i wonder about the psychological role of diagnosis
i've heard this pattern before. diagnosis gives you…absolution?
you're still the SAME EXACT person; but now there's a label in the DSM for the kind of person you are, so you no longer hate yourself
a curious phenomenon
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in my case i refuse to get diagnosed bc i hate the mental health establishment where i'm from, but also yea getting a sense of the pattern of a thing allows me to navigate it with less confusion. knowledge is power. i am not the same person than before; I know myself better now
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i've run into a funny pattern where i refuse to use a diagnosis-ey word to describe myself until i have my own alternative model of what it's actually made of so i don't have to use the default one. noticed myself doing this with both "depression" and "ADHD" recently
I wish more people used their own words like this tbh. yes it's more work, but you avoid a lot of the pitfalls of going with an off-the-shelf solution that's full of all sorts of janky bullshit
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I continue to believe that one of the most powerful things you can do is figure out a new way to describe things. once again I am talking about word magic
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it is a lot more work yeah. i rejected "depression" as a label as far back as ~2016 and it's taken this whole time to feel comfortable casually using it 😅 and i had to refactor its meaning substantially multiple times
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yeah i don't like crude popular concepts that invade my brain and crush my delicate local understanding of myself and now i don't remember what it is like to see the world or myself *not* through the lens of the crude popular concept
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memetic immunity is hard and we don't know anything about it yet
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I feel compelled to insert so many caveats when I talk to others, like, "what you're describing is a shared experience for many people who colloquially refer to it as part of their ADHD" as opposed to "oh, that's an ADHD thing"
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I don't actually know if that's an ADHD thing, or even a "condition that we currently refer to as ADHD" thing! It could very well be unrelated zeitgeist, and I wouldn't want to propagate the confusion.
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