The Pathology Of Being Human

There is now a ‘hack’ for literally everything.

There is even a hack for how to breathe properly. In a book called - you guessed it - Breathe.

We have officially pathologized being human.

We’re no longer sensitive souls with a need for quiet. We’re Anxious Introverts with Insecure Attachment style.

Our little boys with loads of energy and minds of their own are now deemed to be ADHD with Oppositional Defiance Disorder.

Every ex-boyfriend we or our friends have is, of course, a Narcissist.

I do this too. All the time.

But as I navigate softer waters and lean into a Personal God where unconditional love is the medicine, I’m seeing through our hyper-vigilance; this commodification of our quirks, our personalities and our human flaws.

There is now a diagnosis and a ‘disorder’ for even the most mundane of quirks. Somehow, we’re no longer allowed to be human. We’ve had to pathologize even the aspects of ourselves that may be working just fine.

I’ve always loved being alone. I crave my alone time. I love my family and my friends. I am filled up by their presence in my life. But when the visit is over or my husband and daughter leave the house to go for a walk, I exhale.

And I could certainly make this a problem. A big one. I could say that I have Dismissive-Avoidant Attachment (cue my eye roll) and spend the next 40 years trying to psycho-analyze what works perfectly well, out of my system.

What a shame that would be.

And it wouldn’t work, to boot.

I will always want my alone time. It will always elicit a giant exhale from my body and I will likely always be better for it.

But the algorithm will always lean towards the negative. What’s wrong and how to fix it. This is the entire self-help industry in a nutshell. It is no different with new age practice; it just shows up with a more spiritual and shiny bent.

What I’m learning is that God comes to the broken hearted. It is precisely in our illness, our brokenness and our lostness that God shows up. He leaves the perfected alone. They don’t need him.

Did you catch the rub, there? We cannot be perfected. We simply can’t.

So He leaves no one alone.

For Lent this past Easter, I deactivated all of my social media accounts. And I’ve never gone back. They’re gonzo. It’s given me the space to see just how much noise I was taking in. How much useless information I was consuming. We were not meant to be garbage receptacles for endless amounts of input. It fries the circuits.

Most of what I consumed in a day was completely unrelated to me, highly negative and nothing more than a distraction. But the algorithm figured me out quickly. It spotted my hyper-vigilance, knew that I lived with illness and began stuffing endless diagnoses and ‘quick fixes’ down my throat.

Of course this only intensified my hyper-vigilance. It only sat as a reminder of how broken I was and that if I only tried these 900 suggestions, something would surely work!

I realized, in hindsight, that I was being relentlessly marketed to. I had been commodified; radicalized to believe that the way that I was, was never going to be up to snuff.

But it is precisely our quirks, our odd personality traits, our proclivities, and yes, even our so-called ‘pathologies’ that make us who we are. We have been intelligently and lovingly designed.

Every one of us.

There is no flaw in the design.

You were made so that you could look yourself in mirror, as you are, and go deeper. You’re so-called flaws are really invitations to come back to God. They’re not something to fix. They’re not something to get rid of. You’re not a robot.

We don’t read books and go to movies to find flawless characters that have perfected themselves. No. The best art celebrates the flaws.

The best art finds a way to turn pain into poetry.

It doesn’t aim to eradicate it.

It just gets really, really honest about it all. It gives pain a voice. A unique one. Your unique one.

So the next time you find yourself scrambling to diagnose, fix, pathologize, or make your flaws go away, try sitting with them for a while. Try letting them be. Imagine them as an integral part of the painting called your life.

See if you can hold them as unique and beautiful and perhaps even necessary to being exactly who you are.