The Importance of Irrelevance (or, My Meeting with My Psychologist)

I went to see my psychologist today. The thing about going to see my psychologist is that I always end up saying something with her, but I can't ever really think of anything to talk about beforehand, and even though we always end up having a good conversation, it never feels like the conversation was about the thing we should have been talking about, whatever that may be.

A lot of things happened this time around, but there were two interesting things in particular. One of them was that I had two...I wouldn't call them "panic attacks", but they were more like, say, "anxiety fits that manifested themselves in very physical forms". Like twice during that meeting, because of what we were talking about, I felt my heart rate go up, this stuff aching pain in my neck, back, and shoulders, difficulty breathing, dizziness, etc. I actually have this feeling rather frequently these days. I had it at least one today before I had to see my psychologist. I'm able to physically detect them now. And they are now very very physical. That was interesting.

The other thing that happened involved me explaining something Doctor Who-related to my psychologist. It was very on-topic and if I remember rightly, she practically asked me to tell her about Doctor Who. (She knows I like that show.) As I explained something, she noted that I sounded and seemed much more excited and animated talking about it than I seemed while talking about the other stuff. She used this as evidence that I actually really like Doctor Who, to the point that it might be something "important" to me, something that I "love". And I actually got really sad when she said that, because Doctor Who (and the rest of the things I get excited about) aren't that important. Like the only things that give me any sort of pleasure aren't important. They're not productive (with perhaps the exception of writing, but it really depends). They don't involve real-world skills or concerns. They're not responsibilities, they don't help anyone. They're not important.

And for some reason or another, it makes me feel really really sad that the only things I care about are unimportant things. Like they tell you to make your life about the things that you love or that make you excited; the only things I love or get excited about are stupid, trivial things. And the "important" things like school and doing things for people are really dull most of the time and sometimes outright painful. They're certainly getting harder, for a host of reasons.

Though my psychologist did mention that I got excited about books. (I agreed and then rambled on a bit about The Great Gatsby. Again, this too was perfectly warranted by context.) She pointed out that my intent is to become a high school English teacher. I always did sort of intend to use the books I like in the classes I teach. (Provided they're part of the required curriculum. But many of the books I like are the sorts of books that are taught in schools.)

She then pointed out that, in the future, my teaching will be important. My books will be exciting and interesting. Something that is interesting to me right now but not terribly important will be the entire foundation for my employment in the future.
I suppose it's okay for my life's main interests to be totally irrelevant if they (or at least some of them) are going to become important later on. I guess it's okay if my main reasons for living are unimportant if they're going to help me do arguably the most important things in my life later.

Maybe one's life interests don't have to be important all the time. Maybe the things that give one's life meaning don't have to be useful or important or objectively significant right now. Maybe it's enough if the important things for now are boring and painful and the important things for later are enjoyable and interesting and the opposite of painful.

Halloween Costumes and Vicarious Joy

Halloween. It's yet another one of those things that I'm nuts about and that most of my family doesn't care for. Even those who do like dressing up or partaking in the festivities aren't as involved as I am. For example, when my younger sister expresses interest in putting together a Halloween costume, she isn't as interested as I in making sure everything is present and sometimes doing clever and unusual things to make sure the costume is exactly as desired. She also doesn't care as much as I do if the costume doesn't get finished. For me, being unable to finish and wear a Halloween costume would be a crushing loss, something that would put a tremendous damper on my favorite time of the year. For her, it would just be a bit of fun she wasn't able to have, and that would be it.

Sometimes, I forget that she's not as invested in Halloween as I am. I had this fact very clearly brought to mind about a week ago, when she was telling me about how she wanted to dress up as Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) and, as she Googled pictures of Ariel costumes and cosplays, I advised her on what she could do and how. I even offered to buy things for the costume and eagerly volunteered to let her borrow any garments or objects I owned if they would help her with her costume. (Note: this was a patently absurd offer, because there is absolutely nothing I would conceivably have that would even remotely fit in with a Little Mermaid costume.)

I kept making suggestions as to how I could help her with this costume, as I got more and more enthusiastic, she turned to me and said, "You know, you don't have to get so excited about this. It's not that big of a deal."

It took me a few moments to get my mind in such a place so that I could even conceive of Halloween not being "that big of a deal". It took me a few moments more to realize that the concept of Halloween not being "that big of a deal" could apply to my current reality.

