[Don't] Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation about Mental Health

by Kelly Jensen

And while all those words might be useful for cataloging my behavior in one given circumstance, they would not and could not define me completely. Because we define words, not people.

Depression is a thing I carry with me. It is a shadow that lurks inside me. Depression is the smoke that ebbs and flows within my body.

Depression is the voice that whispers in the back of my head. It is the rain that falls and the thunder that shakes the windows and the lightning that strikes the earth.

I define “depression,” but depression does not define me because you cannot define a person. Not with a single word, not with an entire book. Human beings defy definition. Yet the stigma surrounding mental illness makes some believe we can use it to define others, and it often deceives us into believing we must use it to define ourselves.

Your actions are no longer your own. Your words are no longer your own. They become the actions and words of depression, and you become something less than human.

the most fucked-up part is that once someone has defined you by your mental illness enough times, you begin to define yourself by it.

Define words, not people. Define “depression,” but don’t define others by it. Because we are people and we defy definition.

I had a baby blanket that I sniffed, rubbed, and carried with me at all times. I painted my nails religiously, then picked off the polish within a day. Those habits were “normal.” This hair-pulling thing, not so much.

And counting the pulled hairs? That backfires. It turns into a game of trying to beat a high score.

This happens to me with hair pulling and calorie counting and even doing reps of exercises. I have to beat the score.

I’m taking control of my mood by drawing whatever the heck I want above my eyes. And I spend a lot of time on my drive to work wiggling my eyebrows at myself in the rear-view mirror.

Trichotillomania used to control me, but now it’s just a part of my existence. I can battle the effect, but the cause will always hang out in my brain somewhere. I’m still dealing with not being ashamed, but I’m getting there.

However, just when I thought that I had come to terms with my anxiety and depression and what they meant for me, I received a new diagnosis: borderline personality disorder (BPD).

I only wish someone had told me not that I was “crazy” but that I was sick, and there was a way to get better.

When there are things about yourself you can’t change—no matter how much you might want to and no matter how hard you try—it sort of throws your ideas about free will and agency into chaos.

What I really had no control over, of course, was the irrational sense of rage that bubbled up inside me whenever I was forced to endure these sounds that I loathed. In truth, I never quite know how to describe my reaction to sounds I don’t like, other than use the phrase “instant homicidal fury.”

The rage is like a light switch, and it’s totally out of proportion with what’s actually happening.

The experience is painful—pain that tells you someone is hurting you—and the response is a reflex, not a choice.

I quickly found out that these aren’t the kind of complaints or issues anyone wants to hear about. Understandably, people get defensive when told that the sounds they make are repulsive or intolerable. So I opted to do what anyone would do when they have a weird off-putting personal thing going on: I kept the whole thing inside me and wrote myself off as a controlling, bitchy kind of person.

It’s known as either selective sound sensitivity syndrome (4S) or more commonly, misophonia, meaning “hatred of sound.” Unfortunately, merely learning about misophonia has done nothing to fix the actual problem—I’ve found no solution to the symptoms. Yet despite the lack of resolution, this knowledge has still managed to deeply change me. I’m no longer alone, and that very fact has altered the way I see myself.

It means my misophonia is something I can externalize. It’s something I deal with, yes, but it’s not a defect in character or a symptom of moral failing. It’s not me. This distinction matters. A lot.

Acceptance, I’ve come to believe, is an act of free will. An expression of my personal agency.