There Was Never a Problem

I spent years waiting and hoping for something or someone to fix me. A therapy, a doctor, a pill. Some kind of intervention that was beyond me. I was in pain all of the time—physical, emotional and existential. I was depressed. I was fatigued. I was paralyzed. I was angry. I didn't fit in. For most of my adult life I numbed it with drugs and alcohol — the only thing that temporarily quieted the storm in my brain. Everything in life was difficult for me, from daily activities to social situations to work. And I knew there had to be something that would fix me. That one day life could really begin, how it was supposed to. I was in pain and looking for a reason, and coming up short caused more pain.

The waiting assumed I was a broken object — something that could be reassembled, mended, completed by something else. Nothing alive works that way. A tree isn't a damaged machine. Neither is a nervous system. We come out of this earth and we return to it. We are nature, happening in a particular shape, for a particular stretch of time.

If you are a process, not an object, there is nothing waiting to be restored. Not a better version. Not a "real you" underneath the one institutions can see. Just this, happening.

So, why did I ever think there was a problem?

Because I noticed that I experienced everything very differently than everyone I ever knew. And because civilization is designed for a narrowly defined nervous system, things were very difficult for me. Yes, there was childhood trauma that made things worse, and that amplified traits that are uncomfortable in this world — what the DSM calls OCD is one of them. But set aside the trauma for a moment.

I'm an anomaly. And if you're the anomaly, you'll most likely think you're the problem, because we're taught that anomalies are problems. In systems, anomalies are undesirable because they produce unpredictable effects. The way our society is designed relies on a set of traits and behaviors defined as "normal" by our institutions and the people steering things. This design is efficient, economical, keeps people in line, and keeps the people who are in power in power. If you don't fit the design, the system doesn't rewrite the design. It writes the problem onto you. That's how "I'm an anomaly" becomes "I'm the defect." It isn't a conclusion you reached. It's one you were handed.

I didn't need to be told the world was a bad fit. I had that information before breakfast, every day, from childhood. What I needed was someone to stop treating the fit as my failure.

I spent decades with the wrong therapists and psychiatrists, being medicated for diagnoses I didn't have. Dozens of medical specialists over fifteen years. Almost every diagnostic test you can order. Clinically depressed, they all agreed. End of story. Pain with no structural cause. Nobody flagged the neurodivergence, nobody recognized the trauma — not because I was a difficult case, but because I was a case nobody had the vocabulary for.

The investigations kept failing because the premise was wrong. When you ask "what's broken" loudly and persistently enough, the system will produce an answer — a diagnosis, a medication that partially works, a label that captures some but not all of it. That looks like progress because it confirms there was a problem to solve. But I wasn't getting closer to anything. I was just accumulating artifacts of the wrong question.

That's what the defect premise does once you accept it. A problem implies a solution. Your attention goes outward — to the right doctor, the right diagnosis, the right medication combination. Investigation feels productive because investigation is movement, and movement feels like progress. But every search confirmed the problem, because I was specifically looking for confirmation of it.

Western medicine finds mechanical faults in mechanical systems. I'm not a mechanical system. Neither are you.

Something shifted when I turned 40. Not because a protocol finally arrived — it didn't. What arrived was people who weren't looking for a fault. The right therapist, eventually, who recognized my neurodivergence, and understood and validated my trauma. She was the first person who showed me that I'm not worthless. Then through her, the right psychiatrist. An expert in my autistic profile, PDA and all the branches off that tree. She also understood the social model of disability and the systemic failures that shape how people like me move through the world.

They didn't fix me. They stopped looking for the fault. I was still the same process. Someone had finally stopped treating that as an emergency.

None of this made the world easier. The insight doesn't change the architecture — my nervous system is still the same one, daily life is still built for someone else, and everything still requires a negotiation most people never have to think about.

What collapsed was the layer on top of the actual difficulty. The "why can't I just be normal." The "what is fundamentally wrong with me." Those dissolved — not because I talked myself out of them, but because the premise underneath them didn't hold.

The question "what's wrong with me" assumes there's something to find. After fifteen years of tests and clinicians and dead ends, I think the investigations were useful after all — just not in the way I intended. The absence of a finding is a finding. The question was wrong.

Anomalies aren't defects. They're data points a system wasn't designed to accommodate.

There was never a problem in the first place.