In Search of Myself

Stop on your way to work for 30 seconds and look around you. What do you see? The postman is out delivering mail, people are rushing past you on the busy street to get to work, Amazon delivering a midnight order of nappies, construction workers continue to toil on, a child is throwing a tantrum with a frustrated parent, cyclists whooshing by, and impatient drivers blowing their horns in traffic like it would make a difference. 

When you stop, the world continues around you. No one has really noticed that you stopped moving. Nothing happens. No crisis at the office as happened because you took 30 seconds to breathe. Look at how insignificant you actually are in the massive world we live in.

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Every day of my life, I grapple with feeling like I’m invisible, or at the very least, semi-transparent. It’s like living life, but never really being a part of things, but just a spectator. Often, when people walk into a room, they don’t notice me until I speak up, as though I blend into the walls, partly in this dimension and partly in another. And when they do notice me, it’s almost in shock because I’ve startled them, or embarrassment because they didn’t see me sitting there for the last ten minutes. 

I will admit, I’m a physically still individual who prefers to speak up when necessary, or at least I aim to. I tend to keep my thoughts and opinions to myself, as in the past, they were always met with some level of hostility, so it’s probably best if I kept my mouth shut. But what baffles me is that people say that I “blend” into my surroundings, as though I was some form of human chameleon. I’m often forgotten and left out of things, and most times, I never feel included. 

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Today feels like everything has labels attached. If you’ve got a couple quirks, you’re either ADHD, OCD, bi-polar or on the autism spectrum. As a kid, autism was something rare, and it was severe. Now, everyone is labelled as something. Why? What is this obsession with being named something? Is it a sense of belonging we seek so badly that we cling to something like ADHD as though it explains our entire lives? It’s an unhealthy obsession with an interesting root. 

Any psychiatrist looking at me can find signs of half a dozen mental illnesses. I’ve been diagnosed as clinically depressed, manic depressive, ADHD, severely OCD and now, I’ve been (unprofessionally) told that I show signs of being on the spectrum. The catch 22 is that if I reject the “diagnosis” that I’m living in denial. If I embrace the “diagnosis”, I’ll allow it to define me. Neither scenario is positive. Yet the whole world is obsessed with it. 

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