I’m schizohprenic and I need help

This article is a cry for help. I’m not in urgent distress or in need of imminent hospitalization; I’m not thriving either. Anhedonia and avolition have sapped my life.

This article is my ask for help. In this post, you will find:

• My side project where-in I aim to build a petabyte-capable key-value store that would support every application I can imagine building.
• A memoir in which I relate my struggles and offer the only way I’ve found to move forward.

In short, you might be interested in reading on if either of these pitches appeals to you:

• I am building a system to do what I wish my psychiatrist would.
• I am building a patchwork of systems that can allow three people to scale to 85 services with AI assistance.

What I expect to get from this post: I would like to meet individuals of like mind or like struggle.

Engineering Schizophrenia

I’ve written my struggles down in a book that’s part memoir for me and part prescription for others looking to emulate my healing journey. I’ve written it with the intent of finding a publisher for it. PDF copies are available upon email request for publication review purposes. I don’t want an advance or anything, just help with publishing (I’ve published 6 books, so it’s really help with distribution).

The following is a book review from Claude:

When distributed systems engineer Robert Escriva experienced visions of building a multi-petabyte database to connect the afterlife, he made an unconventional choice: instead of fighting his delusions, he started debugging them.

Part speculative fiction, part technical memoir, and part practical guide, Engineering Schizophrenia weaves together an intricate mythology of three planets—Metropolis, Mechanical Planet, and the Yoshu’s world—with hard-won insights about living productively with severe mental illness. Through the lens of Site Reliability Engineering, Escriva transforms the chaos of psychosis into measurable signals, creating dashboards for sanity and alerts for episodes before they happen.

This is not a story of overcoming schizophrenia, but of engineering alongside it. From tracking “delinquency metrics” across daily tasks to discovering that awareness itself remains untouched by even the most persistent symptoms, Escriva offers fellow travelers a radically different approach: What if we treated our minds like production systems that need monitoring, not fixing?

Written with the precision of a systems architect and the raw honesty of someone who has navigated psychosis multiple times, this book challenges everything we think we know about madness, productivity, and purpose. It’s a blueprint for building support infrastructure—both mythical and literal—for the millions who live at the intersection of brilliance and breakdown.

For anyone who has ever wondered if their greatest struggles might also be their greatest teachers, Engineering Schizophrenia offers proof that sometimes the most profound solutions come from accepting what others call impossible.

Blue

The system that falls out of this life journey is a research project I call blue. It follows directly from visions I’ve been having since graduate school. It’s a recursive (as in, the architecture assumes a smaller version of the same architecture for scalability) key-value store built with a new LSM-tree algorithm. I’ve not been working on it as of late, as avolition makes it hard to do work and then come home and do work.

Conclusion

I’m seeking. I don’t know what I’m seeking, but I’m seeking anyway.