Thanks to the people who reached out after last Thursday's post about depression. I always hesitate to talk about that sort of stuff because I hate to think people are worried about me when I know it's something I'll rebound from after a certain amount of time. As per the usual course of events, I'm again right as rain and looking for ways to proactively prevent another episode. I guess we'll wait and see what that looks like.

It's unfortunate that discussing my mental health is such a hard thing for me to do. If I have a cold, I'm like, "Hey, I have a cold and it sucks. Don't touch what I touch and don't get to close to me and everything will be just fine." For some reason, it's a lot harder to say, "Hey, I have Tourette Syndrome and some other associated conditions that affect my mood and sociability and a bunch of other things." The rub, as we all know, is that I bare no more personal responsibility for having a cold than I do for having TS. I never worry about being judged for having a cold but I worry all the time about sharing my TS diagnosis. Even with people I know and love, I have worries along the lines of "Is this person just being nice and polite to me while inside they're thinking, 'Ed is totally full of shit, there's no way he has Tourette's, he's just making excuses for why he's vaguely weird.'" I'm tempted to turn this post into a diatribe about how neurological and mental health disorders are ultra-stigmatized and the general population is unsympathetic to sufferers of illnesses they can't clearly see or understand, but gosh I'm just so tired of feeling negative about people.

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