Or: How My Latest Diagnosis Changed My Life (Again)

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

The summer has passed me by quietly so far. I am realizing lately that I rarely, if ever, write in my authorial (rather than narrative) voice. What I mean is, I don’t write in the same way that I talk (so to speak). What does that say about how I see myself in a social context? (That was rhetorical: don’t answer it).

Do not misunderstand me: my narrative voice is not—in my eyes, at least—contrived. It is not an obscuring of myself, but an actualization. I use language, become as verbose as I feel necessary, in order to engage with content that I otherwise regard as nearly unspeakable. It feels organic. It feels like a truth. Even so, I am a person and I write about people. When I allegorize each experience, I am only providing half of the story.

Every now and then, in some conversation or another, someone (and I can tell you every name and what they said, because these are some of the most humbling moments it is possible for me to have) will reference my blog while talking to me. Sometimes they mention specific phrases or images or ideas. Once, an attendant at a house party quoted a piece verbatim (that really tickled me). Every single time this occurs, it never fails to astound me—and I mean literally astound me—because with the exception of a few scattered “likes” on Facebook, I genuinely can’t believe that people actually read this blog.

And that might be for the better: I think I have to believe that. My literature (so to speak) is a full-on, unflinching chronicle of a mental state that sometimes seems to be deteriorating at a rate that frightens even me. What might it mean to know this, to see myself as being seen this way, as a thing that has spent half of this year one wrong word or thoughtless action away from a complete breakdown? I could hardly stand knowing that people knew me in this way. I have to believe that, as I work towards regaining much of my health, many of you are choosing not to look.

Do “people,” in the abstract—that is to say other people, people outside of myself and those that I know intimately—understand how much I like them? Not just as individuals, but as a notion, as people-who-are-not-me. I am fascinated by this whole living, breathing, thinking network of human bodies that all seem to know what they’re doing when I don’t. I want to be fond of it. I want to break down all of the unspoken barriers that seem to impede my relation to some greater world.

But to really grasp the difficulty of achieving this, one would first have to understand why I built up such remarkably effective walls in the first place. And I’m not sure even I really understand that.

I don’t think I was all that well-liked as a kid. I’m fairly certain that has something to do with it. Losing my relationship with my dad probably didn’t help either. But I never realized just how bad things were until the end of my first year at university. Now I am trying to remember the last time I felt completely comfortable in a social space full of other people—the last time I did not feel an implicit need to justify what I perceive as the inherent detriment of my presence—and I honestly cannot.

To be clear, this is not a new issue for me. One of the clearest and earliest memories I have of this, outside of family events and classroom settings, occurred when I was thirteen years old. I was enrolled in a summer theatre program that was, in my eyes, the single most wonderful place on the planet. I had never been more excited. It was not always easy for me: with a nonverbal disorder, chronic anxiety, and some symptoms of potentially being on the spectrum, I was unable to navigate the fast-paced and exhaustingly social atmosphere of the camp as easily as I might have liked to. Sometimes I spoke too much or too loudly. Sometimes I was too nervous to speak. Nevertheless, I was extremely happy. I was so thrilled to be there, in spite of its challenges, that to this day I am not completely sure what I was doing wrong.

But I must have been doing something, because one day, the program director asked to have a “conversation” with me. My memory has expunged most of the encounter—to protect me, most likely—but I remember that she said something about behavioral complaints. Then she asked me, very seriously and sternly, if someone was making me come to the program every day. That question hit me much harder than I am sure the poor woman had intended for it to. To her utter surprise and confusion, I began shaking, then crying hard.

“No one’s making me come here” I choked out, “I want to be here. This is my favorite place in the world.”

I will never forget that feeling. I was hurt and I was humiliated, but worst of all, I was crumbling beneath a sense of woeful and staggering inadequacy: not only, in my thirteen-year-old mind, could I not get these people to like me—I had somehow also failed to communicate how very much I liked and admired them. When I went home that day, I had cried all of the shock out of me, and so I sat in my room for hours and did nothing at all. When my parents came home, I did not tell them that anything (or everything) had gone wrong. I spent the next day stammering out explanations to anyone who would listen. I spent the rest of the summer apologizing everywhere I went.

But the conversations continued. Things just kept happening. And it all hurt tremendously, but how were they to know? They were all so well intended. They were trying to help by fixing me. But I didn’t need fixing. I needed someone to like me. I needed one goddamned person to understand how confused I was by the world. But that person never appeared, and at some point, I think that I just started assuming my own inevitable isolation. I wanted to become untouchable, and thus, less damageable.

So I got smarter. I worked my ass off in high school, and better yet, by the time I reached eighteen or so, I learned how to make it look as though I was not trying at all. (That’s bullshit, by the way. I am always trying very hard, and usually just in the interest of keeping my head above the water). I got angry. I started smoking, mostly so that my hands would stop shaking every time I tried to make conversation with a classmate or a shopkeeper or a stranger. I inked my skin. I shaved my hair. I learned how to argue with, dismiss, and mistreat other people. You could say that I learned to make them feel how they used to make me feel.

