One of the reasons why progressives frequently irk me — besides the quite natural situation in which familiarity breeds contempt — has to do with how mental anguish and even victimhood can be ennobled in certain progressive online spaces, even, for that matter, sanctified.
Perhaps my annoyance is best summed up by this viral tweet:
mental illness tumblr really let a bunch of ppl think "i dont need to improve myself in any way whatsoever even if i am treating everyone around me as emotional punching bags" and they just never grew from that. wild. do your dbt kids. managing your symptoms isnt "neurotypical"
— автомат кошка 12 (@scorpionviscera) January 31, 2020
Tumblr culture is youth culture, sure, but even olds like me can’t help but be impacted by it. If anything, being an old means that I’ve seen it all before, whether on vaguely goth-y MySpace pages or angry fan fiction forums from days of yore.
The internet, of course, generally rewards toxicity, but validating the choices that severely impact our mental health is a very specific brand of validation. On the one hand, the internet screams about SELF-CARE! EVERYWHERE! FOR EVERYONE! On the other hand, it can teach you that being toxic toward yourself and others is simply an expression of your unique spirit — and anyone who judges that is probably an asshole, an ableist one at that.
It’s a tricky subject, because access to mental health care is such a huge issue in this country, as I’ve documented previously. When we scream at people to “get help,” we forget that oftentimes, they simply cannot, or at least not right away.
At the same time, it’s important to not be an enabler and to not actively prevent someone from getting better — and I am saying this as a veteran of good and bad mental health cycles, wherein one decision, whether made from a place of weakness or strength, will greatly impact all of your decisions going forward.
In my social life, both online and offline, I have had to retreat from spaces and places where my recent decisions to take medication and try different forms of therapy, including talk therapy and EMDR, were being met with suspicion, if not outright hostility.
Unfortunately, the biggest loss was several writers’ cliques that had come to mean a lot to me over the years. Listening to talk about how medication was going to sap my creativity became exhausting and dispiriting.
“Don’t these people realize just what kind of trouble I was in before I was forced to seek help again?” I thought.
It’s not that they didn’t understand per se, it’s that they honestly think that the trouble in question should have instead inspired me.
Here’s a moment of truth: medication does make it harder for me to write! It absolutely does! I have been writing since I was four and have developed certain patterns and internal mechanisms for getting my work done. Pain and desperation have both served as my engines. Stress enabled me to hyper-focus. Resentment enabled me to keep ploughing on.
Medicated, after extensive rounds of therapy, I have to approach writing from an entirely new direction. I think this is true of many people in creative professions, and other professions, for that matter. The entire infrastructure of your inner life changes. Of course, this can and will impact your productivity.
But mental health should always be about playing the long game. There is a reason why so many Russian writers, for example, died so terribly young. You can indeed churn out great work while feeling like absolute shit, but your career is very likely going to be cut short. You will leave very many sad people in your wake. Mental health wasn’t big on the agenda in 19th century or 20th century Russia — but is unnecessary pain worth it when there are other potential outcomes?
As a person with other health problems besides post-traumatic stress, health problems that may or may not cut my life short anyway, I not only would like to be around for as long as I feasibly can, I would also like to strengthen myself for the coming storms — and everything in our current time tells me that those storms are on the horizon already. This is why I don’t think of my struggles as glamorous. I don’t think they make me a better person. But dealing with them? Sure. I think it does. And I think this can be true of everyone, even you, yes you, who’s reading this essay right now and wondering just what the hell are you going to do next.
“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson wrote. It’s wondrous and weird. It is, like all of the best things in life, angelic and random. Wanting to hope may make you less aloof and cool, sure. But when it comes to learning to feel and be better — who gives a shit about being cool?
Image credit: Ales Kladnik