"No, really," my sister went on. "And you don't need to do all this stuff for me."

"Oh. Oh, alright," I said.

"Why does this matter so much to you, anyway?"

"I guess I'd just really like to see you achieve this goal and have a nice costume. 'Cause, you know, family members want to see each other have a good time and succeed."

"Having this costume isn't 'succeeding'."

"I guess it is to me."

She didn't get it, but then again, she doesn't get a lot of things where they concern me. We continued our image search, admiring good costumes, deprecating bad ones, and expressing puzzlement over pictures of things like women with babies and men wearing costumes of Mario the plumber (things neither my sister nor I thought were very logical results for "ariel blue dress").

"You know," I said after a while, "I think I know why I'm so interested in you getting this costume together."

"Yeah?"

"It's because I know this isn't the case for you, but I like Halloween a lot, and it's kind of important to me. And the costume is important, too, and I know you're not as big on Halloween as I am, but I guess people like to see people - especially their family - succeed at things they think are important. And I know it's not important to you - it's not really important - but I guess, since it's a big deal to you, I want you to be able to do it."

"Well, thank you, then," she said. "That's very nice of you."

"And you've explained directly that it's not that important to you," I went on.

"Though it'd be nice."

"Yeah. But I'll try to keep in mind the fact that it's not that important to you, and I won't force my enthusiasm on you. Because, you know, that's just not what you do."

"Yeah."

In that moment, I got an insight into the minds of mothers who force their daughters to take dancing lessons because that's what they liked doing when they were young or fathers who make their sons play the sports they were never able to play in their youth or parents who force their children to go to whatever schools they deem "good". It's mostly well-intentioned, hopefully, but it exists because of a misunderstanding on the parts of those who force others to do things based on other senses of what's important.

Then again, I don't think there's anything wrong in being inordinately pleased over some little pursuit on the part of your loved ones, even if they don't think it's such a big deal. It gives them a little personal pleasure and it gives you a lot of vicarious pride.

Comfort the Disturbed, Disturb the Comfortable - Mental Illness Awareness Week

It's Mental Illness Awareness Week.

This may mean nothing to some people, and it may mean everything to some people, but if one has read many of my recent blog posts, one will know that I feel rather strongly about the issue of mental illness awareness. Naturally, I have something big planned for this week, some great manifesto or well-thought-out speculation to share.

Well, I don't.

I spent most of the past few days trying to think up something to write about, coming up with a single relatively silly idea (which, while interesting, was not the great contribution to Mental Illness Awareness Week that I wanted to make), then coming up with a bunch of ideas (none of which really stood out to me as particularly interesting or strong), then coming up again with a single idea. This single idea, however, was not silly, and it was perhaps the exact thing I needed to write. And, to make a satisfying idea even more satisfying, it relates to art.

Have you ever heard that saying, "Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable?" It occurred to me that it's very applicable to the issue of mental illness. Any sort of mental illness of any variation in severity is enough to qualify one as "disturbed", where "disturbed" could mean "having great difficulty with something that most people would find easy" or "recovering from something hugely traumatic" or "unable to cope with life on a regular basis because of how one's brain works". And while I acknowledge that not all neurotypical people have easy lives (far from it; misery and hardship can strike anyone), there must be something very comfortable in having a brain that works properly and which you don't have to constantly fight.

The mentally ill are the disturbed, and the mentally well are the comfortable. I will comfort one and disturb the other.

To those living with mental illnesses:

First off, I don't pretend to be able to speak for all of us, and I know that I have it pretty easy in comparison to some of you folks. However, I can somewhat understand your problems since I am, after all, one of you, and, using my experiences and the experiences of the many mentally ill people I have known, I can hope to make some sort of statements that you might relate to and that might comfort you. If say anything that is somewhat offensive, I apologize, and if I say something that, while not offensive, does not apply to you...well, it was not directed at you.

While I can't say that your problems are normal (since the reason we even have a concept of mental illness is because it is not what people normally experience), they don't make you bad or wrong or dysfunctional or even sick. At least not by necessity. Different people handle different things in different ways - it's just something that happens because we are all very human and thus all very different from each other - and as long as the way you handle your mental illness does not hurt others or yourself, however you choose to handle it is perfectly fine.

