weird

My interest today is to carve out some space that barely exists in our narrative culture: weird, but not lonely. Weird but popular, a friend. Weird but loved. And from there I’m sure I’ll return to raging against all the things I usually do.

For whatever troubles I’ve had in my life, I’ve never struggled when it comes to finding connection with other people or in having warm views of humanity. I have never lacked for the softness of others, and I’ve always been happiest when squeezed into some bar booth with beers and friends. Indeed, other people have had to be my refuge because I have always had so much trouble being myself. There has long been a certain strange desire, among a particular sort of internet person, to see me as a loveless incel - there was, for some years, a distressingly active Tumblr account dedicated to writing fanfic about me being a morose shut-in - but that’s never been my problem. I only ever endured real social isolation and cruelty from peers in middle school, and even that only briefly, and alongside friendship rather than in lieu of it. In general in my life I’ve been popular and, sometimes, desirable. I know stating that baldly in this way will attract the mockery of that same kind of person, but at this point, honestly, who cares. It’s true. I feel it’s necessary to say because we have a certain modern vision of what it means to be imperfect, to have problems, and this is an essay about my problems, and how we treat people with problems. And despite the dogged belief of a few angry weirdos, being friendless or loveless aren’t my problems. Indeed, I write this piece in the glow of the warm love of one remarkable person in particular.

I also think that “I Was a Teenage Misfit” has become a station of the cross in the mythology of American success; it’s why objectively gorgeous human beings like Ryan Gosling and Winona Ryder now feel compelled to tell tales of adolescent alienation. The least we can do for the actual outcasts is not to pretend that all of us have shared their misery.

The stock American archetype is of the weirdo who seeks out solitude in which to be truly themselves, away from the force of other people’s expectations; either this person is a budding genius whose eventual creative success will be their revenge against society or else an angry loner who uses an AR-15 to secure that revenge. In either case, the assumption is that someone who’s weird only becomes truly themselves when freed from the pressures brought by other people. But this is just another of society’s reductive little stereotypes. In my experience there’s a type of weirdo who has thrived, not because they’re a weirdo, but because the people around them were willing to create the space they needed to discover who they really were beyond and above and past the weirdness. The normalcy of others is not a straightjacket confining the weirdo but the necessary backdrop against which their essential nature can be better understood. To me, that’s a far more beautiful and mature thing than yet another tired story about the misunderstood outsider whose weirdness was the source of their brilliance. Eccentricity can be good or bad, some kinds should be accepted, some merely tolerated, it all depends. Sometimes weird is bad but we must accommodate it all the same. I know of what I speak.

The thing you have to remember is that human beings are kind. Beneath it all, past all the terrible structures we’ve built to subsidize cruelty, away from the force of social pressure and the insecurity that always prompts our wounded aggression, people are kind. Not always, not to everyone, I know, I know, I know. But the human heart wants to be kind; it takes all the weight of our immense pathologies to render it cruel. It’s true though that people are only ever kind when they can apprehend the real human before them. (Unfortunately the basic realities of the internet ensure that only a tiny fraction of the people who know of us have ever seen us as anything approaching a real human.) The kids in school when I was young, though, were mostly kind. I tell you true, they were kind. And the handful that were cruel in middle school mostly grew to become my friends as we got older. What could be a better outcome? The ones that didn’t went on to go to the local Catholic high school, which served a convenient function as a kind of warehouse for the worst dudes you ever went to school with. I would like to thank the Holy See for having performed that vital service.

For me, high school got easier as we aged up. People just started leaving each other alone. There was never any rigid popularity hierarchy (and I suspect people think there always is merely because of the influence of Hollywood) so no one felt forced to police one. I’m not suggesting that basic elements of crass human social sorting didn’t play a role; they did, they do, they always will. Certainly the fact that I grew eight inches in about two years changed how the world perceived me, which always left me smirking about how fickle and arbitrary these things are. (Height is so socially valuable and so utterly outside of our control that it feels like God invented it to demonstrate the folly of meritocracy.) But also people were kind because people are kind, when you allow them to be. I feel like our culture constantly suborns a wounded attachment to outsider status, teaches our young people that hanging onto resentment is a form of integrity, but it’s healthier and wiser to look for all the ways people are reaching out to you, even in the depths of your alienation. I will always remember that people were kind to me, in elementary school and high school and college and beyond.

