that long with no brain damage.”  I passed a cognitive test of some kind, and they did not scan my brain. They gave me something for my stomach. (It hadn’t been enough coffee beans to cause serious worry, apparently.)

Third: A few days later, I ate a pickle.

My pain disappeared.

Not just “relieved” but gone. For the first time in nearly a year.

My boyfriend at the time, Taylor, said:
If you feel bad again in thirty minutes, it’s a sodium deficiency. I felt bad again in twenty-five.

I ate more pickles and mainlined gatorade. When the test results came back, they confirmed that I had a sodium deficiency.

I looked up sodium deficiencies and found a name for the thing that was ruining my life: Hyponatremia.

You can get it from malnutrition- say, after not eating enough when a certain medication destroys your appetite. Without enough sodium, you cannot process food or water correctly and your stomach begins to sort of eat itself. And without enough sodium, the water in your brain cannot conduct enough electricity to function.
It can cause hyponatremic seizures.

It also had a gloriously, maddeningly, infuriatingly simple solution:
Electrolytes. Goddamn salt.

Then I remembered what my doctor told me: “Avoid acidic foods,”

You know which foods are often the acidic ones? The ones with electrolytes. Citrus. Pickles. Salt-and-vinegar.

Not only had he failed to perform a single test, but the advice he gave when he wrote me off could have killed me.

The hyponatremia went untreated for so long that it became chronic. For years after, I had to supplement my diet with shots of soy sauce, small glasses of salt water, or sodium tablets. Or else, like clockwork, my stomach would begin to boil again.***

I called it the Mermaid Sickness. But I had my life back, and decided to (once again) do something crazy with it.

The luggage Az mostly lived out of from 2017-2019, photographed at a train station in Athy, Ireland, 2018.

I sold or gave away all my costumes to my friends and moved to Europe. I documented LARP events on a whole new continent, staying on friends’ couches and in spare rooms when I couldn’t find a rental.

My dad called while I was in a train station in Berlin. He had checked the federal Open Payments Database and told me that the psychiatrist had been paid roughly $100,000 per year in speaking fees- by the pharmaceutical company that held the rights to the anti-psychotic he prescribed me.

​But I let my feelings about the American medical system fester in a dark little corner of my mind while I sipped my brine, and went about the business of filling my life up with living.

Three years later, 

...In 2019, I went back to Florida to visit my parents. And the funniest thing happened.

COVID-19 shut down most of the world, and in Florida I was stuck. Visas and immigration to the UK were thrown out the window, as well as access to the now-international LARP community I had met and loved and suffered for in new and beautiful ways.

Florida was in the epicenter of the pandemic at the time, so even without mandated lockdowns, I was not leaving the house.

But I still had my camera, my skills, and my love of telling tales together.

I finally relented and downloaded TikTok.

To my delight, I found an entirely new and ingenious community of role-players using short form video and TikTok’s duet feature as their medium. Remote LARPs. To say it lit my brain on fire is an understatement.
​
I made videos at a velocity that could’ve broken the sound barrier. There were tags for different stories and genres of roleplaying, and through them creators built universes. Wizard schools, time travelers, swashbucklers, medieval royalty and intrigue, it was all there in our hands. Storytellers always find a way.

Az getting ready to film "Professor Wyllt" wizard school videos in his mom's bedroom in the middle of the night during COVID-19

I had my hand in all of these genres, and made plenty of stories as a pirate, a wizard, a knight, and a lounge singer.
But the story that I founded myself was a complete accident.

I posted a sort of “screen-test” for an original character, purely as an aesthetic experiment between other stories.

The only information I gave was that her name was AA1i5 (Aalis) and that the apocalypse was the best thing that could have happened to her. But something about her gripped people. 

​Hundreds of comments, questions and inquiries later, a friend who played a family member in a wizard school LARP with me suggested the name Asunderland. As far as I'm concerned, the story developed a will of its own, and insisted to be born. Who was I to hold it back?

The title card for the living Asunderland video playlist, which you can watch here on StarWhispers.

Asunderland is the story of an apocalypse in a dystopian fairytale world. The place itself is a mash-up of Oz, Neverland and Wonderland. The stage was set with the premise that you, as a fairytale citizen of Asunderland, must model your role perfectly or be sent to the “Rabbit Hole:” a secret medical facility under the Emerald City. There, you will be fixed right up, reconditioned, and sent back out into the world.

Or not.

The metaphors and analogies were about as ham-handed as you can get. Taste and subtlety wasn’t the point for me; Catharsis was. Together with hundreds of other creators each making dozens of videos, we plotted our character’s escape from the Rabbit Hole, the downfall of the Emerald City and the Wizard who put them there.
The story amassed over 60 million views on TikTok.

A few choice duets of a single video in the Asunderland tag; a single moment in the story told by dozens of creators.

The artistry and ingenuity from so many creators was overwhelming. There were subplots for subplots, and single creators doing the work of entire film studios- Costuming, roleplaying and filming multiple characters themselves just to realize their story and vision. There was literature being created. Comics were drawn. Dolls were painted. Cosplays of each other's characters were done. At one point, so many people were creating in the tag that a separate, wider “fairytale apocalypse” aesthetic trend caught on.

