The Lesson

[lb_lee]

Rogan: if there is one thing I had to peg as the most important lesson I have learned about my brain, it would be: all of it, no matter how unpleasant, self-defeating, or painful, is on my side.

ALL OF IT. This includes the suicidality, the eating disorder, the screaming ghosts and the ocean made of loss and agony, all the things that I’m encouraged to treat as an enemy. Even Edward Cullen, my sparkly vampiric symbol of self-hate, is secretly on my side!

People who’ve been reading a while may have noticed I don’t use diagnostic categories for myself much these days. Part of that is just wanting to avoid multi diagnostic dicksizing, but also, it’s because a lot of them plain don’t serve me anymore.

Take depression, for instance. If I say I have depression, that comes with some presentiments baked in: that I have a medical condition, perhaps a chemical imbalance, most known for being treatable with medication and therapies like CBT. These ideas were an improvement over the one that I was just weak, but they were also a hindrance. See, my depression isn’t actually any of that. It’s psychological exhaustion. That’s it! That’s all it is. It is a sign that I am overextended (be it from homelessness, closeting, an abusive situation, or a painful mental posture held overlong) and need to stop. Everything else—the despair, the misery—is just the inevitable result of not stopping. I truly thought while homeless that my problem was just my brain and was honestly shocked that getting decent housing instantly “cured” my depression! Thinking “I have a brain problem” misled me into drawing the wrong conclusions! No medication or therapy on earth could fix the despair, the exhaustion of my homelessness. It would be truly horrifying if it could; why provide people housing if we can simply medicate them instead? As I learned so painfully during the Homeless Year, pills were far cheaper than rent.

Similarly, there’s a reason the Homeless Year culminates with my embodiment of self-hate stopping with its constant gleeful “kill yourself” exhortations and saying, “I am a destroyer. You chose to only hear the self-destructive parts to protect that which you didn’t want to destroy. But it’s time to wake up now. You know what I’m really after.” What really needed to die wasn’t me; it was my precious illusion of my happy family. Self-Hate protected me from the pain of that loss by letting me blame myself instead. I needed that time. After all, it’s no coincidence that AllFam started just a few months after Homeless Year ended! Once the illusion was dead, memory work was inevitable. I couldn’t bear it and the strain of homelessness at the same time, so self-hate stepped in to protect me.

All of our most destructive behavior and headspace entities have been protective in similar fashion. Feral Rat’s constant threat-crunching allows us to escape heinous situations, if we listen to it properly. Rawlin became the group stalker because he sacrificed everything, even his soul, to keep the rest of us alive. The ghosts force us to deal with pain left buried. Even my suicidality has kept me alive—I can withstand a lot of pain, knowing I have a plan to prevent the worst. And considering how bad my life has gotten in the past, no, there are some things I choose not to live through (again). I don’t think that’s mental illness. That’s just basic common sense. As Viktor Frankl said in Yes To Life, a man who knows he can run into the electric fence at any time no longer fears the gas chambers, and vice versa.

All of it, every bit of it, is on our side. And that’s not a statement intended to be warm and fuzzy. That’s a statement of responsibility. It means no matter how awful something is, it’s my, our duty to find out what it’s protecting us from. It’s our duty to break the cycles of enmity and demonizing and “everything would be fine if not for YOU.” It’s our duty to make this life, this mind/body, one we can live in, and while other people can help or hinder, in the end it’s down to us.

It’s hard to say this. I feel compelled to disclaim, to equivocate, to make caveats. But I am talking about myself, my headmates, nobody else. That’s why I’m using the first person singular mostly. If other people generalize it falsely, that’s them, not me.

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

Part of that is just wanting to avoid multi diagnostic dicksizing, but also, it’s because a lot of them plain don’t serve me anymore.

This is interesting, as I've started thinking of mental health diagnoses in terms of "Is it useful?", and thinking about how what constitutes a useful diagnosis depends on circumstances. Social assumptions or judgments, expectations of what a person should be able to do, if and how a person can be punished for not meeting expectations, how access to resources changes based on a diagnosis, etc. all influence whether a diagnosis is useful for a person at a given time.

