Here’s to the fucked up. The crazy ones. The misfits. The chronic wallflowers The suicidal. The manic. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. And while some may see you as the ones with weird issues, I see life. Because sometimes, just sometimes, the people who are fucked up enough to think they don’t fit in this world, Are the ones who change it.

1. Trinity said it best. The Matrix cannot tell you who you are.

Just as I stole the general structure of the opening verse from an old Macintosh ad, I stole this soundbite and others from Alone from The Last Psychiatrist. Credit where it’s due: it’s another blogger quoting the Wachowskis about the same context I do. I’m also gonna steal some soundbites from Jerod Poore, the mastermind behind Crazy Meds! All of these might be used way out of context. Do read these guys. They kick ass, know more about the psychostuff than I do and make for general pleasant reading. But let me cut to the chase and repeat it.

The Matrix cannot tell you who you are. The Matrix cannot tell you who you are.

The first step out is acceptance. Self-acceptance.

Some of the most fucked up people I know are people who invest all their energy and all their soul into passing. Passing as what they’ve grown to believe normality is. Passing as what their parents expected them to be like, passing as what their peers have always been like, passing as someone in their condition is supposed to be like. These are the people who can’t give a shred of an answer when you ask them who they are. They are, um, what people are. Normal people.

The so-called “normal” people who they’ve always attempted to emulate have a ready answer. “I’m just a regular guy who enjoys watching soccer on the TV”. “I’ve done ballet as a child and while I didn’t pursue it, it marked me as an extrovert”. “I’m an introvert but my peers help me overcome my shyness when I really need it” (Don’t get me started on the differences between introversion and shyness). These are answers. Maybe they’re not complete answers, but they’re windows into these people’s quest for meaning.

But sometimes you’re not one of “them” and would give your life to be one of “them”. Which you are already doing. If you’re the type I’m talking about, you’ll recognize yourself immediately — though most will try to pass off that moment of clarity and hide behind their giddy mask of happiness. (If you’re not ready to admit you have issues, just stop reading here. Nothing to see. There’s naked women on Youtube.) And while I’m from the Matrix — everyone but yourself is from the Matrix — and can’t tell you who you really are, there’s a shred of an answer there, a tiny piece of temporary meaning: you’re someone who spends too much energy passing. Too much energy, man, too much energy.

And you know it’s too much energy because you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired. You’ve done everything you’re supposed to do, you have everything you’re supposed to have (some people express upper middle-class guilt here) and yet you are miserable. And while you might have scores of personal problems to be resolved with a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist, rest assured that the more general problem (unless you’ve suffered child abuse or stuff like that) is that you feel mal dans ta peau. You feel bad inside your own skin, you’re not content with with your residual self-image — the difference between what you’re supposed to be and what you feel burning on your inside.

You’re that not different from people with major brain cooties. At best, many of your issues can be traced down to brain cooties, which can serve as provisory exculpation for being fucked up until you realize there’s nothing wrong about what you felt in first place. At worst, it’s something that’s inside of you that you need to face and handle. Maybe you’ll come to accept that you don’t need to be dead on the inside forever, that there’s an actual you waiting to surface. Maybe you’ll face the pain and be stumped by its trials for many, many moons — and this is still better than being dead on the inside. Whatever it is, there’s no need to being afraid of being “one of us”. The residual self-image, the mental projection of what “you’re supposed to be” is just hindering your coming to actual life.

2. Life is life. Leben heißt leben.

I like to quote this from a Laibach song. There’s a puny studio version sung in english and then there’s the majestic, fascistic live recording sung in german. It’s an overwhelming positive message, in every possible sense of “positive” — from the fact that it conveys a positive image of the world to the anti-idealistic, proto-fascistic reassurance that might makes right. One could say Trinity’s message is the negative one — the one saying what isn’t. Yet that’s the good news, and the positive message that life is what it is delivers the bad news.

While you’re stuck in your own private world of pain, the planet keeps on spinning. And no one really cares how much it hurts – all the caring and the love you get from your friends and family and lovers is out of care for you – maybe from the residual image, the mental projection of the person they want you to be (more commonly with friends and shallower romantic relationships), or maybe because they really love you and wish the pain would stop. But just as they’d only listen to the details of how your badly broken bone was fixed with platinum plaques out of courtesy (and not out of fascination with the world of orthopedy), they’re only listening you whine out of courtesy.

And no one, no one will change the important bits of how they relate to you. Oh, you have brain cooties? Oh well. Leben heißt leben.

