Perfectly executed social commentary. I couldn’t agree more.
Since you’ve shown yourself a good “listener”, I’ll go on and say that much of my skepticism about those who wear their infirmities as some badge of honor, has to do with the contrast this illustrates toward those far fewer who try and speak about it as something they mean to overcome and get on with their lives.
My own view, is that most of what passes as “normal”, the very background context against which the clinicians and the diagnostic manuals measure what is not, is itself a vast epidemic of mental instability and emotional immaturity combined. I have various “conditions” myself that might well be diagnosed as something. Park me in front of some paperwork or compel me to spend more than five minutes in some bureaucratic office setting, and what you’ll witness won’t be pretty. Even if I can cope and get through the episode, what it will do to me afterward is certainly not anything anyone could call “normal.”
I have long since diagnosed my own condition, and found ways to live my life around and despite it. I call it “administrative impairment”, and it has been with me my whole life. I manage it, but what the managing of it has come to cost me, has made my whole life into something few might call “normal.” I live with that too.
But the ideas of submitting myself to quacks and drug-dealers calling themselves “clinicians”, or of finding ways to act the part of someone I simply I am not just to relieve others’ requirements that people around themselves appear as “normal”, are alien to me. There is nothing really “wrong with me.” There is a whole lot wrong, with what I might have to do in order to be ruled as normal.
But neither my reality, nor the reality of a thoroughly sick way of life that I coexist with on my own terms, is either my fault nor anyone else’s. It is just what is. I could no more expect myself to become someone who thinks himself healthier for filling out forms and jumping through official hoops like some trained monkey, than I will ever transform the whole world into a place where these things are not measures of normaldom.
So I make my own norms. And live by them. No doctor was ever going to prescribe that. The poor delusional bastards are too sick in the head themselves to ever do anything for anyone else other than what best suits their own hoop-jumping way of life. I want nothing to do with them.
The trick for me, has been an entire lifetime of seeing to it, that they have less than nothing to do with me.
People who are actually proud of their drugs and therapy and their fancy-sounding conditions, mostly just scare the shit out of me. Mostly I see these things as sick adaptations to a lifestyle and social setting that is sicker than they are, and that it would never occur to them to simply find and demand some other way to live and some other sort of people to be around. I see some grad student in her early twenties who is posting on social media her tips on how to never travel without her meds and always have her therapist’s number on speed-dial, and all I see is somebody who’d be a lot happier as a waitress in some little backwater cafe, serving coffee to truckers and farmers and calling them “hon.” It may not pay as well or be as glamorous, but it looks a whole lot more like sanity, than someone who hasn’t even finished college and has already accepted a life as a kind of walking-wounded over how she feels about herself and can’t manage that without continual clinical aid.
And yes, this is a real person I am referring to, someone who is running up a lot of mileage online with her constant posts instructing sick people how to stay sick rather than just change the sick circumstances of their own lives.
I just decided to live how I want to, and can live with, and accept the costs.