It's fraught to talk about because when you bring up the socially constructed aspects of mental illness, a lot of people think you're about to tell them "Give up what's keeping you alive right now and put all of your hopes in my utopian vision of the future!" Or worse yet, they're expecting me to tell them that their mental health symptoms will stop existing if they just refuse to believe. But I think genuinely understanding the social aspects behind diagnostic labels can be useful for a lot of people. And it's can be done in ways that aren't about shaming people into giving up treatments that help them.

[lb_lee]

Rogan: I think it’s also important to discuss how psych diagnoses CHANGE. It’s not like tetanus, where they can test for the specific microorganism that causes it and you either have it or you don’t. Investing your identity in what amounts to a malleable insurance code is bound to cause an identity crisis when the dx changes!

Like, depending on time period, doctor whim, or country, over the course of our life we could’ve been diagnosed with any one of FOUR different multi diagnoses. And I have read enough old Usenet posts from the 1994 name change of MPD to DID, and seen enough tumblr slap fights over the OSDD subdiagnoses once created in 2013, to be like, “wow, I don’t want doctor name changes to be load-bearing pillars of my identity.” Obviously, I have no trouble believing that and that multi exists at the same time, or that multi can have its own specific challenges, sometimes disabling ones!

A lot of the time, though, people act like a formal diagnosis conveys True Legitimacy, when in my mind it does not. Doctors can be wrong! Doctors can be expensive! A formal diagnosis can fuck up your life! Whether you get one or want one depends on context.

[pantha]

As I learned so painfully during the Homeless Year, pills were far cheaper than rent.

Oh, JFC yes, this. Employers, landlords, governments, politicians and so, so many more people in power should listen to this. It reminds me a little of the article a neurodiversity advocate wrote in Forbes titled "When mindfulness is gaslighting". So often, stress is a warning sign that you're in a shitty situation. Yet the solution seems to be to treat it as an individual's problem and then shame them for not seeking "help" or participating sufficiently in that "help". Instead, we should address the structural issues.

(Apologies, that is probably a tangent, but ... ARGH!)

I think a lot of it comes under that "sane reaction to an insane world". It's just... the world isn't getting any saner and I don't know how anyone can help with that. (Well, community-building. Small, concrete islands of hope in the insanity, I guess? Which can feel pointless, but it's important to recognise that even slowing the slide into insanity is something, even if it's too big and you're too small to actually stop or reverse it.

(Ugh, more vague not-really-on-topic meanderings. Apologies.)

[lb_lee]

Rogan: yeah. It really feels sometimes like getting mauled over and over by a lion, only to get diagnosed with Spontaneous Bleeding Syndrome and prescribed bandages. Yes, the bandages help, but sometimes you gotta do something about the lion!

The Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, in the Book of Joy, talk about the importance of doing your part for a better world, however small, as a necessary part of being happy, and I agree with them. I still take my antidepressants every night, because they help raise my psychological pain tolerance so as to make the painful parts of healing more manageable, but there’s a reason I chose to move back to Boston and work, rather than rest on my disability laurels in Ohio. Working makes me happier and healthier. Offline work does too. And if the trade off is housing is hard sometimes, well, so be it. Being a part of my offline community is vital for my health.

[pantha]

Oh god, the lion analogy. Yes, 1000x, yes.

Meaningful work (be that "work-work" or other aspects of your life) is definitely important. And yes, antidepressants can make that easier. But they aren't the solution. Completely agree with you.

[lb_lee]

Yeah! My work is neither respectable nor well-paying, but it serves others and does my part to build a better world. That is so important for keeping me part of society!

There’s a difference between work that satisfies you because it serves the world and work that gives the external rewards of money and status but doesn’t feel like it does anything useful.

[dismallyoriented]

This sounds parallel to some thoughts my partners and I have been having about what we've called the "Problems Guy" phenomenon. Y'know the thing that happens where some system members can end up with the lion's share of the bad memories/brain shit/negative emotions. Folks can sometimes end up in a pit where they feel like all the good stuff about Them has been portioned off to other people, and they're nothing but the designated problems haver.

