Just Guyton

People are afraid of things they don’t understand.

And when it comes to mental illness, sometimes that fear turns people into something they probably don’t mean to be—unkind.

People hear words like schizophrenia and suddenly they stop seeing the person standing in front of them. They see every scary movie they’ve ever watched. They see danger. They see unpredictability. They see someone they should stay away from.

Sometimes people treat mental illness like it’s contagious.

Like we have the plague.

Or like we’re all one mildly inconvenient Tuesday away from becoming serial killers.

Spoiler alert: we’re not.

Some of us are actually superheroes.

Just a slightly different kind.

I have been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, and Autism Spectrum Disorder. I was officially diagnosed with ASD in 2023, later in life, which explained quite a few things that had apparently spent years being filed under:

Well, that’s just Guyton.

And I want to tell you what living inside my particular brain can actually be like.

Not because my experience represents everyone with these diagnoses. It doesn’t.

But because maybe if you spend a few minutes inside my head, something that once seemed strange might become a little more human.

Maybe I’m Multidimensional

I haven’t experienced hallucinations in a long time.

The last time was probably about two and a half years ago.

I kept seeing a man walking around my neighbor’s yard.

And I didn’t think, Oh, look. I’m hallucinating.

I saw a man.

It felt real enough that the next morning, I told my neighbor she needed to check her security cameras because someone had been walking around her yard.

That’s something I wish more people understood about schizophrenia.

Sometimes we can hear things you don’t hear.

Sometimes we can see things you don’t see.

That doesn’t make us “crazy.”

Maybe we’re just multidimensional.

Okay, probably not.

But it sounds considerably cooler.

There was also a period of my life when I experienced psychosis. For about a year, I genuinely believed that I had died on Mount Hood.

Obviously, there was a small logistical problem with this theory:

I was still here.

My brain solved that problem too.

I became convinced that I was living in an alternate realm—some version of my life that continued as it would have if I hadn’t died.

And let me be very clear:

It was horrible.

I can look back at it now and understand what was happening. But while I was inside it, it was my reality.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t like the way people casually throw around the word crazy.

You don’t know what somebody’s brain is doing to them.

You don’t know what reality looks like from where they’re standing.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Then there’s social anxiety.

How do I explain social anxiety?

Well…

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

There you go.

Next diagnosis.

I’m kidding.

Sort of.

Strangers make me uncomfortable because, hello, STRANGER DANGER.

I don’t want to be adult-napped.

Yes, I realize I’m almost 50.

No, this information has not been forwarded to the appropriate department in my brain.

And if I think somebody is staring at me?

Absolutely not.

I’ll probably mumble something under my breath like:

What are you looking at, asshole?

And then giggle because, really, what am I going to do?

I’m the size of a child.

There are also things that seem completely ordinary to other people that my brain has decided are unacceptable.

For example:

I cannot use the phone in the car.

Nope.

If the phone rings while I’m in the car, my nervous system behaves as though someone has just released a tiger into the passenger seat.

You hear:

Ring, ring.

My brain hears:

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

Is there an actual emergency?

Probably not.

Has that information helped?

Also probably not.

Welcome aboard.

Sometimes My Parents Take Their Eyes Off

And then there’s my autism.

I was officially diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in 2023.

That diagnosis didn’t create a new version of me. It finally gave me language for things I’d been experiencing my entire life.

And sometimes that brain and my mouth apparently lose Bluetooth connectivity.

I was having a perfectly normal conversation with my husband recently and tried to say:

“When my mother and father take their glasses off, they can see, but when I take my glasses off, I’m blind.”

Except that isn’t what came out of my mouth.

What came out was:

“When my mother and father take their eyes off…”

I stopped.

That wasn’t right.

My husband looked at me.

I tried again.

“When my mother and father take their eyes off…”

No.

Again.

Eyes.

I knew the word was glasses.

My brain knew the word was glasses.

My mouth had apparently entered into an exclusive contract with EYES.

Eventually I repeated it so many times that I started stuttering. I had to stop, breathe, count down, take another breath, and finally reboot the entire system.

“When my mother and father take their glasses off, they can see. When I take my glasses off, I’m blind.”

WE DID IT.

There are other things.

I pace.

A lot.

When I’m getting overwhelmed, I make up songs. Sometimes entire responses become songs because apparently my nervous system has decided life should be a musical.

The bed needs to be made.

Everything has a place, and there is a place for everything.

Except sometimes I also need to move those things around.

Everything needs to be done a certain way.

I eat specific things.

And fish are friends, not food.

Also, I don’t eat lamb.

Why?

Well.

Jesus is the Lamb of God.

Mary had a little lamb.

Mary was Jesus’s mother.

And now somehow we’ve arrived at me eating Jesus.

I’m not eating Jesus.

Did you follow that?

No?

That’s okay.

I did.

Welcome to my brain.

And You Know What?

I like it here.

I genuinely love the way my brain works.

I am perfectly imperfect and uniquely me.

There are more than eight billion people wandering around this planet. Maybe somewhere among them is someone whose brain works remarkably like mine.

But they still aren’t me.

I like the way I think.

I like my imagination.

I like the way I write.

I like that I can turn practically any situation into a song.

I like that I can be a complete weirdo and my husband still loves me.

I like that I can be almost 50 years old and still feel completely passionate about things I loved when I was a child.

I like the good.

I like the bad.

I’ve even learned to make peace with some of the ugly.

And that means more to me than I can adequately explain because I spent so much of my life hating my own existence that today, I’m just happy to be here.

That’s why I call myself mentally gifted.

Not because schizophrenia is some magical superpower.

Psychosis was horrible.

Anxiety can be exhausting.

Being overwhelmed isn’t particularly adorable when you’re the person experiencing it.

I’m not pretending difficult things aren’t difficult.

I’m saying I refuse to believe that having a brain that works differently makes me less valuable than somebody whose brain works exactly the way society expects it to.

Maybe the superpower isn’t the diagnosis.

Maybe the superpower is learning how to live inside your own mind.

Maybe it’s surviving the days when your own brain isn’t particularly kind to you.

Maybe it’s learning your patterns.

Finding your tools.

Making your songs.

Taking your breaths.

Counting down.

Trying the sentence again.

And eventually learning to love the person who’s been in there the entire time.

Before You Decide Someone Is “Crazy”

Learn something.

Ask questions.

Listen.

People often fear what they don’t understand, but you don’t have to stay afraid simply because you don’t know something.

Knowledge is power.

And kindness?

Kindness is important.

You don’t have to understand exactly what another person experiences in order to treat them like a human being.

So before you judge someone because their mind works differently from yours, try understanding them first.

You might discover there was never anything there to fear.

You were simply looking at someone whose superpowers didn’t look like yours.

Because not all superheroes wear capes.

Some of them can take their eyes off.