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Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram are pissing me off today.

Sorry no BDSM cogitations on this entry. I’m feeling ranty.

When I was Fifteen years old, I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder. I had been cutting and burning myself for about a year, and then at the end of my Freshman year of High School, I tried to kill myself (for the third time, actually. My first suicide attempt was in 6th grade).

The difference was, I got caught. And my mother loves me. And I was lucky and got with a really good therapist and psychiatrist.

I was put on anti-depressants, and by the time I reached age 18 I found that I was forgetting to take my meds more and more often. I had developed tools to cope with the weird fake thoughts that my brain made. The meds gave me a lens through which I could look at the world as it was, rather than as my brain chemistry made me think it was.

Looking back, I suffered from debilitating anxiety disorder (I wasn’t diagnosed with GAD until I was 35, and working on my senior thesis paper). I was always terribly shy and awkward and scared of everything. Ever since I can remember.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s, they just called it “being shy”.

Again, I developed tools to cope: Shy? Become a hairdresser, can’t be shy doing that job.
Don’t like something about my personality? Fix it. Jump into the deep end, and force myself into that uncomfortableness, because I cannot let these chemicals beat me.
Agoraphobia? Force myself to attend the second biggest college campus in my state.
Hate crowds? Force myself to attend lectures with 1000 other people. Force myself to travel, dealing with airports.

Not that those things fixed me, per se: I’m still terribly shy, still hate crowds, still have agoraphobia … but the difference is this — I have empirical evidence that these things won’t kill me.
It may kick up my IBS, and make my stomach churn. I may eat a hole in my stomach lining.

But these things won’t kill me.

And that kids, is the worse case scenario, right?

This is why I get so fucking angry when people keep mewling on about how they are ‘broken’.

Nope, sorry. You are not broken.

Humans are amazingly resilient.

MDD and GAD? Your brain chemistry is all fucked up. Just like about 80% of American population.
Maybe you aren’t doing something you are supposed to be doing, but you aren’t fucking broken.
Broken equals defeat, and I cannot have respect for anyone who wallows in their own defeat.

You aren’t a special snowflake.

Now, here I will go into the Nature vs. Nurture debate, but if you view this through a lens of cultural and biological evolution, Humans did not evolve to sit in an office for 10 hours a day under florescent lighting.

We actually evolved to run down our prey (according to some evolutionary biologists, and physical anthropologists) and to live in small groups of 150 or less.

So, your biology cannot cope with living around thousands of people and lack of sunlight?
Humans are diurnal, that’s why you feel like shit.

It’s a biological artifact, it’s why some people are more prone to obesity, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers (debatable … but it’s been hypothesized) ad nauseum.

So Pinterest Tweeting, IG superstar, no you are not broken.

You were raised by an asshole, and you aren’t doing what you are supposed to be doing.
None of us are.

Well, with a few exceptions.

Go to your local university and ask any professor of Evo. Biology or Anthropology if the !Kung tribesmen, or Papua New Guinea Highlanders or Maasai or uncontacted Amazonian people suffer from MDD and GAD.

Statistically, they probably do, but I bet the numbers are much much smaller.
They are doing what humans evolved to do: Hunting/Gathering (those that do suffer from mental disorders are usually shunned or accused of witchcraft. Sometimes venerated. It would be an interesting field study, but that wasn’t my concentration, so I’ll let someone else do the legwork on it).

Being sedentary accounts for 0.001% of our entire human species’ existence.

Evolutionarily speaking, that is just a blink of an eyeball.
A veritable eyelash on the grand clock of our species.

Again, if one more person infers that I am “Broken” because I have a chemical imbalance in my brain, I’ma break their face.

Then they can be depressed about the blood running out their nose.

I’m just kidding. I do not condone violence, unless it Himself beating me.