nichiyes.com

Friends. Our society’s treatment of people continues to be absolutely fucking disgusting. I’ve had a stomachache for the past several weeks, and I finally realized it was because I was dealing with someone threatening to reveal what mental disorder I have going on, as to use ableist stigmas to attempt to discredit me. I’ve been wanting to let people know that all those nice things they (at least seem to) think about me apply to people with conditions like these, because I and many of my close friends live with them. And maybe someone else who has the same stuff going on will be happy knowing we’re the same in this regard.

Anyway, I’ve had hallucinations my whole life. They scared me as a child, and it took me many years to get good at distinguishing which parts of my perception are telling me about reality. Now when I’m doing well I can control my perception to a fairly high degree. High amounts of stress can cause my control to decrease. Which has happened more than is ideal because of post-traumatic stress. It’s like the life-or-death mode that everyone seemed to flip on when the pandemic started felt like for once people were at my normal. When I experience mania, sometimes I can’t sleep for days, and I seem to get through weeks of work in days. It’s stressful, though at least useful for giving myself room for when I experience depression and can miss entire days not moving. Panic attacks can send me into a whole other world, or force out a different personality, which gets me to the last part of me talking about myselves; I have dissociated identities. Multiple personalities, as some say. If I’m the most organized person you’ve ever met, it’s probably because if I don’t have things written down or otherwise represented in the external world, I don’t have a complete record of what happens from the perspective of me. (Contemporary English is a bad language for talking about this.) It still feels surreal sometimes learning that I moved, or that months have passed, or looking in my notebook to see different handwritings of notes I have no memory of writing. Yet also having a generally good memory for the stuff “I” am around for. We can talk with each other, and while there’s been tension and long-term conflicts among us, we’ve become quite supportive of each other over the past few years.

I’m lucky to have skin white enough and a tongue silver enough to not stay locked up long. It’s awful that those are the fucking reasons. It’s awful that for all the talk I hear about social justice, most people rush to justifications when I point out ableism, in them, others, or society. It’s “sane” people who support locking people up and forcing drugs with awful effects on people. I study evil and personality each quite a bit, and it’s become quite clear to me that the very concept of an evil person is fundamentally flawed and counterproductive to use. Rather, we label people evil to avoid having to deal with the fact that people are different. It’s easier to just lock up or kill people than fix personality-environment mismatches. Our school system is also generally pretty useless to people in the psychological minority. I do my best as a teacher to be there for students who allegedly don’t belong in school and/or society.