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The Connected Mind's avatar

This essay is vivid, wrenching, and fiercely intelligent -- thank you for sharing it. I found myself deeply moved by the story, and also full of questions I’m still sitting with. There’s a raw honesty here about what didn’t work, what harmed, and what helped, especially the elemental things: being treated as normal, being outside, being useful, being loved.

At the same time, I felt pulled toward some of the contradictions in the narrative. Not as critiques, exactly. More as tensions that feel meaningful to explore.

For example, the author beautifully articulates her longing to be treated as “normally capable,” yet this sits alongside a strong insistence on being seen as different, misjudged, uniquely harmed, and not responsible for her behavior. (It’s a tension that exists in all of us, of course, and perhaps it’s youth that keeps this difficult life task just on the edge of her awareness.) She also intimately portrays her desire for community and mutuality, yet this is expressed mostly through what others gave, rather than what she offered in return. I loved how she described what it means to be held by community, yet found myself eager for some self-reflection on what it takes from each of us to build or contribute to that kind of mutual care.

The author's wish for systemic alternatives is also vivid, but the rejection of every available intervention sometimes feels totalizing. While her critique of psychiatric and family systems is important, there’s little acknowledgment that the options available in the wake of real harm can really only be -- like life itself -- messy, imperfect, and painful. And sometimes, rejecting every flawed option can become its own kind of trap. And while I appreciated her sharp insight into the failures of family and psychiatry, I was left wondering: what would it have looked like to name not just what others did wrong, but also what the author herself eventually did differently, what different choices she decided to make or narratives she decided to claim, and how she is carrying her values and practical actions forward into the world she wants for her future self and for others.

I don’t mean this as a dismissal of her pain or her truth. Instead, I hope this reads as more of an invitation to wonder. To perhaps go deeper. To think through questions like: What does accountability and self-determination look like when you’ve been blamed for too much, too young? What do mutuality and contribution look like when your earliest experiences of others were unsafe? What would healing look like if it allowed for both grief and growth?

There’s something haunting and true in the idea that much of what we call “mental illness” might be better understood as a lack of ordinary human nourishment. Of stability, of belonging, of being seen without distortion. And yet I’m also left wondering: how do we grow into agency without collapsing into blame, claim our difference without disowning our responsibilities, and seek healing in a world where the available paths are often partial and flawed?

I look forward to another reflection from the author in five or ten years, to hear how she views these tensions with the gift of more time, more healing, more agency, and further growth in this imperfect world.

Thank you again for this. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

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Sofia Jeppsson's avatar

Thanks so much for this.

I'm from a pretty different background and with a different kind of psych history, but this:

" This made me hypervigilant for any trace of weirdness in my behavior. Believe it or not, obsessively checking your behavior to make sure it’s normal does not make you seem very normal. ... I just felt crippling shame anytime I realized I had done something out of the ordinary, and I still felt the niggling paranoia that I was probably acting weird all the time and just couldn’t tell" - was SO relatable.

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