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 07:44 am (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2024-10-28 03:31 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2024-10-29 12:24 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2024-11-02 04:39 pm (UTC)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.