It’s a symptom not a quirk.
At Bless This Brain we have something called a Recovery Cohort. It’s a 12-week program where people who are actively pursuing mental healthcare, regardless of where they are in their journey, can come and share and be encouraged.
Without question, these are the weirdest people I know and I’m proud to count myself among their number. Because after the first week of cathartic vulnerability resulting in instant camaraderie, the strange parts of ourselves comes bursting out of our shell.
And it was out of one of these amazing groups that a phrase was born. Someone did or said something weird as we are prone to do, and someone made an acceptable excuse for them that has become part of our collective collection of favorite phrases. They said, “Hey, it’s a symptom not a quirk.”
Now, maybe it was just a quirk. I think that’s perhaps why we all laughed as hard as we did the first time and still do. But sometimes a quirk can be a symptom.
I’ll give you an example from my own story. In the months following my diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder and Social Anxiety I took a job at a startup that was incredibly fast growing and the role that I filled was an especially stressful one managing a large team. I was still having trouble adjusting to an unhelpful medication (and by unhelpful, I mean unhelpful to me. Plenty with a similar diagnosis have been helped by it), I was reeling from what felt like tremendous instability, and I found that something fairly normal for most people was proving really stressful for me: Picking out what clothes to wear each day, and having a functioning pen.
And so, when I went shopping I bought five of the exact same shirts, two pairs of the same jeans, and I started keeping a constantly refreshing box of my favorite pen, the Pilot Precise V7.
For a year, this was what I wore everyday of the week. White dress-up shirt, blue jeans, a pair of brown dress shoes that I replaced with the exact same brown dress shoes, and in my pocket, two pilot precise V7s. Always. Without exception. Not missing a single day.
And it was the joke. It was kind of funny. It was my quirk. And it was a symptom of severe anxiety. Because on days when I forgot my pens, I would go home to get them or stop at the Target near my work to buy more. On days when I’d forgot to wash my shirts for the week, I’d show up late while I waited to finish washing them.
And this was just one of a few things that from the outside were just weird and kind of funny but ultimately pointed towards a desperate attempt to manage a small part of my life when so much of my life felt unmanageable as a person in recovery. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about how I used to rinse out drinks with the drink I was about to drink because I needed the cup to smell like what I was about to drink before I poured my drink in it. But that my children, is a tale for another day.
All that to say. Sometimes it’s a symptom, not just a quirk. And one of the ways we can know is when we start to ask questions rather than just poke fun. Questions of others. Questions of ourselves. In an attempt to understand why we might be doing the slightly odd things we’re doing. Curiosity is one of the most powerful tools we have in the fight for recovery.