They had to be kind because I was fucked up.

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I know this is the origin story for every self-involved jerk with a mechanical keyboard, but it is the case that in elementary school I was a strong student and also considered for special education. This was mentioned by my father in passing when I was 12 or 13 or so, I believe as one of his wry compliments - look what they thought, and look what you became anyway. I (sort of) remember seeing some type of behavioral specialist when I was young and not really knowing what it was all about, but rolling with it in the way you do when you’re a kid and you just casually assume that everything has a purpose which you don’t need to understand. There’s no way (because no one) to ask about whatever discussions were had then; I only know that they were had, unless this was one of my father’s many harmless fables. My parents were such libertines, and so dedicated to letting us be ourselves, that I doubt anything would have come of it. I mention it now only to say that I was a pretty normal kid for a very weird kid, if you understand me. I was the unremarkable son of an arty household with little use for sports and a perpetual inability to escape the fantasy world inside my books, a happy kid who didn’t know how good or bad he had it. Life was my parents and my siblings. Also, you know, I was really weird.

The basic trouble was my intentional mind losing control of the whole apparatus of my being, giving up command of the ship to a not-exactly-subconscious but definitely uncontrollable part of my brain. As I do now, I had a terrible time concentrating on one thing. I don’t think this is the same as what people say when they describe their ADHD; I read those testimonials and find nothing of myself in them. I can sit down and write for six hours straight without ever feeling any tug to do anything else. I’m rarely antsy and only ever really fidget when I’m trying to get to sleep. None of the whole “ADHD people just feel deeper than everyone else, man” stuff resonates with my own lived experience at all. And I don’t keep turning my attention to other things. I’m just gone, sometimes, absent rather than distracted. I’m there and then I’m not, I’m elsewhere, lost in a world of fantasy, and ideas, and words. All the way back to kindergarten, I have found myself wandering around the storytelling centers of my brain without being able to recall when exactly that happened. It’s like you hear people say in movies - I lose time. I’m thinking of one thing, paying attention to my surroundings and my world, and then I find that I’ve been gone someplace else for awhile, who knows how long. When I’m brought back to attention by someone else, I genuinely can’t remember having ever left. The whiplash of trying to remember how long I’ve been elsewhere can be physically unsettling.

Where do I go? Sometimes I go into the big black void in my mind - absolutely nothing happening in an absolute nowhere of a non-space, deep into nonexistence. (Imagine if I could have summoned that when I wanted to, instead of falling into it while a date was asking me a question.) Usually, though, I’m not nowhere, but rather lost in some thought that has nothing to do with anything that’s occurring in my environment. A stray word will make me think of a lecture I once attended that will make me think of a political argument I once had that will make me think of a person I once met and then in my head I’m having it out with that person, suddenly, without having chosen to. And “in my head” is not always entirely true, given that I mime the conversations and sometime speak them. I want to say that I talk to myself, at these moments, but that isn’t quite right; I’m not talking to myself. I’m talking as myself, as a performed version of myself I imagine I could have been or could one day be. I’m playing a role in a production I never signed up for, and unbidden, I’m actually making noises with my mouth, throwing my arms around, smiling at someone who isn’t there.

