[content warning: suicidal ideation]
I.
A lot of times, the narrative about mental illness is a narrative of recovery.
A person has a mental health problem— alcoholism, depression, social phobia, an eating disorder. They hurt themselves and other people around them. Eventually, they “hit bottom.” With the help of medications and a therapist, they pull themselves out of the pit they’d sunk into, and right now are indistinguishable from a neurotypical.
And… that isn’t me. I may eventually stop meeting criteria for borderline personality disorder, but I am never going to have emotions as weak as a neurotypical’s. And I am never going to get the chance to stop thinking about it. To skip exercise without paying the price in depression later in the week. To not have to work into my planning that I might not be able to leave the house. To have a basic, bedrock foundation for intimacy other than “I trust you to deal with me when I can’t deal with myself.”
A lot of narratives about neurodivergence depict it as a place you visit. For me, it’s a place I live. People who are visiting get to spend all their time looking at train schedules trying to figure out when’s the soonest they can get out. Me, I have to make the best of it. I have to put up some nice curtains, set up a ramp so I don’t have to step on the rotten stoop, and think “well, at least it’s walking distance from the beach.”
It’s different to live inside crazy than to visit there. There are advantages. I have to pay sufficiently many Weird Points to continue alive and vaguely functional that it costs me almost nothing to defend suicide rights on Facebook or get my fiance to change his last name to mine. And it is often a spur to be wildly ambitious. As a friend says: if starting your own company is only a little more terrifying than working a nine-to-five job, why not start your own company?
Eliezer talks about sacred values, values it’s unacceptable to trade off against. I think a lot of people treat suicidality and panic attacks and so on as a sacred value: if something makes you want to kill yourself, you shouldn’t do it. That’s all very well if you’re visiting crazy, if all you’re looking at is a few years of avoiding crowds and work and romance, but I’m going to live here for the rest of my life. Suicidality is something that I have to take coldly into my cost-benefit analysis. Sometimes it’s not worth it; sometimes I’ll look at a little thing, something people do every day, and go “can’t do it, sorry.” And sometimes I will look at my emails and go “I would rather kill myself than answer these damn things”, and then I will take a deep breath and answer them anyway, because answering emails is always always always going to make me want to die and it has to be done anyway.
I’ve seen a lot of disability rights advocates say things like “being normal is not the same as being functional”; for me, it seems rather more like they’re opposites. Today I can’t leave the house unless someone is walking me to the street, and it’s stupid and dumb but my other choice is not leaving the house at all. I can make eye contact or I can have a friendship where I care about something other than keeping you from hurting me, those are the choices, and of course I’m going to stare at the ground. What else could I do?
The problem is that people don’t realize these differences exist, they assume that ther kind of crazy is the only kind of crazy. Many a person with treatment-resistant depression– who has tried the first-line treatments for depression, then the second-line treatments, than the third-line, then things some asshole swears by on Longecity; who has gone through an acronym soup of different therapies; who is seriously considering going to a Pentecostal church in the hopes a faith healer will help– will encounter a person who says “oh! Have you considered yoga? It cleared my depression right up!” While I do not condone murder, I don’t think a jury in the world would convict.
I don’t mean to say that visiting crazy is better or, god forbid, “more privileged” than living there. In some ways it’s worse. You’re more likely to be freaked out by things. You haven’t gotten used to it. You have high expectations for yourself that have come crashing down, rather than lower expectations you can reasonably fulfill. I’m not disappointed in myself. That’s not nothing.
II.
I have a lot of trouble thinking of myself as “sick”.
Because… I’ve been borderline my entire life. Some of my earliest memories are about thinking I should be dead because of the evil I had committed– and, you know, six-year-olds are not really capable of much evil, so it was mostly that I bit my nails and kept accidentally knocking over water glasses.
I know that there are diseases one has at birth, so being born this way doesn’t mean I’m not sick, but it’s different when the diseased organ is your mind.