If you're one of the roughly one out of four who have a mental illness, ideally you can treat it with professional help and/or medication, but if that's not possible, then know that (at least in some cases), it is still possible to cope with what you have. Depending on what you have, you can either learn coping tactics for how to deal with things that cause you trouble and aggravate your mental illness, or you can learn to avoid certain things while still functioning in life. Your life may look very different than other people's lives, but it will still be a life, and as long as you're pleased with it, it will be a perfectly sufficient life.

People talk about "recovery", like you get better from your mental illness someday, through a lot of therapy or a lot of meds or a lot of luck, but that's not always what happens. Some people do not recover from their mental illnesses. Actually, I could speculate that most people with mental illnesses don't "get well". But that's okay. Maybe you don't have to recover. If you're hallucinating grandiose scenarios that aren't remotely happening or so depressed that you literally cannot get out of bed or unable to go out in public for fear of panic attacks, then you need help and hopefully you get better, but that doesn't mean your problem is going to go away. You might get to a point where you just sometimes see things you can tell are probably not there, or you might have trouble motivating yourself because life is empty, or you might have to work up a great deal of courage before going out into crowds. But even those challenges aren't those experienced by most people, and you're still not entirely "well". That's not bad, though. Not everyone functions completely well or easily, and that's okay. We live in a world where things aren't perfect and where people have struggles. Some have more struggles than others, and some people's struggles may be fewer but greater, but everyone's struggles are real, and if you can cope and if you can be okay with who you are and what you're like, you don't need to worry about "recovering" or "getting well".

You go through an astonishing amount of trouble every day, trouble that the rest of the world cannot comprehend, and you deserve a bloody medal for it.

To those not living with mental illnesses but possibly around and beside them:

First off, I'm going to try to be respectful of you when I say these things, and I might get some of my perceptions of you wrong because I am not one of you, and we with mental illnesses have perhaps some negative preconceptions of you (as you have negative preconceptions with us), so if I say anything that is somewhat offensive, I apologize, and if I say something that, while not offensive, does not apply to you...well, it was not directed at you.

While it's not possible for me to speculate how your minds work (given that I am not one of you), it is quite likely that (unless you have previously suffered from a mental illness) you will not be able to comprehend what people with mental illness go through everyday.  Do not tell us our problems are "normal", because despite that a relatively large percentage of us have such problems, the reason we even have terms and diagnoses for mental illnesses (and why the field of "abnormal psychology" has that name) is because they are not normal. The fact some of you say that "people with OCD should stop worrying about unimportant little things" or "people with depression should just cheer up and stop bringing everyone else down", or "people with anxiety need to chill out" show that they do not understand what we go through nor why these things are quite impossible for most of us.

Just because you cannot understand us, however, does not mean that you can't respect us. You can read things written by people with mental illnesses (and, sometimes, truthful, unbiased medical descriptions of what's going on with us) and, if you know someone with a mental illness, you can (hopefully) talk to them about it and hear them tell you what's going on with them personally so you can better understand how to help them. 

Don't take my usage of the word "help" to mean that you should feel personally obligated to "save" people with mental illnesses, though. Because you can't do that. You may well be a very helpful and good person, but you do not possess the superhuman powers necessary to "save" someone from depression or anxiety any more than you have the ability to "save" someone from cancer or asthma. No matter how much good you bring into the lives of mentally ill people or how much you help your mentally ill friends cope with life, don't ever think of yourself as a "savior to the mentally ill", because you're not. You don't have that power.

The brain is an organ. While it has quite a few differences from lungs or hearts or kidneys (which all have quite a few differences from each other), it can get sick or be "abnormal" like any other organ can, and it should be treated as an organ. The only thing that really separates how we perceive the brain from how we perceive other organs is that it is happens to be the organ that serves the purpose of letting us make choices and control things. It doesn't mean that it can control itself.

You hear about mental illness recovery all the time, but the truth is, not all of us "recover" in the sense you'd think of, and that's okay. We don't need to be like you to be okay. You are who you are, with your own challenges and abilities, and we are who we are, with our own challenges and abilities. You are not the yardstick for success. And that's okay.

For those of you who are accepting and supporting of us, I possibly shouldn't thank you for doing so, as we are human beings, and it's your duty to accept and support your fellow human beings (and not a polite act for which to be thanked), but I am going to thank you because, being a good human being aside, you put up with some things that must try you and confuse you, and that's no small thing. Thank you.

