Oz J. Thomas made a video response to my piece Undiagnosing Myself. I was very touched and moved upon hearing it and want to share both the video and the text here today. Oz told me the text is not exactly what he said in the video, but very close.
The text:
I am undiagnosing myself from mental illness.
If I undiagnose myself it does not mean that I no longer suffer, no longer feel melancholy, no longer feel the sharp sting of a noisy room or the confused thoughts and paranoia that combine and blend and blur in a rainbow haze. This just means that I will no longer consider myself broken because I am human and I am different.
I am tired of being boxed in because of the workings of my own mind and this culture’s narrow-mindedness. I am not a diagnosis just as you are not a skin color.
Mentalism is todays racism.
I grow sick of hearing others call people schizo as a joke. It’s not funny now and it never was.
I grow sick of people assuming that mentally ill are more violent. This is not true now and never was.
And I am sick of accepting advice from people who have even less of a clue than I do.
This is not to say I am anti-psychiatry either.
I am just not into taking drugs that never helped me, and in fact just made me much worse and robbed many of my friends of their life force.
I realize that this is a choice and like Gianna, I believe we all have the right to make our own choices over how to live our lives.
Not to be coerced. Not to be lied to.
And no, I don’t believe vitamins and positive thinking can cure a lifetime of
abuse, years of chemical poisoning and a predisposition to nervousness either.
I’m tryin real hard to live in the real world here.
This is a world that is grey, that is complicated. That is messy.
And its a world where I am constantly crushed by the question, what are you, or sometimes, who are you? What do you want from life?
I still don’t know.
Sometimes I feel like it’s a joke, I see the animals and buildings are laughing at me. This human seriousness is a joke, they seem to say.
This world is a lie, this world of what is acceptable and what is not is a lie. Nobody can tell you what is right for you except for you.
And more than anything else we need all of these other voices to listen to. Because our world is dying, lost in a sea of pre-frontal goobledegook.
We need some nonsense. Some dancers, Some healers, some animals, some plants, some mushrooms.
We all need to be heard
And maybe then the question what do you want from life will be heard again and I’ll answer with another question and it will be ok.
And maybe one day we will all look at eachother, eye to eye.
Everything Matters 