Jan. 26, 2012 at 5:51pm with 12 notes
mental illnessocdpanic disorder
when people talk about “oh I wish I had grown up in XYZ historial era”

they are usually thinking of the fashion and art of that time, yeah? and the media, the music, the social movements

I usually wind up thinking about how my mental illness would have been interpreted and treated

anytime in the last century I would probably have been hushed up, maybe put away, likely given sketchy electroshock therapy, possibly even given a lobotomy, depending on whether I was unlucky enough for my family to wind up in touch with Walter Freeman.

before that? I woulda been called POSSESSED as hell. oh man. you ever seen somebody having a really violent panic attack? it looks like some shit straight out of the exorcist. dry heaving and sobbing and muscle-spasming and retching and tears and spit and snot and clenched fists and rattling lungs and sometimes self-harmy shit like scratching/hair-pulling/biting. you start saying weird shit. I sometimes can’t stop myself from saying “I can’t, I can’t,” over and over again. when my OCD was bad I’d try to ward off panic attacks by chanting prayers. you feel like you’re dying. you look like you’re dying. it’s horrifying to experience and pretty awful to witness.

it’s exactly, exactly textbook possession. I woulda been exorcised, ostracized, god only knows what if I’d grown up in a superstitious time and place (especially because I wouldn’t have been able to keep my attacks secret for as long as I did in eras with much less space for privacy and isolation).

anyway this is just something that I was pondering earlier while reading some stuff about belief in demonic activity, and this is all just to say, I’m pretty glad I grew up in a time and place that, as hellish as it might make being mentally ill, didn’t poke around in my brain with an icepick or think I was aligned with the Devil. 

  1. aeide-thea said: yyyyyyyup. (would you prefer that this post not get reblogged? because first and foremost i want to respect your boundaries but if you’re cool with it i feel like people ought to read and absorb.)
  2. erikawithac posted this