Diagnoses labels collected over the years have all gradually been relinquished and I've got a pocket full of zero-identity to live up to now.

Medications have vanished and I there is a big space in the days between needing them or else and the now of absolutely not.

It's lucky to be so lost after having navigated that system so early. It's fourteen years past. I am 28. For the past two years I haven't known a chemical to enter my body that is meant to change anything about how my mass of existence does what it does. And it's strange to be in this place after the lithium, haldol, klonipin, zoloft, depakote, lamictal, risperdal, paxil, effexor, ritalin(!), I-can't-even-remember-what-else...

When I was fourteen years old I was transported to a psych ward after attempting to run away from home. My 8th grade paper journal had been read. My mother and church discovered my ongoing sexual relationship with my youth pastor.  I also had a history of sexual abuse with my recently-deceased father that I wouldn't even touch with my thoughts at the time. So the church I grew up in decided that the best thing to do in this situation was send me to a psychiatric hospital. Further, the people working in that psychiatric hospital thought that the best thing to do with an energetic, emotional, artistic, hypersexual girl whose father had recently died and who was getting her pussy sucked by a grown man was to diagnose her with Bipolar disorder and begin a feeding regimine of five different drugs to "fix" her.

Perhaps the thing that needed fixing was the way we were dealing with the incredibly human experiences of sexuality, raw emotional expression, adolescence, body trauma, grief, and death. We cannot medicate ourselves out of humanity, but we dangerously try.

High school was a march through the labyrinth of the psychiatric industry and the attempt to figure out how to stop myself from being who I was, so much so that I neglected all that was school-related. I would stay up late at night working on collage, writing poetry, planning and dreaming. I would spend my days singing and dancing and practicing theatre, reading and writing more poetry, telling my teachers that I didn't understand the point of being inside of their classrooms or writing their papers, crying and staying home from school because I just didn't want to be trapped in a place where I was expected to think and speak on particular things in particular ways.
And each action of mine was fuel for the psychiatrists to validate a diagnosis, prove that my very being was flawed because I was un/able/willing to follow the structure. And I believed them. I thought that the was I was acting was surely proof of my own fucked-upness, that I should be fixed, that something must be done with me. What else could explain the feelings of despair? Reality? I submitted all responsibilty of my body to the people in charge, the doctors and the church, my clueless and gullible mother, the drug companies, anyone but me.

It is not fair or good to convince someone that who they are is diseased. It is not fair or good to convince someone that intense emotions are something to be feared and muted, drugged like magical banishment. It is not good to turn our backs on what is happening in the real reality by constructing new categories and explanations in boxes . Like this will keep our fears caged from coming to get us? The only thing we are fighting is being who we are. We create distractions.

Seven years ago I walked into the county clinic looking for meds, which were never anything but hope for relief and a lot of side-effects, accessories to my cloak of insane identity. There was a doctor there who listened to me like I didn't know doctors could. His wall held proof of top-rate Harvard education and all of the massive institutions seemed to approve of him, but he didn't fit the narrow box of power because he didn't put me inside of one. After my fuzzed-out jaded request to give me meds, he asked me if I would like to talk. I went back, and the walls started to break down.
"You are not crazy", he told me. "The world around you has been so incredibly fucked-up and you have done a lot of work to survive it."

The labels disappeared. My feelings appeared. Meds came and went by my choice alone, and I chose to dispose of them in the service of risking being the way that I am, which is nothing to apologize for.

Recently I spoke with a friend who said that he would rather take meds than be "an ineffectual person". And I thought about that. I remember feeling like that. Like if I couldn't perform certain actions at certain times, than I was useless to exist.
I respect his personal decision to be on meds because it is only up to us to know what we need and how we feel. However, I know that the only reason I ever took those meds was because I believed that my feelings were flaws that needed to be taken away, that I was not good as a person unless I could change who I was.

If it means being who I am and bearing with it, then I would rather be an ineffectual human being.