Yo Krish - Is This Enough Articles For Ya?

Those selves, those personalities, those individual collections of traits and attitudes and values and ideas that every human has - to live a long and sustainable emotional life, eventually, they must prove to be enough. I used the word “just” in the headline here, but maybe that’s counter to my point: your regular-ass, not-the-product-of-disability, not-a-reflection-of-identity-based-oppression feelings are all you need. They are enough. You don’t have to justify their importance by latching on to crowdsourced diagnoses that are now so vast that whoever wants to can be covered by their umbrella. Ordinary feelings are powerful, meaningful, and fulfilling. I’m afraid I have grim news for all of these people hoping to wring an entire personality out of their various cognitive disorders: you’re just like everybody else. We all are. That’s part of our endowment as human beings, our inherent and immutable ordinariness. “You’re not special” is supposed to be some terribly mean put down, but I find it quite comforting, myself; it frees me from the obligation to be anything more than I naturally am. What can it say about you, if you’re convinced that the innumerable traits and habits that make you you, that make us all human, are not enough to hang a person on?

In a simple descriptive sense, it’s not at all clear to me that ADHD or any other cognitive disorder actually creates unique emotions. I suspect instead that they provoke ordinary human emotions in some disproportionate way relative to others. (The “neurotypical,” if we absolutely must.) This claim seems unsatisfying, though, as people appear to be hung up on the undesirability of the ordinary. But ordinariness is not incompatible with depth, meaning, value, or purpose. On the contrary, I find not being special conducive to exactly those virtues. Once you stop spending so much time wanting to be special, you can pursue them for themselves, just as they are, just as you are, just as you actually are.