That means that modulo disability laws that realistically shouldn’t be there, you aren’t entitled to anything just because you have a fried brain. You’re a person just as everyone else and thus you’re subject to all the obligations and rights and pressures everyone is subject to — unless you’re willing to abdicate from your personhood and get locked up in the nuthouse, and they’ll still only do that for the ones that can’t possibly handle themselves. Bog only knows how much I’d benefit psychiatrically and psychologically from a State-funded sabbatical to take care of my rapid-cycling bipolar disorder and my dissociative issues and my ADD and the residual life harm from my adolescent schizoid personality disorder. But still, that’s not how the world spins — it spins from west to east, day after day after day.

If I was to post more often — if I was to invest more energy in the blog project — there’d be a lot more whining about how maladjusted I am to the life of a cube-dweller — about how I’m an idea person and while I’m at my best having ideas I suck at executing them — and worst yet, how this is the best possible world, the best possible job where I get to exercize some creative activity and a tiny shred of creative control, and there’s nowhere else I’ll have that in my profession. Yet I still argue against state-sponsored disability benefits for the mentally fucked-up because we don’t get to force construction contractors into hiring armless men and because it means giving up a little part of your status as a full-blown human being.

I’m not in a coma. I’m just bipolar. I’m alive. And life is life. That applies not only to employment and money issues, but to personal relationships, to how you relate to your friends, family, lovers, kids, and how you get to acquire friends and lovers and bond with your family. I’m struggling right now to build a social life, lifting heavy stones and finding out it’s all wrong and rethinking the whole ground plan again. I screwed up big time with the last person who truly loved me (and that’s not you, Letztes). It’s a neverending war and the only way to go through it all is to keep trying to win the battles. And guess what, it’s’a neverending war for “they” too, and they sometimes break down and you find out they were really just “passing”. They too arrive at old age with a chest full of war wounds.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m all for spreading understanding and collectively stamping down The Stigma, the culturally entrenched message that just because you have brain cooties you’re not a complete human being. That’s why I’m so candid about my mental issues, and I’m candid about it just about everywhere that about being bipolar as if I was to tell people I’m allergic to milk. I do try to keep a marginal front so The Stigma doesn’t kill my professional future but I still basicaly let anyone that’s not likely to rat me out to a current or potential employer in on my brain cooties. And there are so many bipolars — including figureheads like Lizzie Simon — who will be très selective about whom they let in on “the secret”. (Well, she did come out by writing her book under her name, but even there she’s specific about being careful). That’s pampering The Stigma, treating it with care like a flower. I say, let us collectively stamp down this poisonous flower. I say in no unclear words — fuck the stigma.

And while I maintain that privileges shouldn’t be held by people with fried brains just because they have fried brains, any major dude who finds out yu’re allergic to milk will arrange, within the limits of practicality, for you to have a lactose-free dinner when/if you’re invited to dine at their house. If you’re alergic to wool, any major dude will change your work chair to something wool-free as long as there are some around or it isn’t too expensive.

It’s all about collectively — as a culture — realizing that if you have problems, they’re at worst just brain cooties and at worst something you might or might not be able to grow out of like an OCD or a gambling compulsion or a general dysthimic, bleak outlook on life — and that you’re still human. Of course, that’s not something that’ll happen because some half-baked notion of “fairness” stemming out of the idea of stamping out the stigma demands “fair” treatment and the “fair” right to a happy life.

Life can’t be “fair” in the same sense it can’t be “pink” or “salty” — it’s just not a category you can attribute to life. “Fairness” and everything stemming from the complex notion of ethics is something that applies to human action — to your action. You can’t say other people’s actions aren’t fair because you can’t impose your ethics on them. And by “you can’t” I don’t mean “you shouldn’t”, I mean “you physically can’t”. If sociophysiodynamics are such that your individual actions don’t yield the results you expect and want, including results about your own lot — if the world doesn’t favor your half-baked idea of wonderful, tough luck. Leben heißt leben. The sooner you come to accept it, the least fraction of your finite lifetime you dedicate to being revolted about the current state of affairs, the more you can fill the unforgiving minute with precious seconds of distance run. Leben heißt leben.

