Say you break your ankle. You could know everything there is to know intellectually about the injury. Even with this vast knowledge, you will still experience physical pain.
Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.
That is to say: you are not a bad, lazy, or selfish person for struggling, even if you know why you are struggling.
Genuinely, thank you so much for this.
I had a mental breakdown in college. My workload overwhelmed me, and I spiraled, finally ending up even unable to get out of bed.
Ever since then I haven’t been able to take on as much as I could before, and I have mini breakdowns if I get too close. I felt shame about that for a long time until I started to think of it like a sports injury.
It’s as if I hyper-extended my knee playing a game. The acute pain was disabling, and it took me a while to recover enough to get back to a normal level of functionality. And now it’s like I have a trick knee. One injury makes it more likely that it’ll act up again in the future. It means I need to keep up with my exercises and wear a knee brace to safety play almost any sport.
And there’s no shame in that.
The same goes for chronic conditions. I don’t feel shame about taking synthroid for hypothyroidism, why should I feel shame about taking mood stabilizers for bipolarism?
