About the Curator

Jay Fincher is a western shaman and was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, at 35. The road to that diagnosis was long, winding, and full of wrong turns — years of confusion, hospitalizations with no clear explanation, medications that helped some things and worsened others, and the isolating feeling of living in a mind that nobody around him seemed to understand.

Shamanic traditions across cultures have long recognized that the boundary between inner and outer worlds can be thinner for some people than for others — that what psychiatry calls psychosis or altered perception has, in other frameworks, been understood as a form of access. Jay doesn't romanticize his illness. He takes his medication. He sees his psychiatrist. But he also holds the view that the visionary and the clinical are not opposites, and that a life shaped by schizoaffective disorder can be one of genuine depth and meaning.

He built this site because he wishes something like it had existed when he was first trying to make sense of what was happening to him. Not a clinical pamphlet. Not a pharmaceutical brochure. Something that took the condition seriously — all of its complexity, its overlap with other diagnoses, its messy real-world treatment — and still managed to feel human.

Jay knows what it's like to hear voices at 3am and not know if that's the disorder or the medication or withdrawal or something else entirely. He knows the specific grief of losing months to a depressive episode so thick you can barely remember it afterward. He knows the seductive pull of a manic phase — the way it can feel like finally being yourself, right before it tips into something terrifying. He knows the exhaustion of explaining yourself to people who have never had to question what's real.

He also knows that things can get better. Not cured — he doesn't believe in that framing — but genuinely, meaningfully better. Stable enough to build a life. Stable enough to build a website like this one.