mental illness – Already Ridiculous

Among the litany of ignorant and inflammatory comments I’ve been finding on YouTube in response to the recent killing of Walter Wallace by Philadelphia police – the same tired-out claims I’ve seen time and again – something that stuck out to me today is this: don’t pretend you know what mental illnesses are, or that you know anything about their implications.

“I know he had mental illness… BUT…”

“So what if he had mental illness, you still can’t…”

Look, dingwipe. You’re lying to yourself and everyone else if you think you believe that mental illnesses actually exist. Why? Because the very concept of mental illness has huge ramifications for how we as a society view free will, hold people accountable for their actions, and grant people special care and consideration. And you’re not considering any of this. Frankly, it scares you. Believing in the existence of mental illnesses means you can’t assume anything about how someone is going to behave just by looking at them. It means you can’t just tell someone to “suck it up” or “cut it out” and expect them to behave prosocially. It means some people don’t have as much control over their actions as you think they should… and perhaps, neither do you. Hell, maybe we ALL deserve more consideration. But you can’t accept that. Your identity depends on your ability to cope with a lack of consideration from others. You need this story that people do bad things because they’re greedy and vain. The world is so much simpler that way. You can crank someone’s hardships up to eleven, but they’re still equally required to pull through.

After all, we suffer equally, don’t we…?

Anyone who complains just doesn’t want to put in the effort and expects everyone else to cover their asses, isn’t that right?

I get that you’re not going to change, not from this. Not from me. I only ask that you stop pretending that you’re on our side when you enter a debate about social justice for people of color and people with disabilities. You’re agreeing that people can have mental illnesses so you don’t look bad. You’re lampshading. Mental illness means that you will not be capable of responding to situations the way most people can. And as for the claim that having mental illness doesn’t give you a pass to misbehave in society… you’re right. In our society, no, it doesn’t. You are expected to carry yourself the same as everyone else.

Maybe there’s something wrong with that. Maybe that’s something we should change.

What’s ultimately terrifying about mental illness is that we fail to acknowledge it.

I agree with Joe Rogan when he says many people are averse to initial discomfort when it comes to exercise. But discomfort is interpreted differently from person to person. I have had a lifelong anxiety about exercise, especially rigorous activities and activities that are social or require a lot of coordination. I am a survivor of childhood trauma and I have been variously diagnosed with autism and anxiety disorders. For me, physical discomfort equals pain, pain equals injury, and injury indicates both social failure and the fear that something’s changed and it will never go back to normal.

Many forms of exercise, at least the ways they were introduced to me, did not take advantage of my learning differences and instead they made me feel dumb and confused. I could never take the time to understand the physical tasks involved in my own way. And I’m also very sensitive, so I have a time-consuming process of rationally understanding how to complete a new task and how it connects to what I already know, as well as the emotional component, which requires a time-out to assess and express how I feel. In this context, activities like running, jumping, and climbing were prohibitive and I only came to approach them in my late teens. Then of course I’m socially anxious and have a difficult time with teamwork and group learning – both in terms of getting generalized instruction BECAUSE I’m in a group and also imitating a peer in a group. I don’t know to what extent this stemmed from a fear of disapproval or that I rarely found explanations or demonstrations to be sufficient for me to feel confident trying something new. I’d like to believe it’s the second one. Either way, exercise had a pernicious way of bringing out my lifelong risk aversion and really exploiting it in ways that most academic and creative activities did not. Most. What really sucks about all this is that from an early age, I associated attempting physical activity with verbal abuse, cognitive frustration, and social exclusion. And that means I have to work extra hard to be physically healthy, because every time I learn a complicated exercise or participate in games or suffer a minor injury, all the fear and all the anger swell up in me. I feel like I’m back in elementary school, like nothing’s changed.

Many people associate getting healthier with self-discipline, goal setting, perseverance, and keeping to a schedule. But I don’t want all that. I want to feel more expressive and show it in my body language. I want to feel excited to travel somewhere new and explore on foot. I want to cook and craft. I want to use my body to make new things and share what I’ve learned with other people. I want to use exercise to lean into my strengths in ways I couldn’t when I was younger, rather than keep trying to learn exercises that I spent much of my life envying people over, the ones that didn’t acknowledge me.

Thanks for reading.