I've been thinking about this thread and Victoria, and one thing I think is genuinely true about her mental state aside from any disordered personality traits is that she has actual, bona fide health anxiety.
She has repeatedly freaked out that she must have cancer. She jumps to the worst possible explanation of medical issues, and I don't think it's entirely from a munchie thing (or maybe this is part of how munchies get started? hm, food for thought). She doesn't think she just has some kind of mild irritable bowel, it must be Crohn's. I get it, she wants lots of medicines, she wants hospital servants, but it seems to me like there's something else here too.
A lot of her symptoms seem like manifestations of anxiety, and taking as many stimulant and corticosteroid medications as she does can make even a normal person very anxious all the time.
I know a person who gets hives every time she cries or gets angry. It's not common, but it's fairly benign. The same person gets hives from anxiety attacks (it's probably familial, since she said her grandma was the same way). Face, hands, red splotches everywhere, puffy skin, the whole bit. It's a good thing she doesn't have health anxiety, because if you were a Victoria type, it'd be real easy to think this was some sort of allergy response. It looks like it! If you talked to urgent care/ER doctors about those symptoms and said they were definitely from a food allergy and that this had happened before, they'd probably believe you.
Vicky fixates on specific health conditions and marinates in her own filth, and to me it seems like it all comes from a place of extreme, hermit-like anxiety about growing up and finding your place in the world. People in a massive anxiety spiral, like depressed people, can end up skipping out on basic hygiene and maintenance tasks because they get to thinking about it too much.
Victoria fundamentally has an anxious thought pattern telling her that physical discomfort indicates injury that should immediately be rested. Is that laziness? Well, sure, of course, but it's also something else, something underlying, a seeking of safety above all else.
I genuinely think her entire pathology, from seeking out a wheelchair because her hip hurt to not seeking out appropriate homeless services and instead going back to her university where she understood how to navigate the bureaucratic systems, all traces back to a profoundly crippling anxiety disorder. It's the force behind her wanting to be treated like a child and a cripple, so no one judges her by the standards of a pretty, rich white trust-funder in her 20s. She doesn't have the social stamina to be taken seriously in that crowd, so she relieves her anxiety by putting herself in a different judgment basket...one where any judgment received can be batted away with accusations of ableism.
Victoria has shown a serious fear of unknown places, foods, experiences. She can only do something like moving by doing it all last-minute so she no longer has time to think, only to do. Has she ever been treated for anxiety, I wonder?