I have all kinds of mildly embarrassing fantasies that I come back to, for no particular reason. I am thirteen again, riding the school bus, reverently cracking open a book of real magic spells for the first time, a bit of time travel back to when I was really thirteen, really riding that bus, and could dream of nothing else but magic. Michael Phelps and I are the best of friends, but in the pool, bitter rivals. I run a tech company, its product vague, that has made me immensely wealthy, and I use that money to rebuild my struggling state into a walkable, green, humane paradise. I’m onboard the USS Enterprise, a time traveler, and someone in the medical bay is being rude about my backwards ways; Dr. Crusher sticks up for me. I’m a fencing coach, slightly disreputable, once a promising young swordsman who never reached his potential but who now helps a scrappy underdog make it to the top of the mountain. I’m a beloved novelist who mentors other writers. I am a famous academic who has perfected the science of calm and preaches a school of meditation without any woowoo; people pile into auditoria to be in the presence of my legendary serenity. I am an All-Pro free safety who rescues the moribund Chicago Bears franchise. I’m helping Max and Furiosa escape from slavers who have captured them. I am the AA sponsor of the fallen son of a wealthy blueblood clan and, as I help him heal, his family comes to love and value me. I am granted the ability to control all sound by some ancient force and thus become the most powerful creature in the galaxy. I am a wise psychotherapist; I am a director whose genius compels my peers to speak about me in hushed tones; I am a crow. My mother is not dead. My father was not crippled by alcoholism. I never spent time in the forensic ward of a state psychiatric hospital. I have not chased away dozens of loved ones through my instability. I have never been utterly trapped professionally in the terrible constraints of my past behaviors, or sometimes, I am delivered from my professional limits because my sins are merely forgiven. I do not have bipolar disorder. I am not myself.

There are so, so, so many more, and some of them have not changed much since I was ten years old. These things pop up unbidden into my head, and I am compelled to occupy the roles, saying the same things I’ve said for decades, feeling the contours of the scenario, responding with predictable rhythms. And, sadly, frequently gesticulating, moving my body unexpectedly at a restaurant or in a subway car, counting the syllables on my fingers as I speak, and talking to myself, or to no one. Talking, talking, talking to myself. Usually just guttural half-words as the surprise of finding myself speaking catches me and I quiet down. But if I’m deep in thought, I can let loose with a full sentence, based on nonsense, a confident reply to a question that was asked by a character in my mind, a mind that I can barely control. Nearby strangers tend to find this to be a little odd, as you’d imagine. When you have a tendency to paranoia, sometimes to the point of pathology, you’re used to the unjustifiable feeling that everyone is looking at you; this can be rendered a little more complicated when you are in fact constantly giving the people around you reason to do so! Often enough, though, I am merely lost in my own mind in a way that other people find quite awkward.

I want to be very very clear with you: this is all bad. It has hurt my life in countless ways and it hurts me still.

You might be tempted to see this aspect as some sort of pleasant eccentricity. You might think of it as some whimsical way to live life with one foot firmly planted in dreams. It’s not. It’s alienating when I do it around strangers, sometimes exasperating even to patient friends, and a deeply disquieting demonstration that I am not fully in control of my own mind or body. It’s a constant imposition, sometimes an intense version of what they call intrusive thoughts, and a headache to navigate socially. I hate it and have always hated it and I have spent so many long hours of my life trying to stop myself from doing it. It’s very off-putting to people, when you start talking to someone who isn’t there, out of nowhere. Paying attention to people when they talk to you is seen as a basic sign of respect, and rightly so, but I have been totally present and then simply, entirely gone in more conversations than I care to count. I have missed so many important scenes in movies, key points in classes, loaded moments while talking. People who know me and care for me learn to deal with it, but they shouldn’t have to. I can usually charm strangers, so long as I can focus and stay normal. But eventually everybody catches me while I’m gone, suddenly transported to another world, and they all have to individually decide whether and how to accommodate that. My poor, patient, compassionate girlfriend has had to gently snap me back from talking to nobody, drawing stares, while she’s just trying to navigate Target. I don’t want to be weird in this way. I don’t want to be fucked up.

