You and I are abnormal, and that's fantastic!
I've got some surprising news for you: you and I aren't normal. In fact, we’re all different. Each of us is an utterly unique character with our own specific way of being. This is our beauty, power, and creative spirit. It’s what we are meant to bring to the world.
But we live in an environment that demands conformity. Western life, it seems, is the process of trying to get along with each other, trying to be like each other, and trying to be better than the next person … whilst connecting with our true inner, unadapted, untamed, independent nature. This is no easy task.
We internalize society's “norms” as an inner critic that continually represses who we authentically are. The less aware we are of this normalizer part of ourself the more we aim to conform. If we fail at fitting in and succeeding at the world’s game because we suffer problems, we call ourself, “mentally ill,” “loser,” “hopeless,” etc. Some may internalize this so much that they create lasting trauma within their psyche.
What if our problems showed us the way to our solutions? Our problems are the great messengers from our subconscious. They show up to thwart our attempts at living a false self - which is why masking is so traumatic in the long term. If we’re lucky, they completely mess up our life thereby making it impossible to totally give ourself away. As amazing as it is to think, the worse our pain the bigger the gap between who we really are and who we’re trying to be. Again, masking …
Instead of learning how to process our problems so we can use their transformative messages to awaken and individuate, we're taught to pathologize them, drug them, or mask them. We spend all our time, energy, and money trying to zap them away. We spin entire mythologies around our symptoms—complete with diagnostic labels, support groups, and pseudoscientific explanations. All of this misses the point: A problem is like a movie and the symptoms are just the opening scene.
Conventional mental health practice watches the first minute of the film and then leaves the theatre. We need methods that teach us how to understand the whole story and integrate it into our life. We need authentic voices and experiences to guide our path to discovery of our authentic selves.
The main problem here is that society does not favour us being our authentic selves. Modern colonialism (aka, capitalism) requires productivity of its human resources. When you’re working on your health, and thus unproductive, colonialism has no use for you. Their solution? Drugs. My solution? Shift the paradigm. Change the conditions.
Having spent and wasted an entire decade to psychiatry and it’s useless therapies, my paradigm shift happened when I leaned into my authentic autistic self. What say you?