Was today typical?
I’ve been up for the last hour or so, but there’s surround sound system on the TV where I’m housesitting for the week, so of course I’m watching “Jack Ryan” loud enough to rattle the windows. You really need surround sound for the full experience. Otherwise, you don’t know Jack.
I’ve loved Jack Ryan since I was a kid, and John Krasinski is amazing. It’s kind of funny watching Jim from “The Office” as an action hero. I will fall over laughing if he ever breaks the fourth wall and looks into the camera. He didn’t last season, but I’m only halfway through the first episode now. I have ADHD. When my brain says “start writing now,” I do it. That’s because if I tell myself something is a priority, I have to do it right then. Otherwise, the flow disappears.
Flow is a good thing, but so is being distracted. I’ve been talking about Sinead O’Connor’s death from a medical standpoint, and proceeded to chat about medicine. The only time I got even a little bit angry was when this woman said that her husband had a widowmaker heart attack and died instantly, then his daughter found him. I told her I knew exactly what that meant, and that I was so, so sorry, and that my mother had died at 65 from an embolism, which isn’t that unusual, but it felt like she was young. Someone replied that her husband had a heart attack, but that the fancy insurance package at his job saved him…. and oh, I lost it. What if the husband had died because he didn’t have health insurance? As calmly as I could, I said, “interestingly enough, my dad had a widowmaker a few days before my mother died. I just didn’t say that because I thought it would come across as “my dad survived and your husband didn’t. I should have said so to avoid confusion, but I was only trying to avoid pain.” I figured that was the nicest way I could tell this woman that I thought she was an insensitive jackass.
Groupthink leads to violence so in a later part of the thread I got, “you’re not an MD. You’re just the help. You are a vicious little nobody.” Ohhhhhhhh, is there a lot to unpack there……. But I told her that I’d already said I wasn’t an MD many times and that it was only my opinion and that I was out. She then called me some other choice name, but that’s when I blocked her and went about my day. I’m still thinking about the hypocrisy. Sinead O’Connor wasn’t a vicious little nobody. She had a celebrity career and a disorder…… but when you only have a disorder and you’re not famous across the world, the compassion for them does not extend to me, a nobody. The “therapist” said that I must have been triggered because she thought I was “clinging to the lurid details of someone’s death,” because she wanted to remember Sinead another way. I had told her our perspectives were different, that I was talking about medicine, and that if she wanted to grieve a different way, then my thread wasn’t the place for her. That’s because there were no lurid details. Everyone in my thread was talking about young people dying all over the world from a lot of different stuff.
It went from passive-aggressive to violent speech very quickly, but I’m not one to engage a troll anymore.
That’s because I know I can verbally bitch slap just about anyone, but people I don’t care about don’t deserve it. They’re not going to change or grow from anything I say, much less in anger. It’s just hard to tell tone of voice from my words, so people assume I mean harm when I’m just neurodivergent. Overexplaining is both a trauma response and a symptom of ADHD. Being objective and dispassionate leads to people thinking I’m condescending, which means I look down on people. 😉
I am not responsible for what other people understand. It’s just that most people don’t register ADHD/Autism in Facebook comments. I also can’t reassure everyone when the hate starts piling on. I don’t let it get to me most of the time, because I know that they’re not angry at me. I’m just an outlet. I know I can be angry and loud on the Internet, but this wasn’t it. I don’t think I’ve ever been angry when using a word like “comorbidity.”
I need to try and forget that she said it, because she got into my head and it won’t let go. She had no idea what trigger she was pulling, and being a nobody is it. I’m not a person, I’m just wallpaper. So I replied that it seemed that she had anger issues that she needed to resolve with the real people in her life because I didn’t deserve it. I went about my day and this woman had left a series of comments that were equally rage-fueled, so I said, “I was asleep. I wasn’t ignoring you, but now I am. This is going nowhere productive.” And then I blocked her.
Keep in mind that this is a thread where I’ve already said I had the same brain disorder that Sinead had, that the thread was all about mental health from a patient’s perspective, etc. where everyone was pouring out their grief for O’Connor and acknowledging we should help people… check in with them….. because no one loves a bipolar person more than they do at their funeral. What I mean is that I was relating to her hardcore and telling people what it was like, but only Sinead deserves compassion, apparently. That’s ok. They can use me as their punching bag, because I’ll remember that hurtful shit, but I don’t have to react. It was just ironic how bad the hypocrisy actually got.
So, to people who think I was exaggerating about being attacked, no one tells you that you’re a vicious little nobody when they don’t want to bait you, especially when at every turn you’ve tried to de-escalate a situation, because that only makes trolls madder. If their opinion of you is nasty, it doesn’t matter what you say after that. I don’t know the leap between medicine and her rage, but I didn’t want to find out. I’m going to take an educated guess and say that someone peed in their Wheaties, but it wasn’t me.
If someone thinks I sound vicious when I talk medicine, they probably don’t know many doctors. It’s not meanness. It’s blunt. Medicine doesn’t run on touchy feely crap. I don’t sound emotional because I’m not. Medicine does not require me to be that.
You also have to go to medical school to be a psychiatrist, which means I am flat affect about that, too. Something will eventually kill me, and this might be it. There are a TON of things that go wrong with your body when your brain is diseased. Again, your brain will do everything it can to protect you. It uses the very best lies against you. It will shut down rather than allowing you to feel unsafe.
Telling people about your mental health doesn’t generally get results.
Because I’m not a person. I’m just wallpaper.
Stories That Are All True 