I lay it out this way only because this weirdness is describable, obvious, and predates my bipolar disorder. But there’s all other kinds of weirdness, just a kind of pan-oddity when I was young that I still manage today. A core one: impulsivity that’s so overpowering that it genuinely feels like I’ve had an out-of-body experience where I made some choice for no reason. Not even big ones, just a waitress asking me if I want my coffee hot or iced, saying iced, then immediately wondering why I said that, when I had come in with every expectation of taking my coffee hot, had thought about little else for the prior half-hour. Then, an intense fear of correcting my mistake and simply telling her, actually, I would prefer that hot. I am generally pretty assertive, occasionally to a fault, and yet I cannot cannot cannot take back that kind of choice. When I was a desperately poor grad student I once spent $200 I didn’t have on a new coat simply because while I had been looking at it in the mall a worker in the store said “Can I ring this up for you?,” and I said yes for no reason at all and then could not bring my mouth to renege even as I started to internally panic as she rang my card. I have previously told you the story of how, also while I was a broke grad student, I flew into Las Vegas for a conference only to discover that I had entered the return date on my plane ticket a full month after I had intended, necessitating a multi-day long bus ride back to Indiana. Forms like that through which I purchased my plane tickets have a habit of appearing before me and, somehow, turning off my conscious mind until they have been haphazardly filled out. No amount of therapy or a commitment to being more intentional has ever saved me from this quirk. I instead rely on the tolerance of others to help me manage this aspect of my weirdness, and again, they almost always have.

I’m sure if I had different parents and was born in a later era, I’d have been given some facile diagnosis as a child. Not that there’s anything wrong with diagnoses, when they’re appropriate, when they help. It’s just that the things I’ve been talking about aren’t issues that need diagnosis; what they’ve always required is the kindness that I’ve usually received. As it stands I’ve been adversarially diagnosed by others as autistic, as an adult, many times. I don’t think I’m autistic. I just think of myself as fucked up. What bothers me about a lot of the current discourse is that it ignores the voluntary and compassionate accommodation that people have offered me while insisting that more and more people should be the beneficiaries of the involuntary and legalistic accommodation that our society has grudgingly come to extend. The existence of that type of accommodation is a good thing, on balance, a necessary thing. But the urge to medicalize every form of human difference turns human kindness into something procedural and mandatory and, in doing so, perversely undermines the expansion of consciousness that might eventually make legal accommodation unnecessary. I don’t pretend that these tensions lend themselves to easy analysis. But they do exist, and have little presence in the disability industrial complex.

Were I of a slightly younger generation, I would likely be urged to call myself “neurodiverse,” and to think of that as my magic word, my psychological multitool. But I see no percentage in that kind of thing. Giving my weirdness a name could not heal what was wrong, would in fact militate against accepting that this stuff is bad at all. And it happens that I do have such a term, a diagnosis, and it has granted me precious little of the accommodation that it’s meant to. When I was young I received kindness and now that I am old I can demand only legal accommodation and let me tell you, the former did more to protect and heal me than the latter ever has. In an era of supposed love and respect for the mentally ill, the legal force of my diagnosis has only ever bred resentment.

In time the stuff that happened to my family happened and in time I had my first manic episode and what followed was fifteen years of instability and struggle. I don’t want to write about it, anymore; everyone tells you that you need to work through those things, and I write about them, and I find that once you give it away, it’s gone, but gone as in a dollar spent instead of as in a weight lifted. I feel so ridiculous. But, yes. If you would like me to express my condition in the parlance of the day, I experienced the traumatic loss of my parents, life with a parent debilitated by depression and addiction, the trauma of loss, a loveless and toxic relationship with my guardian, financial devastation, crippling depression of my own, mania, psychosis, and the pain, indignity, and loss of control necessary for recovery. A partridge in a pear tree. That’s life. Things are hard all over. For this, I did and do require accommodation of the legal variety. Because, you see, some things are difficult enough that you have to be able to force the world to bend a little. I am aware that (among others) my former employer Brooklyn College did not bend in the legally-prescribed way, but then I hated that job, and I was objectively bad at it regardless of my disorder, and anyway the statute of limitations has run out. You’d think that I’d also get a little more of the other kind too, a little more of the less legalistic kind of accommodation, the kind built on grace. I have yet to receive much. Perhaps this is only a record of the fact that everyone you only know over the internet is forever a stranger.

