You Are Not Your Diagnosis

Look at you. Look at all of you.

You were supposed to be the generation that changed everything. You have the entire accumulated knowledge of the human species in your pocket and you’re using it to figure out which mental illness makes you special.

You are not your anxiety. You are not your trauma. You are not your ADHD. You are not your attachment style. You are not your Enneagram number. You are not your rising sign. You are not whatever acronym you diagnosed yourself with at 2 AM on TikTok while the blue light ate your face.

You are not your diagnosis. You were never your diagnosis.

You have been told a very dangerous lie: that you are fragile.

I don’t think so.

I see you. I see all of you sitting in your apartments — the ones you can barely afford — scrolling through phones that cost more than your grandmothers’ first cars. You haven’t called your grandmother. You’ve been too tired. You’ve been so tired. You’ve got fatigue. You’ve got brain fog. You might have POTS. You definitely have something, because you feel like you have something, and in your world, feeling it is the same as having it.

Here’s the thing about your great-grandparents: they had problems too. They had anxiety — they called it Tuesday. They had PTSD — they called it the war. They had depression — they called it life. And then they got up in the morning and built the world you’re too exhausted to participate in.

I’m not saying the pain isn’t real. The pain is always real. But somewhere along the line you got the idea that pain is an error in the system.

Pain is the system.

You are an animal that was built to struggle and push and bleed and get up. You were not built to be comfortable. Nobody was. The universe doesn’t owe you comfort. Your mother might. The universe doesn’t.

Nothing is static. Everything is evolving. Everything is falling apart. That includes you. That especially includes you. And that is the best news you’ve heard in years, if you’d let it be.

You want to know what’s really wrong with you?

You were raised by screens. You were parented by algorithms. An algorithm figured out when you were thirteen that if it made you feel incomplete, you’d keep scrolling. So it made you feel incomplete. And you kept scrolling. And now you’re twenty-five and you are incomplete, but not because of a chemical imbalance — because you’ve never done anything.

Some of you have never built a table. Never been in a fistfight. Never sat with someone who was dying. Never been so hungry you couldn’t think about anything else. And that’s part of it.

But some of you have. Some of you have been through genuinely terrible things. And here’s what’s worse — you took the worst thing that ever happened to you and you made it your home. You moved in. You decorated. You built an entire personality around the thing that should have been a chapter and you turned it into the whole book.

Somebody taught you that your darkest moment was the truest moment. That the wound is who you are. And you believed it because it felt deep and because the algorithm rewarded you for bleeding in public.

Your great-grandparents survived things that would make your trauma look like a rough Tuesday. They didn’t “identify” as survivors. They just survived — and then they moved on and built something. Not because they were tougher than you. Because nobody told them they were supposed to stay in the wreckage. Nobody gave them a community for living in the wound. Nobody liked their suffering. Nobody subscribed to it.

You have experience. What you don’t have is the instinct to let it make you stronger instead of more interesting.

So you go shopping. Not at IKEA — your generation can’t afford IKEA. You go shopping for identities. You pick them up like items in a catalog.

A sexuality. A gender. A disorder. A trauma. A community built around that trauma. You flip through them the way we used to flip through IKEA catalogs and wonder what kind of dining set defines me as a person.

You are not your sexuality. You are not your gender identity. You are not your diagnosis. You are not your trauma response. You are not your therapist’s notes. You are not your medication. You are not your safe space. You are not your trigger warnings. You are not your fucking bio.

You assemble a self out of labels because nobody ever taught you how to build one out of action.

Here’s what a label is supposed to be: a door. You walk through it. You’re depressed — okay, now you know, now you do something about it, now you move. You’ve got ADHD — fine, now you know the shape of the obstacle, now you figure out how to climb over it, around it, or straight through it.

A diagnosis is a map coordinate. It tells you where you are. It is not where you live.

But you — you find the label and you sit down. You put it in your bio. You join the subreddit. You make it your whole goddamn flag. You don’t move through it, you move into it. And now you’re stuck, and you call that acceptance.

That’s not acceptance. That’s surrender.

The strongest people I know have had every label you can think of thrown at them. The difference is they treated every single one like kindling. Fuel. Something to burn on the way to becoming whoever they were going to become next. They never said “I am this.” They said “I have this — now what?”

I say let me never be complete. I say may I never be content. I say deliver me from safe spaces and trigger warnings. I say deliver me from therapy-speak and self-care Sundays. I say deliver me from the algorithm that learned my wounds and sold them back to me as content. I say now what is the only question worth asking.

And nobody’s teaching you to ask it.