But that is the problem, isn’t it? These people aren’t all the same person; yet I began, ridiculously, to forego their demarcation by the inevitable virtue of their not being me. I saw everything in a manner that was almost explicitly oppositional: there was Myself, and then there was Everyone Else. And I was in equal parts envious, suspicious, contemptuous, and admiring of Everyone Else, simply because They were not Me. I still struggle with this.

Not all of the changes were detrimental, of course. Some of them were revelations, rites of passage, my means of coming into a better and fuller sense of personhood. The issue arises, I reckon, when I am no longer confident in my ability to differentiate between the protective spectacle and the unrestrained self. Because when your mind falls apart and your fingers are always twitching and you wake up one morning and realize that you have lost just about every trace of the optimism and vulnerability that you used to have in abundance, it is easy to be bitter and resentful of the world.

Is this helpful, though? Am I healing? If the last year is anything to go off of, then the answer is absolutely fucking not. The unhappy moments I describe have been internalized, by me, as lasting and deeply harmful parts of my psyche. They compounded with early strains of my depression, and years of verbal and psychological maltreatment, to such a damaging extreme that my therapist and my psychiatrist and my team of doctors finally produced another diagnosis to add to my nightmarishly accomplished mental repertoire. They gave my paranoia a new name, they called it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they wrote a few new clinical notes, and provided some impassive words of sympathy that dripped into my skin like anesthesia. It made me feel so fucking low.

Now, I am desperately seeking someone or something to hold onto. I am pushing away everything that I do not want to hurt, or that I do not want to lend the power to hurt me. I am not always doing the right thing. But if there is one thing I will credit myself for, it is that I did at least try to communicate what I was thinking and feeling. Yes, sure, maybe it was not enough. Maybe people really did not know the full extent of the damage they inflicted when they leveled unfair and untrue accusations, when they left me alone in the worst parts of my life, when they failed to stay in touch, when they made me start hating myself again. But they knew, they must have known, that I was violently ill. I wore it on my arms and my protruding ribs. I stopped laughing. I stopped working. I stopped going outside. And most unmistakably, most explicitly, I allegorized, documented, and published it all here. On this blog.

Does this read like I feel sorry for myself? That might be because I have nothing left to lose from self pity. I did everything I was supposed to. I “got help.” I tried to be honest. I fought back when I had to, and when I saw no other option but to be angry and unrepentant, that is exactly what I was. (Why is that so often construed as fucking funny, by the way? Why does it amuse people to see me so obviously upset: online or in person? What difference is there between aggravating my fears for entertainment and kicking a goddamned dog? If I remember the last incident correctly, there are 27 of you who might explain that difference to me sometime). I was ill to the point of incapacity, and it was overridden and ignored. My needs were overlooked and displaced in favor of a more greater and more comfortable social narrative wherein I was making some active choice to feel this way. But that wasn’t true, it just wasn’t. A half informed conception of my personhood was projected, perhaps inflicted, upon my scars and my episodes with a relentless and unforgiving precision. 

Is it my fault, then? I know that it might be simpler, less painful, to comply a bit more. But I don’t see that it’s any better to kill myself slowly, in pieces, by behaving like a thing I am not, rather than simply taking care of it all in one permanent action. With any luck, this will remain a choice that does not need making. But do any of you really understand, for a even a goddamned second, what really compels me to write the way I do, and as often I do, and using the subject matter that I choose? I am not all that talented or thoughtful or insightful. I am just trying to justify my own presence, because I don’t think my presence is, on its own, justifiable. And I did not come to feel this way needlessly.

I want to be like everyone else. I want to be treated as normal. But I also need people to understand that, for me, it is a herculean effort to get out of bed every day. I can be wrenchingly honest about the fact that I am angry and sometimes hardly sane. But I am far less forthright in addressing the fact I am just sad, or sick, or scared sometimes, and it is not a cataclysmic tragedy, but a very simple and fixable problem. The “Confession” here, then, is that I am not special. I am just relentlessly sensitive, irrationally melancholic, and chronically unwell. The confession is that I believe, secretly, that most of you already knew that, and that my constructed narrative of feeling misunderstood is just a way of not having to face being understood and yet uncared for. This is everything I was too afraid to say; it is the exorcism of what I was taught not to speak of or remember.

I am trying so hard to negotiate some form of existence that does not feel like it is killing me off. I am trying to live an impassioned, compassionate life. I am trying to be likable. I am trying to love. If there is one action that I must resolve myself to, it is the critical and continued interrogation of my impact on other people; the influence I have by sheer virtue of speaking, moving, engaging within some space that is not my mind. Because that is how I will endure this. And I would prefer not to do so alone.