And now, concluding this, I'm certain I haven't done a lot of good in "comforting" the disturbed nor "disturbing" the comfortable. Probably the things I said to people with mental illnesses came off as either platitudes or known facts, and probably the things I said to people without mental illnesses came off as the same. But who knows. Maybe someone with a mental illness will be reading this and be comforted by my affirmation that what they're going through doesn't make them "wrong" and that, if they never fully "recover", they're okay. And maybe someone without a mental illness will be reading this and be disturbed by my proclamation that they are not able to "save" people with mental illnesses, nor can those with mental illnesses control what they have in the ways the neurotypical would often like to them they can. And maybe something I've said here is relevant, regardless of what it was intended for or what it accomplished.

New Publication, or, What I Learned from Welcome to Night Vale and Put Into a Story

I recently got a piece of flash fiction accepted by a literary magazine called Grim Corps. Specifically, my story was in their online flash fiction series. The story can be read here. (At least, it can be read there throughout the month of October. I'm not sure what will happen to that page when the October issue is no longer the most recent one. I'll find out and fix that link as necessary.)

The story is extremely short, but for those who can't or don't want to read it, it's about a family moving into a house and then noticing that something is rather...off. There's a doorknob that looks exactly like an oak leaf unless you're looking directly at it, there are whispering voices in the bathroom, there's an oven that plays the first few notes of "The Sound of Music" when the food is done. Basically, it's a bunch of small, surreal events that the family at first would like to get rid of but slowly adjusts to, treating them as perfectly normal things because, for them, this is normal. They come to get used to it and even like it, which they can do because, even though some of it is kind of creepy, they understand that it's okay because it is the way it is, and knowing that makes it less weird.

I'm dedicating a whole blog entry to this story because there's a bit of a story behind it, and it involves a podcast called Welcome to Night Vale.

Some of you reading this might know what Welcome to Night Vale is. For those of you who don't, it's a surreal comedy/horror podcast about a town called Night Vale, which is a very surreal place where bizarre, Lovecraftian things happen on a regular basis. Its format is that of an NPR-style radio program whose announcer reads off the daily news (with events like a mysterious glowing cloud appearing out of nowhere and joining the school's PTA or a five-headed dragon running for mayor) with a sense of mundanity that is either creepy or hilarious or both, depending on who you are.

The reason these surreal or horrifying events are treated so normally in Night Vale is because, for the people in Night Vale, things like that are normal. The weird is the everyday, and they never thought it was strange to begin with, or if they did, they quickly adjusted their worldview to match their circumstances.

Welcome to Night Vale was the first piece of fiction I really got into after my mother's death (which was, as of now, six months ago). A lot of strange things had been happening since her death - or, at least, things I considered strange, because my life simply hadn't contained those things before. I had previously been using references to and interest in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a coping tactic, since I interpreted that work of fiction as (intentionally or not) conveying the message, "Sometimes, weird and drastic things happen, and it plunges you into a series of weird events you weren't expecting and that you didn't necessarily want, but it happens, so get over it and embrace the absurdity of the universe."

Whenever I enjoy a piece of fiction and can tell it will become important to me, I say to myself, "Alright, what am I going to learn from this?" Because as soon as something becomes important to me, it can teach me things and I will listen. While my life isn't nearly as weird as life in Night Vale, it's still a series of events that, for rather a while, I considered strange and almost surreal. When I realized that the strange can become a part of one's everyday life and that one can come to consider almost anything as normal if one needs to, I figured out how to cope with my own life.

In some ways, what Welcome to Night Vale taught me was the opposite of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The message I got from Hitchhiker's was that of things suddenly changing and having to cope with it as a matter of adjusting to new things. The message I got from Night Vale was that of strange things being a way of life and not having to think about adjusting to them because maybe life was always like that and maybe it's just a different sort of normal after all.

Now, if you're familiar with Welcome to Night Vale, one would expect that I don't think the people of Night Vale should come to trust their surroundings, as they are unpredictable and frequently actually malevolent. This would be correct. Strangeness and unfamiliar events are perfectly fine, but there comes a point at which one should not naively trust the new developments to be safe. 

If one is going to have to live with something, though, one may as well get used to it and accept it as not a strange development but a part of one's life, no different than any part of one's life that existed before and that one was used to. That was a life lesson I learned from a Lovecraftian humor podcast, and I thought I could retell it in a story about a haunted house that turns out to be not so much "haunted" as "just a bit uncommon".