​The true map of Asunderland sprawled well beyond what I'd originally drawn. Hundreds of voices made it into a living, breathing thing- and so much more than the story I thought I had set out to tell. 

That’s part of what I love most about Asunderland: how it got away from me. It became the stage for other creators to process pieces of their lives. One creator explored their DID. Another made her art from a place of having been mistreated and exploited by the Disney company itself. Many simply had fun experimenting with makeup, or at-home film effects. They expanded their creative confidence as well as their friend circles.

​Through this play and art and exploration, I met Lou, my partner of 6 years now. I saw his first character videos and loved them so much that I reached out to him, and we started talking. The rest is, as we say, gay history. And that's only part of what I owe to this story and its many storytellers.

Lou as RA3317, his White Rabbit character in Asunderland

An actual screenshot of my TikTok drafts from the first time I saw one of Lou's videos, when I duetted it to save it for later. January 2020

Because “reconditioning” (or brainwashing and memory-wiping) existed in Asunderland, there could be multiple versions of a character. There was no single Wicked Witch. Wicked Witch was a model, or a role, or a program. Each creator's version was a unique and canon interpretation. This was intentional, to facilitate hundreds of creators playing together without anyone’s favorite being “taken.” But it also forced characters to ask themselves one central question:

“Who are you?”

Aalis, my character, never had a clear answer. There were three versions of herself she struggled to reconcile:
The dreamlike, irretrievable and innocent past version.
The trapped, terrified rabbitlike version.
And the warlike vigilante that she was afraid of becoming.

In order to escape the Rabbit Hole, she needed the warlike fury. To access that, she needed forgiveness from the dreamlike. And through friendship, she learned the rabbitlike uncertainty wasn’t weakness. It was what made connection possible, and what kept her human when inhumane things happened to her.

I thought I was losing my mind in 2015. That doctor told me as much without ever bothering to check. Some people closest to me told me as much when they implied I was feigning sickness for attention. My friends and fellow storytellers didn’t.

It was a friend and fellow storyteller who drove me to the emergency room. Another stayed up all night with me. Another still chugged soy sauce on camera to prove a point about my illness on my behalf. They reminded me that it was real, it was bad, and that I wasn’t alone.

Aalis’s victimization was the forward momentum that made her ready to act. Her connections were what gave her the ability. Without the fear and uncertainty, the anger would just be self-righteousness, and the dream would just be an escape. Together, the anger, the uncertainty, and the dream transformed into someone who could never be made small again, and whose friends wouldn’t let her.

An idyllic, past version of Aalis alongside a wrathful vigilante persona.

Then she, you know, mind-melded with the Jabberwock while the rebels unleashed the ancient beasts and razed the Emerald City to the ground. As one does. (No damsel in distress here.)

Aalis was a journey from What have they done to me? to Who am I?  to, finally:
“I decide who I am.”

Asunderland, to me, is a story about how the institutions which harmed us are pathetic, unnatural and wafer-thin. About how toppling them starts with us, helping each other, and discovering ourselves in the process. Who we are is bigger than them. That’s what I needed to feel bigger than what happened to me.

And beyond that: I wonder often what this story meant to everyone playing it out, but I think some people  discovered something I didn’t have the context for yet. Asking who you are can matter more than who you were, or who you want to be.

When you ask yourself “Who are you?” regularly, you learn that the answer can change. So you begin to think of yourself in terms of who you could be. Not who you should be. 

It’s probably no coincidence that Aalis was the last character I created before I realized that I am trans, and began to medically transition.

Now I know what I’m capable of.
Now I know who I am.

And to you who tell stories with me: Thank you for that.

-Trystan
(Azrai)

---

* It probably did not help that I chose to binge-watch Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse during this time. I’ll tell you what, if you’re battling any kind of identity crisis or gaslighting of any sort, that’s not the show for you right now.

** It is not a nervous tick. Hair is soft. It feels nice. I was bored, and hair is a sensory delight.

*** The Mermaid Sickness only truly resolved years later, when I transitioned. Because testosterone increases your sodium reabsorption, it effectively cured my mermaid sickness for good. Funny old world.

**** I even made a video about LARP helping my anxiety eventually. It’s ancient now, but a fun little piece of the archive. You can watch it here.

***** Weight gain of course isn't the end of the world, but in this author's humble opinion, psychiatrists should be discussing these side effects with patients, so that at the very least it's not a surprise. My body became foreign to me and keeping me in the dark made it, quite frankly, scary. But then again, that psychiatrist should have done a lot of things differently.

An Asunderland "admission ticket:" a two-week-only release of a faux theme park ticket based on Asunderland.

If you're here between February 26, 2026 - March 11, 2026, this Asunderland sticker is avaiable in our FourthWall store.

Lou and I are creating extremely limited runs of faux-theme park tickets based on our stories to help us through our current series of life-changing events. 

get the sticker