I don’t know. It’s really hard to explain what it’s like to have a serious mental illness, to be medicated and managing it, and still to struggle. Worse still, to do so without giving your antagonists fuel to manipulate you. You have to make people understand that the struggle is not the one that’s so obvious and easily photographed, the struggle for control, the struggle to stay in treatment and to maintain basic order in your life. There are other kinds, the dull weight of dragging this ball and chain around with me, the brain fog, the acres of fat around a waist that for so much of my life was tight and photogenic, the chalk-like chalky chalk taste of chalk-like pills. In those ways, I am struggling. These past few months I’ve struggled terribly, really. Not with maintaining control, not with taking my meds, not with staying physically safe, none of that. Actually maintaining control gets easier, and the same logic applies - I am out of second chances, I cannot bear to lose more friends, my career cannot survive another crisis, and if I were to go back to the old cycles I would eventually kill myself. So that’s not hard. What’s hard is just the grind, the endless grind of fighting, and the daily realization as I shovel another pill into my mouth that there will be pills tomorrow and the next day and the next day after that. I’m sorry to feel sorry about it, but it’s just hard as hell.

You have to understand, beneath all that lovely deadening lithium, below the placid nothingness, there’s an ocean. Sometimes that ocean is just a calm and boring sea, and sometimes it’s frozen over with depression and self-hatred, and sometimes it roils and roils. Again, it’s OK. I’m OK. Never better, really; I am medicated and stable and under the care of a psychiatrist and therapist. But I can feel it, physically feel it. You can’t understand unless you’ve been through it yourself. I can feel an agitated animal clawing inside of me. It moves. Something is alive in me, and it moves. Sometimes it presses out like it’s trying to escape from my fingertips. Sometimes it just pulses out in rhythm with my heartbeat. For obvious, understandable reasons, most people can only sort others into the categories of sick or well. People with mental illness are either going through it, going all the way through it, psychotic, crazed, or they’re in recovery - not fixed, exactly, but well. There are other options, though. And what you’d like, if you have a psychotic disorder, is for people not to think of you as crazy even while they bear your condition in mind with sympathy. That is, if you’re scoring at home, just one more expression of the basic human plea - think of me as normal, but remember always that I am special. This is of course not an adult demand, and not one that people can ever fulfill. I ask the universe for it all the same.

Here’s the thing, though: all of you would be the last to know if I had a problem. It’s very difficult to talk intelligently about when readers reach out to me, convinced that they’ve read the tea leaves sufficiently to diagnose me as unwell, because the vast majority of the time this is straightforwardly an effort to undermine and discipline me. 99% of the time it’s just someone fucking with me, trying to goad me. People have a funny habit of deciding that I must be having an episode right after I’ve published something that they disagree with. I criticize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, I speak out in favor of trans rights, I reiterate my lifelong support for an open door immigration policy, and someone’s gonna be doing a disingenuous virtual wellness check. It happens all the time and has happened for years. “You alright, bro? This piece seemed a little… unwell.” The fact that it’s at least remotely plausible that someone could be doing this out of misguided but well-intentioned motivations just makes it worse. Well, I promise you, you cannot diagnose me through my writing. I don’t know how many decades I have to do this before people grok that for me the action is the juice - the point is to see what I can accomplish in text and, over time, to discover that there’s nothing I can’t, and so of course the “me” you encounter here is a persona. When I write in an exaggerated style I am testing the fence. More to the point, when I get bad I get sufficiently bad that there would be no need for you to wonder whether I was sick. If I were manic I promise I would be far past the point of hiding it in a newsletter.

