Cosmo Vitelli
I'm just your average everyday neighborhood mentally ill antihero. A lot of people would put a pistol to their dome’s if they went through what I go through psychologically on a daily basis. And I’m about as lucky as you could get: white, male, heteronormative, privileged upbringing. I should be in a mental institution but somehow I’ve had the good fortune of having people who love me despite myself. And I’m still so profoundly fucked. And I’m thirty-six but I feel as sick as ever. You have to craft a compelling narrative for yourself in this world or you’re never going to make it. Pick a personality. Any personality.
Everyday that I’m still here feels like an act of rebellion. Every success I have feels like I’m triumphing against myself.
I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder and I’m probably depressed as well. Clinically attention is paid to the primary diagnosis but nothing in life is this simple and mental illness is often marked by comorbidity. Who has only one thing? Only in the pages of the DSM are things divided into individual diagnoses.
I’m going to keep fighting because I have no other choice, but this is wearying. Think about the myth of Sisyphus. Presumably the dude didn’t have OCD, but regardless life is still an absurd uphill battle full of setbacks, embarrassment, and pain. The thing is: how to keep the pain from becoming suffering.
With mental illness, basic shit feels like suffering. It’s like are you pushing this heavy ass wheel up a hill for your entire existence, but the wheel also has spikes on it that at best cause additional discomfort and at worst can puncture you and make you want to stop pushing altogether. Not because you think pushing is pointless, but just because it hurts too much. You’re making a rational decision. The game is too painful to keep playing. You’re injured. You’re running around the pitch with a broken ankle.
Being mentally ill in America is not a problem, so long as your mental illness or personality disorder is compatible with the demands of capitalism. Look at all of the profoundly unwell people in positions of power. But if you’re one of the unfortunate who have a mental illness not conducive to the demands of capitalism, woe unto you. You become disposable, like every other oppressed class. The detritus of capitalism. Expendable. Extraneous.
I’ve always felt doomed, in a certain sense. And it’s not just because of OCD. I’ve felt holistically doomed, since birth. Ill-fitting in this society. Somehow aberrant to the status quo.
I feel like I’m piecing myself back together through my writing, building out a new identity. We are what we repeatedly do and what we repeatedly tell ourselves. To that extent, we are our thoughts. And we can control our thoughts. We can’t control what happens to us but we can control the narrative frame. We can control our personal terministic screen. That’s what freedom is. The freedom to choose your screen, your lens.