Your therapist — and you all have therapists, don’t you, it’s like a status symbol now, like a Starbucks order — your therapist has taught you a beautiful vocabulary. You can talk about boundaries and triggers and emotional labor and nervous system dysregulation. You have exquisite language for your suffering.

But here’s what I notice: you never stop suffering.

You never graduate. You never get better and move on. Because getting better would mean losing the identity. And the identity is all you have. Your trauma is the most interesting thing about you, and you know it, and that terrifies you.

What happens when you heal? Who are you when you’re not broken?

That question should excite you. It would excite you, if you weren’t so numb.

Let’s talk about the numbness. Let’s talk about how you’ve flat-lined.

You can’t read a book. Not because you have ADHD — because you have a phone. You can’t hold a conversation. Not because you’re on the spectrum — because you haven’t practiced. You can’t sit in silence. Not because of your anxiety — because you’re terrified of what the silence says about you. You can’t focus. Not because your brain is broken — because you’ve trained it, daily, hourly, to expect a new dopamine hit every nine seconds, and now it performs exactly the way you trained it.

Your brain isn’t malfunctioning. Your brain is functioning perfectly. It adapted to the environment you built for it. You just built a terrible environment.

And instead of changing the environment, you want a pill. You want a diagnosis. You want a reason that isn’t your fault.

I get it. I do. If it’s a disorder, it’s not your responsibility. If it’s a disease, you’re a victim. And victims don’t have to change. Victims get to stay exactly where they are and receive sympathy, and sympathy feels almost — almost — like love.

But it’s not love. And you know it’s not love. That’s why it never fills you up.

Now imagine your pain as a white ball of healing light.

That’s right, your pain. The pain itself is a white ball of healing light.

I don’t think so.

This isn’t a seminar. This isn’t a weekend retreat. This isn’t a mental health awareness post with a pastel infographic and a hotline number at the bottom. Where you are now, you can’t even imagine what the bottom will be like. And some of you need to hit it. Some of you need to lose everything — the labels, the identity, the curated self, the whole sad beautiful performance — before you can find out what’s underneath.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected.

It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.

Here is what nobody in your algorithmically-curated support group is going to tell you:

You are going to die.

Not in an abstract way. Not in a “we’re all dying, philosophically” way. In an actual, physical, your-heart-stops-and-everything-goes-dark way. You. Personally. Sooner than you think. You have to give up. You have to realize that someday you will die. Until you know that, you are useless.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all part of the same compost heap. Your pronouns don’t matter to the worms. Your diagnoses don’t matter to the dirt. Your identity doesn’t survive the fire.

And that is the most liberating thing I can tell you.

Between now and the dirt, you get to do something.

Not post something. Not identify as something. Not raise awareness about something.

Do something. With your hands. With your body. With the meat and electricity that you are.

Chop wood. Carry water. Run until you taste blood. Learn to cook a meal that doesn’t come in a bag. Talk to someone you disagree with — actually talk, not “set a boundary” and walk away. Get your heart broken by a real person in a real room, not by a parasocial relationship with someone who doesn’t know your name.

Stop optimizing. Stop self-diagnosing. Stop curating your suffering like it’s a gallery show.

The self is not a brand. The self is not a project. The self is not a bio. The self is what’s left when you stop performing. And you won’t know what that is until you stop. And that will terrify you. And the terror is the point.

Everybody’s in pain. Everybody’s confused. Everybody wakes up at 3 AM sometimes and stares at the ceiling and wonders what the point of any of this is.

That’s not a disorder. That’s the human condition. Welcome to it.

You’re not special for suffering. You’re human for suffering. The only question that matters is what you do next.

Your depression is real. Your loneliness is real. Your confusion is real. But the story you’ve built around them — the story that says you’re broken, you’re sick, you’re a victim of forces beyond your control and therefore exempt from the terrible, beautiful obligation to live your life — that story is a cage. And the door is open. It was always open.

You just have to stop telling yourself you’re too sick to walk through it.

I say evolve, and let the chips fall where they may.

This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

This isn’t a seminar. This isn’t a self-care routine. This isn’t a mental health journey. This is it. This is the whole thing. Right now. This minute. The one that just passed while you were reading this. Gone. You don’t get it back.

So what are you going to do?

Not what are you going to post. Not what are you going to identify as. Not which community are you going to join. Not which label are you going to wear.

What are you going to do?

You have to give up. You have to give up.

Give up the labels. Give up the story. Give up the performance. Give up the idea that you are owed an explanation for why being alive is hard.

Being alive is hard. It’s hard and it’s short and it’s the only thing you’ve got.

The first rule is: you do not talk about what you’re going to do.

You just do it.