Mental Illness

What Does It Mean To Be A Person?

That’s a really good question! I’m very much in the ‘mentally ill’ boat – anxiety & depression officially – but I also have autism, so my masking means I’ve gone undiagnosed even though I recognize other symptoms are there. A lot of my writing focuses on my self-discovery & figuring out who i am really in relation to my mental illness, so here’s my best summary of my understanding so far:

A person isn’t defined by their mental illness, but they are shaped by their experience with it. I am not my depression or anxiety, but I do live Life with the invisible weight of both of their opinions living on my shoulders. And even if one day my mental illness disappeared, I’d still walk with bad posture after all those years under that weight.

So, another way to say it, your mental illness doesn’t affect your status of personhood, but your experience with it shapes who you turn out to be. Another metaphor would be a bonsai tree. A bonsai tree is still the same as any random tree in the forest, but the experience of constantly being cut/trimmed forced it to grow in a strange & twisted shape that could only occur because of this outside experience with the thing cutting it.

I hope that answers your question! I kinda get wordy & start to go off on tangents when I start trying to explain things, so sorry if my thought process is hard to follow, haha

(P.S. Fall Out Boy is my favorite band)