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We are living through a great experiment in the dramatic broadening of the concepts of disability. You may have heard, for example, that there are no more picky eaters, but rather people suffering from “ARFID,” Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. I guess it would be fair for you to assume that I’d simply mock this idea out of hand and move on. And, well. If you’d like to talk about the endlessly expanding American concept of disorder and sickness, and how over time more and more fundamentally ordinary behaviors fall into that maw, ARFID is a good place to start. But for the record I have no interest in discussing the concept with mockery. I instead have human sympathy for the people who claim it, of a sort, and I think I understand what’s really going on. Some people who are possessed of a certain degree of savvy about how 21st-century culture works would prefer not to deal with the social stigma that comes with picky eating; we as a culture have moved towards medicalizing everything; we have developed a prohibition against expressing skepticism towards self-diagnosis or otherwise questioning someone’s medical self-identification; the consequences write themselves. A lifelong picky eater need no longer be an object of judgment and becomes, thanks to that medicalization, someone who cannot be judged by good and progressive people. That may sound cynical, but I think in a curious way it amounts to the exact opposite of cynicism.

What those who advocate for the validity of ARFID are saying is, at heart, “This behavior you don’t like is not me, but some daemon you must call my disability; you may not mock me, for if you do you mock St. Raphael himself.” They have been hurt, by being criticized for their eating habits, or they have been vaguely annoyed, or they have merely been forced to think about the possibility that there is some behavior that is better than their behavior. And what I imagine you’re assuming right now is that I reject ARFID because it does not meet the standards of medicalization or isn’t as serious as some medical conditions or whatever else. That is not quite the thing. The thing is that, ultimately, it doesn’t matter, it can’t matter. Whether ARFID someday makes it into the Physicians Desk Reference or not, you have people who can eat or not eat what they choose, you have the incredible bounty of the world’s cuisines and the potential loss from refusing to eat them, and you have parents who must choose to push or not to push. To push is to contribute in some small way to the stigma and judgment people who claim ARFID would prefer to avoid. To not push is to risk locking your child into a lifetime of missing out on some of the purest of human pleasures. And in there, somewhere, is a conflict of values that cannot be legislated away through reference to disability. The DSM can’t fight your battles for you.

In other words, as low stakes as picky eating may be, how we treat those who claim to have ARFID is like everything else that falls within the broad designation of reasonable accommodation for disability, whether legal or social - it’s a question of competing individual and social needs and desires, within which some people are hoping to assert a certain transcendent principle that amounts in practice to “no one can be mean to me.” That is an understandable desire, but ultimately not a compelling one. If “no one can be mean to me” comes before the diagnosis, and if accepting the attitude it asserts amounts to the only “cure” for the disorder, of what use is the diagnosis? I find ARFID fascinating in that it has been defined from its beginnings as a disorder in which only other people are really thought of as disordered, the people who do not accept and honor the ARFID patient’s refusal to eat. It is disorder abstracted completely away from the basic notion of a condition that harms the patient. Here the patient will usually assert that there’s nothing wrong with the condition other than how other people react to it. Autism has come to occupy this status, too, but only for the most capable, the least disabled, who claim it. Those who actually suffer the most under autism tend not to have the capacity to worry about appearances.

Perhaps you can imagine some world where people might assert their right not to eat anything they don’t want to, and be respected, and where other people are also free to point out that the domain of food is a kingdom of abundance and it sucks to give that up. A world, in other other words, where there is only the confused muddle and all of us muddling around it in confusion, doing our best. But this is too challenging, and so we have ARFID, and ever-expanding definitions of autism, and claims about ADHD that pull in every imaginable human behavior, and Tourette’s as an on-demand disorder. We have, in other words, a demand for comprehensibility, a demand for a rule. And the rule shall be, if you are sick, then you are absolved. As the concept of internal political struggle has dissolved, given way to the dictate to be not just sure of the answer to every moral question but bored by the very idea of arguing it, the notion of a simple dictate that wipes away the endless complexity in which we live becomes irresistible. Hence ARFID - this is not a personality quirk others are entitled to mock, but a medical condition they are not. Hence the ubiquity of trendy disorders, which some true believers seem to think amount to a handy get-out-of-judgment free card, to perpetual absolution. Hence “when I fucked your boyfriend it was a trauma response, so you’re not allowed to get mad at me.”

