Thank you guys for listening to each other and making your understandings of these issues clearer for all of us. I didn’t mean for anyone to take this personally. It’s just that I do see that there is disagreement about which terms individuals prefer to describe our conditions.
I had a real hard time framing the question because I wanted to not use any terms that might be perceived as pejorative by anyone. I came up with the “brains work differently” phraseology, and used the details to provide example. @MyNewtBoobs—I hope you don’t mind that I used your words as an example for this. They were out there in public, so I felt I could quote you, but I didn’t want you to feel attacked because of how people responded to them.
Maybe we all just have different ideas about this. There are contexts in which I find “crazy” to be fine. Or “nuts.” “Loon.” But maybe that’s because I call myself those things. When other people use the terms and it isn’t ironic, that’s when I get upset.
When I was reading Jameson’s book after I was diagnosed, I first discovered one of the terminology issues: bipolar disorder vs manic-depression. Some people prefer one, and others the other. Personally, I don’t care.
What I care about is respect. Not so much respect for me as respect for people with brain disorders or mental illnesses or whatever the fuck we want to call them. I’m crazy, and I expect to be respected for that. That’s because my craziness is an advantage.
It makes me think differently and to have different perspectives from most people on a variety of issues. My craziness has also taught me how to be empathetic to others with the same issues, and indeed, with any health issue. I can do that now because I’ve been there. I am proud to be crazy, because if the way most people behave is normal, there is no way in hell that I want to be normal.
However, as a statistician, I know that “normal” is a mental construct that doesn’t actually exist. Everyone is unique in a myriad of ways. We have some kind of idea of what the most common characteristics that more people seem to share, and each of us, individually, calls our own idea of that “normal.” Then, since we are tribal creatures, we try to fit in so we won’t be ostracized.
Unfortunately, we seem to ostracize people who are too far from “normal.” They are scary. We don’t understand them. We can not explain their behavior. It is too crazy.
We all try to fit in because we know what happens to those who are too different. Nobody wants to be ostracized for that. And how many of us, even those who know better, see some guy bouncing down the sidewalk on his toes and think “hmmmm, Aspergers” instead of “how weird?” Or we see someone talking a mile a minute and never stopping for anyone else to talk, think, “mania,” instead of “what a narcissist?” Or see a woman so thin her bones are showing and think “anorexia” instead of “how creepy,” and cross the street to avoid her?
Words both help and hinder the process of education. Different people interpret them in different ways. Probably most people don’t even have any awareness at all of the significance of the way they say things. We want respect, not dismissal. We want people to pay attention to us as much as anyone else, not to shy away in fear. We want people to understand that if we act weird even in narcissitic ways, we can be treated. We also want people to know that some of our so-called “problems” actually might have a benefit. And others that make us different may be neutral in effect.
We want people to know that there is room for more variation in behavior and still not need to be ostracized. Hah! Where do I come off saying what “we” want? This is actually what I want. Maybe others do, too. I’ll let them speak for themselves.
I do a number of things that people disapprove of, in general. Most of them are harmless. One or two are considered harmful in some cultures, but not others. Normal in my society does not include a very important part of me, so I hide it until I have determined that someone might not judge me for it. I think of myself as a good person, but I know there are people who, if they knew more, would not agree with my self-assessment. Maybe all of us have parts of our personalities that are like that. If you read the statistics, you’d say so. If you listen to what people say about those behaviors, you’d think that there are only a few pariahs out there, and everyone else is a model of rectitude.
I’d just as soon stick a stick up those rectitudes. Ass soon as I can find one long enough.
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