What Do I Mean When I Say Anxiety?

Yesterday, I made a Facebook post that included the word anxiety. When I made it, I was dealing with a fairly strong anxiety attack, and I mentioned my frustration at coping skills that weren’t working. A few people commented and joked or just treated it like I was talking about having too much energy. It wasn’t a big deal, but it did rub me the wrong way as I was trying to be open about something that was a fairly crappy experience for me and a lot of people completely misunderstood what I was saying.

A lot of the time, people don’t understand why mental illness advocates suggest that they don’t use words like “OCD”, “anorexia” or “depression” to mean things other than the actual diagnosable illnesses. This seems to me to be a good example. We have lots of words for things that aren’t clinical level anxiety: worry, fear, nervousness, a sense of impending doom. But we don’t really have any other words for the feeling of anxiety that comes with an anxiety disorder. So when I try to express that feeling, I have no way to say it except with a word that will inevitably be misunderstood by at least some of the people I’m speaking to.

That’s actually incredibly frustrating and can feel quite invalidating. If you had a broken leg and tried to tell someone, and their response was more along the lines of what you’d say to a stubbed toe, you’d be a little miffed. That’s what it feels like to try to talk about mental illness and get advice that applies to neurotypical brains. There’s fairly good evidence that invalidation is really bad for a person’s mental health, as it makes it hard for them to trust their own emotions. So while no one was intending to fuck with me last night, it certainly felt as though I was trying to ask for help or comfort or recognition, and instead got people completely ignoring what I was saying.

These are the kinds of small experiences that add up. If you have a mental illness you get them all the time, which means that you have to spend extra time and energy deciding how you want to explain yourself and your feelings to other people. It also means always feeling as if you have to convince other people of the seriousness of a given emotion or problem. When I say anxiety, I don’t mean I’m worried about something. I mean that my whole body feels like it’s going to rip apart, that I have so much energy I can’t keep still, that I alternately cry and do pushups, that my brain will not and cannot turn off, that I am desperate to escape whatever situation is bothering me. These differences are important. We need a word to talk about the intense anxiety. It’s hard enough to talk about it without having the language itself obscure your meaning.

For those who don’t have to learn how to express their emotions in a language separate from the one everyone else does, it might seem like no big deal. But if you’re trying to be honest and open with others and not seem overly dramatic, it’s really important to be able to use the accurate terms without them being misunderstood.

Technical Terms and Language Change

If you’ve been a reader here for any amount of time you probably know that I’m a big proponent of letting language be language. It is a perennial concern of Very Important People that language is changing: words change meanings, new words show up, people start using new constructions, or simple vocal habits and tics change (see: vocal fry). For the most part, I like to remind people that language change is a natural and healthy part of a language. A language that doesn’t change tends to die, and there’s absolutely nothing grammatically improper about creating new ways of speaking, new words, or new definitions for words. Prescriptivist tendencies in language tend to be sexist, racist, and just straight out discriminatory.

But there are a few important exceptions to this belief, and I think it’s important to explain why.

The two most visible examples of language change that rub me the wrong way are “dissociate” used to mean “disassociate” and the slide of “trigger” from a very specific psychological term into a general term for anything that upsets someone. Both dissociate and trigger are words that were coined within psychiatric circles to describe symptoms of mental illnesses. They’re both fairly technical terms with specific definitions that are used in psychological studies, papers, diagnoses, and treatments.

There’s already a lot of confusion and misinformation that surrounds mental illnesses, especially around what different diagnoses and symptoms mean, how in control someone is, and how serious symptoms are. Most people misunderstand what the term trigger means when it’s used in a psychological context and use that lack of understanding to discount how serious it is to be triggered. Very few people have any idea what dissociation is or how serious it can be. Because of these larger public perception issues around diagnosis and understanding, it is extremely hard for people who have these symptoms (as well as disorder that have come into common parlance but aren’t truly understood) to get compassion, accommodations, or help when they’re struggling. One of the ways that people who have mental illnesses are doing activism is by trying to educate others about these terms so that if someone says to you “I think I’m dissociating right now, can you bring me something soft to touch,” you won’t think they’re making no sense and you’ll be able to help them out.