That train of thought is a trap. It's an *understandable* one to have, but it's a trap. You (general) cannot relegate your entire identity to only suffering. For one, that's not true - at the very least there is potential to move beyond pain. Even if it takes time and a good deal of hard work. And like, the point you make about environment and circumstance applies here too. When suffering is a product of your conditions, changing the conditions for the better will alleviate the suffering. This doesn't have to be a fixed immovable feature. This is pain that can be relieved, managed, lived with until it can accomodate a good life anyway.

I got some chewing to do on how the stuff you outline here might be applied for Problems Guys. Being able to forge a better relationship with the shit they're going through, with the "darker" strains of their personality and experience.

[lb_lee]

Rawlin: I am a problem guy. What has been useful is finding positive uses for my history.

Mori: and getting a fucking life. Getting a fucking life and a hobby completely unrelated to the problems helps.

[dismallyoriented]

Yeah, Rawlin, I've been seeing the posts and writing about the journey you've been on so far. Forgive me if this is too forward but I wish you luck figuring your current situation out.

The hobby part is like, tip number one for clawing your way out of the Problems Guy trap. It gives you something entirely outside the problem and also a thing to talk about/avenue to connect with others that isn't The Problems and also is a way to pass the time while you're working on the problems and waiting for them to resolve. The way my wife talked about it, how she got herself out of the Problems Guy pit, was that she started on a hobby, started spending more time on it, branching off into others and then suddenly one day looked up "and realized [I hadn't] thought about the Problems in a week." It's something so straightforward but so effective if you can put the time in.

[lb_lee]

This comment thread led to the following conversation:

Us: Rawlin, what do you want to do for fun? What do you like doing? Something unrelated to The Problems?

Rawlin: ...o_o *has never thought about it before* ...running? I like running? Hiking? ...playing with the cat?

Us: EXCELLENT! Join us on our runs, it'll be great. You can read books with us, see what you're interested in. Also, you seem a miserable joyless bastard, would you like to try headspace antidepressants? They may make you sleepy or hungry.

Rawlin: ...sure. *accepts a copy of what our vessel takes, takes it*

NEXT DAY:

Rogan: So, Rawlin, how are the meds? Feeling okay?

Rawlin: I don't know that I notice any change...

Sneak: LEAFS! AUTUMN LEAFS! JUMP IN THEM WITH ME RAWLIN

Rawlin and Sneak: *jump into leaves and kick them around*

Sneak: 8D EEEEEE

Rawlin: :) hahaha

Mori: Okay yeah, that's the first time he's laughed happily in years, the meds are working.

[dismallyoriented]

Hell yeah! You love to see it :D

[talewisefellowship]

[Janusz]

This is an idea in IFS! No matter how destructive they are, parts are just trying to protect you/other parts/themselves in the only way they know how.

Also glad to hear I wasn't the only one whose depression was entirely situational. My depression disappeared when I transitioned and toxic people disappeared from my life. Imagine that!

[lb_lee]

Rogan: yup! Kinda mad that tumblr bullshit taught me depression was situationally incurable or it wasn’t REAL depression. Might’ve been why I avoided the mental health side of that site.

I know for some people, the depression remains no matter what, but I am not one of them. As a sign at the anarchist book fair said, they’re antidepressants, not antiOPPRESSants. My meds are very useful but they are not magic. They work best in combo with self-maintenance and building towards a better world.

[nix3xin]

ah, yeah, like using problems as a conduit for productivity and self-improvement. i somewhat relate on viewing it as a responsibility. especially when it comes to problem-solving as a plural - if one of us figures it out, then we are effectively helping the others. win-win.

[lb_lee]

Yup! All for one and one for all!

[silvered_woods]

Just wanted to say that this was very meaningful for me (though possibly not in the way you intended… my brain’s a strange beast) and I very much appreciate you writing and sharing it.

[lb_lee]

Hey, yay, we’re glad!