To say that I’m sick is to say that my personality is a symptom, that everything I’ve said and done and thought and wanted is tarnished by my illness, and that the best thing I can hope for is to someday transform myself into someone completely unrecognizable, the neurotypical I should have been.
And, you know, that sounds an awful lot like the voice of my self-hate. It’s true I have one, maybe two, neurodivergences that make you bad at this “shades of gray” business, but I don’t understand why when I say I’m diseased down to my core it’s delusional and when a doctor does it it’s medicine.
(I think this is why so many of us flinch away from casual discussion of cures, even though in reality “cure” means “eugenics” fifty percent of the time and “a pill you take daily and which is trivially easy for a non-institutionalized adult to avoid taking” the other fifty percent. It is hard to hear people, often people who love you, say that you should be killed, and replaced with another person with your same memories, and that this would be the kind and merciful thing to do, and not even understand what they are saying.)
So: I’m not sick. I’m not broken. I’m just different.
I’m not good at being different. Partially, this is because being my kind of different is harder than being normal; it is hard enough to do things when you don’t have a part of your brain saying “hey, why don’t you destroy everything you’ve worked for?” Partially, this is because no one took me aside and said “look, when you’re feeling suicidal, it’s time to turn on some loud music and start cleaning the house, and you’ll feel better by the time you’re halfway through scrubbing the tub”, and now I have to pay truly mindboggling sums for classes that teach me this shit.
But… that’s a kind of hope, isn’t it? The fact that I was never taught how to be good at being borderline means I can learn. It means I can be stronger and tougher and happier and better; but, crucially, that I will be a stronger and tougher and happier and better version of myself. That everyone has flaws and everyone has to learn and grow and become better, and just because my flaws are larger and less common doesn’t make them qualitatively different from anybody else’s. That I don’t have to stop loving intensely or crying often or having spiritual experiences or being filled with the giddy joy of existence, that there is continuity between my past selves and my future selves, that there are things which are good about me right now and I get to value them and keep them and when I become the best version of me that person will have those things too.
Patrick said:
Warning- existential angst.
You are going to be transformed into an unrecognizable person with your memories. This is inevitable. In ten years, you will not be someone recognizable to your current self. Your past self will be a dimly fading haze that you reinterpret through the lens of the you that will exist. If this is being killed, then we’re all being killed, all the time.
The only real question is the extent to which we can control the process, and how we should apply what little control we have.
This used to terrify me as a child. I’d try to remember EXACTLY how I felt the night before. It can’t be done, not really. Anything I feel this morning is only possible via the machinery of the me of today, and not only is my mood different, but my memories are incomplete. You can’t even do it across an afternoon, much less across the personality discontinuity of sleep.
I used to fear sleeping, because there’s no substantive difference between the lack of sensation of deep sleep and total non existence. And then the person who wakes in my body will lack the feelings I have right now, and will have at best an incomplete piece of my memory-state.
But, well, that’s life. And worrying about that seems pointless when you look back on yourself as a ten year old and realize just how gone that person is. Our personalities and selves are momentary states that slip away whether we like it or not.
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ozymandias said:
This seems untrue. I think twenty-three-year-old me would be perfectly recognizable to thirteen-year-old me, and three-year-old me is someone who could recognizably grow up to be me.
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Ghatanathoah said:
Agreed. When I look back at my younger selves I’m often surprised by just how little I’ve changed. I’m essentially the same person I was as a kid, except with better instrumental values.
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Patrick said:
Or does it seem that way because you’re stuck in your own skull, perceiving your past self through the interpretive lens of a present self that only incorporates the pieces of your past self that you remember, the rest having been lost to time?
If you want to see this in action, write a journal for twenty five years. Then reread.
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Ghatanathoah said:
@Patrick
It’s definitely not just me. Other people I know comment on it as well. They notice how I still act the way I did when I was little, except that I have more self-control and am more considerate of other’s feelings.