Hence “mental illness doesn’t do that” too, though. It turns out that you can’t actually live this way, forever; life is too complicated to make those rules viable. Ask Kanye West. West has been widely shunned, in the past several years, thanks to his erratic and ugly behavior. He has a longstanding diagnosis of bipolar disorder, one he rejects. (His denials sound like every other bipolar guy rejecting their diagnosis I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard many, but what do I know.) He also suffered a major head injury years ago. I thought it was really funny when West was first facing widespread condemnation; the public indictments against him amounted, it seemed to me, to saying “No no, you don’t understand - now his behavior is really disturbing, it’s getting uglier,” as though that was proof that he was not really sick. But of course mental illness, actual mental illness, is really disturbing, really ugly, really offensive. If, like me, you think that we must take in all the information, balance the various needs of the sick person and those around him, make dicey judgment calls, and try and live with the messy consequences as best we can - if you think like that, you could feel for those hurt by West and feel for West’s hurt too. But we don’t do complexity in the 21st century. Everyone must be simplistically and permanently all good or all evil. And so we get “mental illness doesn’t do that,” over and over again, a pleasant and soothing lie that helps people who complain about ableism to write off an ugly and broken human being forever, an callousness of convenience.

I’m sorry to have made this point so many times in recent years, but the perversity of this moment strikes me deep in my soul: a movement ostensibly dedicated to showing love and respect to the mentally ill has engendered the broad misunderstanding that we must never judge or blame the mentally ill, that “there’s nothing wrong with mental illness,” which has proven deeply troublesome when mentally ill people do really awful things, leading in turn to the assertion that “mental illness doesn’t do that,” which amounts to an abdication of our most basic accommodation for mentally ill and which helps the least afflicted and hurts the most debilitated. Ivy-educated members of the laptop class with high-income careers must be forgiven from any social censure because they have anxiety, while homeless people who have been broken by psychotic disorders must be denied any compassion when they say racial slurs in the midst of their raving. It’s magisterial in its cruelty.

For the record, if Kanye West had been in his prime, if he was still making music that everyone loved, they would have forgiven everything. It all gets filtered through the lens of who people do and don’t like. There’s no principles with any of this shit. It’s all just jerry-rigging for what people already think. Trust me. West is unfortunate enough to be living in a time in which “disability activists” have busily gotten to work changing the public perception of what mental illness is, such that the violent schizophrenic and the homeless heroin-addicted bipolar patient are further sidelined while high-functioning professionals tweeting about how unique and edgy they are become more and more prominent. Decades of “anti-psychiatry” horseshit that portrays crippling psychotic disorders as adorable quirks fits snugly with the rise of mental illness as yet another identity marker, a way to stand out from your peers at Bowdoin or at Buzzfeed, and the result is that genuinely ugly, genuinely antisocial behavior like that West has been exhibiting shocks and appalls the very people who nominate themselves friends of the mentally ill. To understand that yes, in fact, bipolar disorder often looks exactly like the conspiratorialism and grandiosity that Kanye has been demonstrating might mean that you couldn’t just pull out your pocket judgment machine and tell the world that he’s just bad, all bad, nothing but bad. And people guard nothing so jealously, in the 21st century, as their right to judge, without qualification, without complexity. Well, go for it, honey. Have another Vyvanse, nominate yourself the face of disability, and send that anti-Kanye tweet. Enjoy.