3. You get choose who you are. Choose.

This is the upside. Life isn’t unfair either. You can get up, go to the window and catch a breath of fresh air. Maybe it’s still poluted from all the carbon monoxide, but it’s suddenly kosher because it isn’t air from an unfair world. But caveat lector, don’t think you can just jump and start flying. I was talking about the Matrix as an analogy of how entire worlds can be built out of strong belief. You can’t go out naked and fly like a bird. On the other hand, you can get annoyed enough about it that you attempt to invent some sort of device that allows you to fly. You can also rent a helicopter for 15 minutes for an affordable price, pilot included. Computer science professor Randi Pausch, recounting his life experiences as he prepares to die said it best: “The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out, the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.“

I bought a longboard skate about three months ago. For maybe five, six weeks, I’d go out three times a week and be pathetic in public as I bootstrapped into riding this crazy kind of skateboard — given that I never learnt how to skateboard as a teenager. I was getting better and better, and the adrenaline rush was something amazing . (Of course, I’m bipolar — I was manic. Mania has its upsides, specially low-key hypomania). Then I hit a plateau in my learning process. I could already do what I could already do, attempts to go further went too far and apparently there was a huge gap in the learning curve from which I’d have to fall and fall and fall until I got there. Then work pressures started to increase, I started to come down from mania — which means I sleep more, specially on Seroquel — and I basically forgot the skateboard, static against a bedroom wall.

So this is the sin I fall the most for. Brick walls often stop me. I rationalized buying the longboard because I wanted it to be a general mean of transportation. There was already a bike at home. How badly did I want to kick ass at longboarding? How often did I read the online forums? Why wasn’t I out there every midnight surfing the empty world of cement surrounding me? Maybe I just spent a moderate-sized wad of cash for nothing. Maybe — I didn’t go as far as getting out of the house today, but I stepped onto the skateboard and felt the rush just by balancing myself into it and pushing ever so lightly to the other corner of the room. I’ve probably unlearned most of what I had gotten to — the joints and muscles attuned to the physics of skateboarding, the physical reflex in return of the signals the world is sending. I also have a guitar. Muscle memory is a bitch.

Anyway, had I chosen to kick ass at skateboarding, I probably could have gotten close to it, given enough training time. You’re supposed to ache at every muscle after practicing a sport — no pain, no gain. You don’t get to be a dayvan cowboy without the odd bruises. Maybe I still will — there’s a physicality to the general project of being a dayvan cowboy that I can’t ignore. Maybe I was still longboarding down a street instead of longboarding down the plane of immanence. So let my temporary failure at skateboarding be a lesson on how easily one can be stumped by a brick wall. But also let my insistence on “temporary” be an example of how you should not let your life pursuit be molded by the brick walls you encounter. Maybe I’ll get out with my skateboard as soon as I’m done with this.

The downside of this all is that you get to choose who you are. You. Borrowing again from Alone, if you wanna play ball you just have to get one and go outside. If you want to be on the team, on the other hand…

I cannot stress this enough. I guess the anthropological truism that we’re defined by our presence in a community of others is tautologically true in an anthropological — statistical, even, as most people just drone along the beat — sense. Much like the putative existence of racism means being black carries a heavy semiotic baggage with it and yet in places where racism thrives there are scores of blacks who excel at all walks of life. You have little control over that “definition” of you, much like you have little control over the colour of your skin — and you might still be boxed into a stereotype if you bleach your skin and hair, and you might still win the big bear. At the limit, the anthropological truism means you’re defined by how you stand in the world, and the world is about six billion times more non-you than it is you.

What fuels peer pressure and tribal behaviour in general is the power of this hyperbolic curve. If you count yourself as only yourself, the world overwhelms you by six billions. If you count yourself as part of a little group of six, the world overwhelms you by just one billion. And that’s how the psychology of masses works, by fitting the real you, the one that can go out there and longboard for long enough that the laws of physics begin to stare at you in panic, into the anthropological you — the one that makes you what you mean in your social context. This begets the complex dynamics of need and power — the more you concede to social consensus, the less you are true to your fire. Of course, “your fire” might not involve being a nomadic hermit, and it most often doesn’t. You can’t have do theatre without a public. Most generally you can’t wish the material conditions of your self-actualisation into existence — you are forced into handling the economics, most likely finding an occupation where you’ll maximize your worth in the human capital market. You might have to get a day job. I have a day job, and it often bores me out of my skull. Leben heißt leben. On the other hand, I get a kick of wearing Converse All Stars (themselves being basically a mass perception) with a three-piece suit. It’s fun to use learning for evil.

Still, a truism is just an empty truth based on tweaking the definitions. You are defined by your presence in your surrounding community only as far as you are defined by their gaze. Where does that bit about dancing like no one’s watching come from?