When I watch videos of the child me I talk about the same things that interested me back then as I do now. I even have similar speech patterns. The only difference is that I’m more considerate about not boring other people. I’ve never kept a journal reliably, but I do write stories, and the ones I wrote when I was in second and third grade deal with the same themes as the ones I do now (mainly monsters fighting and discussing philosophy). I definitely had a lot of the same stuff on my mind as I do now.
There are some specific events in my life that I don’t recall. I do regret not having perfect recall of every thing that ever happened to me. But that seems far less important to me than the fact that my values, interests, and preferences are the same as they ever have been. Those are the most important parts of who I am, and as long as they live, I do. I’m definitely not a different person with the same memories, if anything I’m closer to the opposite, I don’t have all my memories, but I’m still the same person.
I think when I was very little I developed an understanding that what makes death bad and scary is what it deprives you of, that death makes it impossible to continue doing the things you want to do with your life. So I never feared sleep the same way I feared death because it lacked the thing that made death so bad: it didn’t deprive me of future experiences. I might be unconscious at the moment, but my preferences are stored safely in my brain while I sleep. When I awaken I can act to fulfill them once again.
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veronica d said:
I mean, we can’t know, right. But still, there is a difference between saying, “You’ll grow into this person” versus “I have a machine that will force you to be some person.” In the first case, the growing is a process in which I participate. Little not-named-veronica girl grew into veronica, and it was slow and painful, but I was me each step of the way, making the choices I made. Some mind-ray that zaps me into not-veronica is different.
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Patrick said:
I’ll be pretty surprised if many psychological treatments are invented that are “zap now you’re different.” That’s more “plot line to a House episode” then the usual way of things.
I think the more likely experiences of personality change through medication are going to either be the “take Prozac for a temporary personality adjustment” variety, or the “engage in detox therapy for a long time to eventually change a personality trait, kind of” variety.
In both cases I think you’re going to experience less personality discontinuity than you do by going to sleep miserable and exhausted, then waking up to exactly the same conditions that made you miserable, but just… not being miserable. Because your brain and hormones reset while you were asleep and now your moods are just different, just because.
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Adelene said:
Enh.
Like.
I was put on prozac and similar for a while as a teen. The person I was during that time period and its aftermath doesn’t register to me as an instance of myself. The person I was before that does. I’m fairly sure the person I was before that didn’t register as an instance of the same person to my drugged self, and I know my current self doesn’t, because that person specifically and intentionally chose to construct/reconstruct me and abdicate our personhood to me, and I have memories from that process. (She thought she was making someone new. I was very surprised to notice that my memories of the time prior to her feel like me and that I have so much in common with that person.)
The ‘people are always changing, no one is ever exactly the same’ thing is a valid philosophical viewpoint, but for psychological wellbeing purposes, that sense of recognizing various versions of yourself as yourself seems to be very important.
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anon1 said:
I agree with Adelene. I’m now taking an antidepressant, and hope to do so indefinitely. I have a lot of things in common with who I was but the core of my personality is quite different. Not that it’s a completely bad thing, since that entity didn’t want to exist and this one does (and oh god I hope I never have to go back to being that person again). But… I wish I could think of myself as being continuous with that person, and I can’t.
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Doug S. said:
I consider my 14-year-old self “me” but not my 11-year-old self. My 11 year old self thought the title character in the film “Problem Child” was an ideal to aspire to…
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Muga Sofer said:
I’m not good at these, but this seems like a good place to rant about how we’re ALL sick and we ALL need cures.
In truth, that probably isn’t accurate. There’s a place for baselines. Heck, I think the majority of the population may well end up within a stone’s throw of baseline. But …
… I can’t condone a theory of personal identity in which I can’t grow.
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Ghatanathoah said:
I’ll add the obligatory transhumanist statement about how we’re all sick and broken compared to the transhuman creatures we have the potential to be in the future.
