coming for the competent
I am reminded this week of something I wrote for my (unpublished) book, This Overtaxed Life: the mind of a diagnosed bipolar II, possibly autistic, primarily suicidal, self-described artist & legal researcher, back in the pre-Covid era.
The week began with hearing from the guy who the majority of Americans who voted, voted for, telling us how he was going after his enemies. Then the utter cruelty of provided horribly incorrect discussions of autism, which made me want to cry on social media that we must be his enemies, because even though it just seems like one of the wacky things of the week, it is so much more. And then we moved this week to the charging of Comey, and that one hit me hard. Now it is going for the competent, because they are competent.
This except is from the early 2010s, when I had finished my law degree, was working on my masters, and felt economically I had to make good on getting licensed as a lawyer in Canada, and instead basically throw myself back into a mental health crisis as my brain and body said no and I keep going. Law itself and improving it I was passionate about, practice I was not.
The reason I am thinking of what I wrote now is how outlandish my fear seemed then, and how my brain picked something that, as our societies in North American keep changing, is much less ridiculous now. I would have preferred to just be crazy than to watch my fear becoming more accurate. (I guess there should be a warning that this discusses suicidality, but to me that is just life, so it feels like having to warn people that I exist):
Back to my articling year, or more accurately 17 months as it was stretched by two leaves of absence…. Pretty quickly there began a very specific obsession which grew stranger as the months went on. It was this soviet-style fear. It was this imaging that at some point our government here would come for the intellectuals like the Soviets had and that being a lawyer, I would be off to whatever the Canadian version of the Gulag would be. And that somehow, if I didn’t become a lawyer, if I did not become a member of the Bar, I would be saved. It wasn’t clear how this would happen that our government could change so much, but it was not as though it had not happened before in world history that the intellectuals had been taken and punished. And more confusing to me at the time was why this was even a problem for me. The suicidality was so strong at that time. At the level of “can I wake up without the deep desire to kill myself being my first thought?” And when at times the best I could do was simply to be completely still, in a fetal position and not move. So I don’t know why in this imagined future I would not just end it, except that I supposed if I did not do so in time I would not be able to.
This was an obsession that I knew was unreasonably, highly unlikely to happen, was probably just a visceral response to everything I was experiencing, but that did not make it less real. And it didn’t make it less effective. It might have been ridiculous but it was still wearing to have to have it in the back of my head. The rational could not simply dismiss the visceral. And it was not that hard to get rid of, I simply had to not formally become a lawyer.