That might not seem like it’s hugely important for someone who doesn’t have these symptoms, but for a person who deals with them, it can be the difference between serious backsliding or competent coping skills.

So when people start using these terms to mean only partially related things, it doesn’t seem to me that it’s basic language change. It seems that it’s a misunderstanding of what certain diseases are and a breakdown in education. In these cases, using the language in a different way does actively harm people. It’s similar to using OCD to mean neat. While most people can understand what you mean, it’s the kind of language change that relies on a stereotyped image of a diagnosis to get its meaning, something that makes it harder for the people who actually have the diagnosis to explain what their lives are like.

In many ways, there are parallels to humor here. It certainly is possible for any subject to be funny, but a good rule of thumb is to punch up, to make fun at the person with power in a given situation. Similarly all words have the ability to change, but in general it seems like a good idea to be tolerant of changes that don’t hurt anyone or are specific to an oppressed group, while resisting changes that rely on punching down at a group.

Of course it’s not entirely possible to just stop language from changing, but what we can do is continue to inform people of the definitions that we use and that are used within communities of mental health, and ask that others do the same to stop confusion. We can continue to educate people about what mental illnesses are actually like. And one way to do that is to stop using trigger to mean “annoying thing” or dissociate to mean “move away from”.

It’s Not Edgy to Be A Douche

So as per fairly usual in my life, I had a minor encounter with a Facebook troll this morning. The conversation ended when I called him out by saying “So you’re just being a troll and you don’t care who gets hurt as long as you’re entertained” and he liked my comment. Apparently he found it really cool to be someone who hurt others. He also felt the need to point out that he associated with people that I would apparently “be disgusted by”, and insist that he was highly empathetic and open minded.

These are the classic troll behaviors. More than anything they illustrate to me that trolls have a few assumptions in common:

1.They are not constrained by the same beliefs that others are constrained by.
2. They are rebellious or forward thinking because they refuse to believe what others believe.
3. They are better than others for not being bothered by mere things like “words”.
4. When it really comes down to it, they’re good people.
5. It’s fun to hurt people as long as it’s over things that “don’t matter” like words.
6. When you hurt people over “stupid” things, you’re really just helping them see an edgier or more free thinking way. You’re doing them all a favor.

Unfortunately most of these assumptions and beliefs are simply wrong. Sometimes when you refuse to believe what others believe, you’re just wrong. There is in fact nothing wrong or overly sensitive about being hurt by words. We as human beings have a drive for acceptance, and words are in fact a form of acting. There is nothing about being cruel with your words that is helping another person or enlightening them to their own idiocy.

I’m about to drop some crazy knowledge on you guys here, so brace yourselves: being mean is not edgy. Being mean is not new. Acting superior and gaslighting people? It’s pretty much the oldest trick in the book. I’m going to be real honest: being mean is just straight out boring. EVERYONE knows how to do it. People even do it all the time without meaning to. Most people probably spend the majority of their time being mean to someone.

In addition, just disagreeing with people doesn’t make you right. In fact disagreeing with a lot of people also does not make you right. Sometimes (I know this will be hard to believe) the majority does actually have the correct facts! There is nothing about disagreeing with other people that is inherently cool, edgy, forward thinking, or good.

You might think that you’re looking real damn good compared to those sissies who overreact. You might think you’re making a statement. You might think you’re more rational or reasonable. But here’s the honest truth: you just look like a douche. Not only that, but you often look pretentious, uninformed, rambling, and unintelligent.

All those little lies that you feed yourself to pretend that you’re coming out on top, that it’s survival of the fittest and you’re the one surviving, that it’s just a big game? You know they’re lies. You know that we are built to be social animals and that at this point in our history we’ve moved past viciously ripping each other to shreds in order to survive. You know that it’s just plain outdated and redundant to do that crap at this point.

So please trolls, just be honest with yourselves. You’re not doing any of this for good reasons or because you’re really a great person. You’re doing it because you like to be mean. The sooner you accept that the sooner we can all move on.