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ozymandias said:
MugaSofer: I am genuinely confused what part of my post you thought was antithetical to personal growth.
Like, analogy: I am an oak tree in a forest of redwoods. It is good for me to become a tall and strong oak tree. It is bad for me to be like “I am sick, because I am not a redwood, and I can’t wait until I find a cure for oakness so I can be like all the other redwoods.” In fact, becoming a tall and strong oak tree might involve being less like a redwood: if I don’t let myself grow wide branches because redwoods don’t have wide branches, I am going to be one shitty-ass fucking oak tree.
Ghatanathoah: I… don’t want to be a vastly different transhuman creature? I mean. I am perfectly fine with those creatures existing. But I would like to continue to be someone who is recognizably myself, and there would probably be some of my impairments I wouldn’t choose to fix (just as I currently choose not to fix my eyesight). I don’t think this is an uncommon preference.
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Muga Sofer said:
I guess …
>three-year-old me is someone who could recognizably grow up to be me.
I don’t want to be a person I’m growing up to be. And neither did three-year-old me, I think.
I want to be descended from this version of myself, not forked at some previous version, or rebuilt from scratch roughly in my own image. But that doesn’t mean there’s some essential core of myself that I can never change.
But I want to grow in ways not currently available. And yeah, some of that will be modifying my nerodivergences; reducing some, and adding others. If I turn out to be Muga+50 years at the end of it all, I will be sincerely disappointed. And if being something other than that is death? Then … yeah, sign me up.
(Of course, I’m aware that some of my own neurodivergences are probably driving this horror of being trapped …)
I guess what I’m saying is: why be an oak tree? Why not splice branches on from redwoods, and apple trees? You can be better than a taller and stronger version of yourself.
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ozymandias said:
Because… I don’t want to have branches spliced on me? I don’t think being an oak tree is worse than being an oak tree with branches spliced on me? I like having strong emotions and caring a lot about ethics and obsessing about things I’m interested in and living in a world made of words, and I don’t think it would be “better” if I were changed to have neurotypical emotions and neurotypical ethical sense and neurotypical interests and neurotypical visualization skills– or, for that matter, schizotypal emotions and interests, sociopathic ethics, and Mel Baggs’s sensory way of thinking. And by the same token some people look at me and go “man, I would NEVER want to care that much about ethics”, and that’s fine for them and I wouldn’t want to change them either? I think it is okay to be me.
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Ortvin Sarapuu said:
As a neurotypical I am sad that I will never be able to care a lot about ethics. I mean I always thought I did, but I just now learned it isn’t possible. Very disappointing.
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ozymandias said:
The way I care about ethics is deeply connected to my neurodivergences. I would prefer to keep caring about ethics the way I do, because switching to the neurotypical way of caring about ethics seems to involve a high risk of moral licensing and “well, the MOST ethical thing is to take care of the people biologically related to you”.
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Ortvin Sarapuu said:
“switching to the neurotypical way of caring about ethics seems to involve a high risk of moral licensing and “well, the MOST ethical thing is to take care of the people biologically related to you”.”
I think you are painting with an extraordinarily broad brush here. Neurotypicals are more than capable of feeling overwhelming ethical obligations to people who don’t feel biologically related to them. I want to give you examples but it would honestly feel patronising, and besides, I’m existence proof right here.
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queenshulamit said:
I much prefer the trees analogy to the original post. I guess I don’t parse being a healthy oak as choosing to stay ill, and it frightens and confuses me that you call being a healthy oak remaining ill (but it’s not an illness!)
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code16 said:
*like like like*
Also, this helps me think about how a thing I’ve struggled with is not *knowing* whether I live here or I’m visiting. At the moment I think it might be either and is basically up to chance, but. This is why I keep wishing I could read a bunch of summary personal accounts of people with my thing (OCD), but I still don’t know how to look for that.
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