New words, old sketchbook

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2 Comments
Friends, family, strangers...

After some internal debate about fears and publicity, I've decided to reopen this blog. Maybe it's to share my thoughts, or maybe to get a glimpse of my own head from the outside, but I'm not sure. I've been pretty confused lately.

Truth be told, I've spent a long time trying to disguise a fucked up psychology. A poem from 2012:

Self-portrait

Borderline Personality,
General Anxiety,
Dissociative Identities,
and Eating Disorder
Not
Otherwise
Specified.

The more I learn, the more I realize that modern psychology is just a means of applying a label to a set of symptoms. And it's harmful.

It's harmful because at 13 years old I got my first diagnosis. I was told, in paraphrase, that I was mentally ill, that most people with mental illnesses never get better, and that my future was likely suicide if I didn't fix myself.

It's harmful because it implies that there is a correct way to live life, and that it's not okay to relax with symptoms that are really quite human. It creates an expectation of constant happiness, but we have all experienced more emotions than visible colors. There is a sense of shame and inferiority stamped on every label. It also places so much importance on things that are out of your control. The past can't be changed, but it supposedly molded you. Genetics are also inescapable, and for the longest time, I think I identified myself with that pile of diagnoses more than I identified myself by my own name. However, the human mind is remarkably malleable, and the present moment is completely new. Every single second of your life is fresh.

At 13, I got my first bottle of pills. I got my first stay in a mental institute. I got my first journal, and I've been writing ever since.

I've had enough with hidden issues. Sometimes I panic, sometimes I get depressed, sometimes my thoughts race, and sometimes I can't sleep, but I'm not going to spend the rest of my life hiding in a drawer beside my bed.





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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for writing this. I think so many of us suffer from a science that is important but which is still in its infancy, and the administration of which is bound up in the financial motives of institutions and drug companies.

-nothing

Katie said...

Thank you, Nothing... but I somehow doubt you are nothing.

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