So many people have concluded that Kanye West is simply and uncomplicatedly a bigot for the exact same reason people run around looking for concepts like ARFID - because it’s easier than the alternative. You have the medicalization of everything and you have the ever-growing conception of mental illness as a set of trendy personality quirks that nevertheless comes with the full force of social and legal demand for accommodation. Among many other reasons, I hate those things because they obscure the line between that which is mandatory and that which is the expression of compassion; just as bad, they free people to rest in the pleasant fiction of certainty regarding that which is permanently uncertain. There’s a reason that mental illness has always been a problem from hell, exactly this tendency to compel us to forgive those who have done awful things and the refusal of the disordered brain to give us bright black lines through which to guide our feelings and our behavior. And it’s only the sublime narcissism of modern liberal politics that compels people to think that they occupy a place of such transcendent moral belief that they can maintain their spotless ethical perspective when looking down on diseases that wreck the brain and destroy the mind. You are not that righteous. You are not that big.

I cannot imagine being manic and being as famous as Kanye West. I cannot imagine being manic and having everyone tell me that I’m a genius, like they used to say to Kanye West. I cannot imagine being manic and having every person who sees me on the street pull out their phones to take my picture. I cannot imagine how hard it would be to hold on to sanity under those conditions. Do I excuse his bad behavior? Do I like him personally? Those are not meaningful questions. The important questions are, to whom is grace delivered? Who may reasonably expect reasonable accommodation? I don’t know. Six and a half years ago I did something really bad, under the influence of my mania, and for six and a half years I have apologized and stated publicly that I am responsible and must remain so. And still strangers nominate themselves to be the ones to remind me that I will never be free of that stain. All the time; every week. How does that fit in with our understanding of reasonable accommodation, of sympathy for the unwell, of the difficult task of unraveling culpability when someone is operating under diminished capacity? How does it all make sense? Brother, none of it ever made any sense. They pretend that they have a perfect grasp on moral reasoning precisely because they’re making it up as they go along.

The people who have actually known me, in my life, have extended kindness to me. Not because they had to, but because they saw something infinitely vulnerable in me and responded accordingly. These days, that’s harder to come by. Maybe someday we will build the kind of society that can maintain that compassion for everyone, without ever once engaging in the pleasant lies that so many now partake in when it comes to talking about the severely mentally ill. Maybe someday accommodation will not even be something we have to do because it’s something we already are. Maybe someday we can look at all of this instability and love those who suffer from it without pretending the instability is beautiful. Maybe we can say, these conditions are ugly, and we must be kind towards those who have them precisely because they are ugly. But modern life does not permit for the frank acknowledgment of that which is intrinsic to the person and also bad, ugly. It’s both entirely different from and the exact same thing as when I say to you that I am weird, and the weirdness itself is all bad, and it is only the selfless kindness of others that has provoked something good.

To the young people out there…. Hard to imagine how much pressure you’re under, from parents and school and friends and your culture, to do the easy thing and just wedge all of your weirdness into the reductive and facile terms our culture currently respects. Hard to imagine. I don’t blame you if you do; people will extend you a little more leeway (if they like you), and you will have certain protections under the law (when the system deigns to provide it), and you will have a talisman, a name, a word (which you will come in time to chafe against and reject). So long as you are kind in turn, I don’t care what you call yourself. But you should always remember that there is no firm place where weird ends and disorder begins; you should remember that for all of the ways our social norms are constricting and uncomfortable and in need of reform, those behaviors that cut against them are never automatically or even usually good; you should remember that the diagnosis that thrills you today with its comprehensibility and social force will choke you tomorrow with its reductive limitations; you should remember that mental illness is bad, always bad, or else it is not illness. And I think you should reach out your naked hand from a place of pure human vulnerability and lonely pain to others when you need it, so that they can remind you of how much grace the world can contain.

I was diagnosed in a state of frenzy and only came to accept that diagnosis years and years later, and I accepted it in a place of limitless pain and shame. Now I go to support group and they tell me to love it. But I don’t love it, just like I don’t love the fact that I can’t make it through a trip to the supermarket without talking to myself. Every force in the social and political and medical world of young people is telling you to love the disorders that were once understood to be sad facts of life. But I promise, you don’t have to love them either. And it’ll probably go better for you if you don’t try.