The Lesson
Oct. 27th, 2024 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeRogan: 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-28 04:47 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-28 03:18 pm (UTC)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.