# Autism, Schizophrenia, Bipolar, Psychopathy, HIV — And Me
There are five words that can change the way people look at you before they have even heard your voice.
Autism.
Schizophrenia.
Bipolar.
Psychopathy.
HIV.
Read them together and they sound almost theatrical, as though someone has written a particularly dark character description and forgotten to tell the character he is supposed to be fictional.
But I am not fictional.
I am not a case study.
I am not a collection of diagnoses neatly arranged in a medical file.
I am a person.
And these are some of the words that have become part of my story.
Not the whole story.
Never the whole story.
But chapters nonetheless.
## Five Words
I sometimes wonder what people imagine when they hear these words.
Autism.
Perhaps they imagine someone who cannot communicate.
Schizophrenia.
Perhaps they imagine someone dangerous.
Bipolar.
Perhaps they imagine someone unpredictable.
Psychopathy.
Perhaps they imagine a monster.
HIV.
Perhaps they imagine a person whose life has somehow come to an end.
And therein lies the problem.
We have become remarkably good at turning people into symbols.
A diagnosis becomes an identity.
A condition becomes a personality.
A medical status becomes a moral judgement.
Before long, the person disappears behind the word.
I know what it is like to be looked at through those words.
And I have spent a great deal of time trying to remember that I existed before them.
## Autism
Autism is part of the way I experience the world.
Sometimes that means I notice things other people don't.
Sometimes it means I don't notice things everyone else seems to understand immediately.
Sometimes conversation is easy.
Sometimes it feels like everyone else was handed a script before entering the room and I somehow arrived without mine.
There are moments when the world seems excessively loud, excessively bright, excessively complicated.
And there are other moments when I feel perfectly at home inside my own mind.
Perhaps that is what people misunderstand.
They want autism to be one thing.
But people are not one thing.
There are autistic people who are outgoing.
Quiet.
Funny.
Romantic.
Awkward.
Confident.
Anxious.
Successful.
Lost.
And everything between.
I am not a stereotype wearing a diagnosis.
I am simply a man whose mind does not always travel the same road as everyone else's.
And perhaps there is nothing inherently tragic about that.
Different roads can still lead somewhere beautiful.
## Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is harder to explain.
There are experiences of the mind that are difficult to translate into ordinary conversation.
How do you explain what it feels like to question your own perception?
To wonder whether something you experienced was real?
To examine a thought and then examine the thought behind the thought?
There are moments when the mind becomes an unreliable narrator.
And what a peculiar thing that is.
We trust our minds because we have no choice.
Our thoughts are the instruments through which we understand the world.
But what happens when the instrument itself becomes uncertain?
You learn to question.
You learn to pause.
You learn that not every thought deserves immediate allegiance.
And perhaps there is a strange wisdom in that.
Most people move through life believing their thoughts are unquestionably true.
I have learned that the mind can be persuasive without necessarily being correct.
That lesson has not always been kind.
But it has been valuable.
And schizophrenia does not make me a monster.
It does not make me incapable of love.
It does not make me incapable of laughter.
It does not erase my intelligence.
It does not erase me.
The storm may sometimes be fierce, but I am not the storm.
I am the person learning how to stand within it.
## Bipolar
Then there is bipolar disorder.
There is something almost seductive about the description of mania when you hear it from a distance.
Energy.
Confidence.
Ideas.
Possibility.
The feeling that the world has suddenly opened every door at once.
But anyone who has experienced the consequences knows there is another side.
The doors do not always lead somewhere pleasant.
Sometimes they lead to decisions you later have to explain.
Sometimes they lead to embarrassment.
Sometimes to exhaustion.
Sometimes you look backwards and think:
What on earth was I doing?
And then come the lows.
The opposite kingdom.
The silence after the noise.
The heaviness.
The absence of motivation.
The feeling that the person you were yesterday has wandered somewhere you cannot reach.
Bipolar disorder can make your own mind feel like a country with unpredictable weather.
But I am learning not to confuse the weather with the landscape.
I have moods.
I have episodes.
I have difficult days.
But I am more than any of them.
## Psychopathy
And then comes the word that tends to make people lean backwards.
Psychopathy.
Say it and watch the room change.
It is one of those words that has been almost entirely colonised by popular culture.
Serial killers.
Manipulators.
Cold eyes.
Dark rooms.
People who feel nothing.
People who destroy everything.
People who smile while the world burns.
But real human beings are rarely so conveniently written.
I include psychopathy here because it is part of how I understand myself and my psychological experience.
I am not going to pretend that the word has no meaning simply because other people find it frightening.
But neither will I allow a word to become a prophecy.
I am not interested in pretending that every aspect of my personality is explained by psychopathy.
Nor do I think having certain traits means someone automatically becomes the villain in somebody else's story.
People are more complicated than that.
Even Shakespeare knew this.
His villains were rarely merely villains.
His heroes were rarely entirely heroic.
His characters desired, deceived, loved, betrayed, regretted and contradicted themselves.
Human nature has always been rather inconveniently complicated.
Why should I be any different?
## HIV
And then there is HIV.
Perhaps the most physical word on this list.
The one that exists not merely in my mind, but in my body.
HIV carries a particular kind of stigma.
People hear it and sometimes immediately imagine the worst.
They imagine a life that has ended.
A person who cannot have relationships.
A person who cannot be desired.
A person who should somehow be separated from ordinary life.
But I am still here.
I still date.
I still desire.
I still laugh.
I still have complicated feelings about people.
I still have bad mornings and brilliant evenings.
I still wonder whether someone will like me.
HIV has changed aspects of my life.
It has not abolished my humanity.
And perhaps that is the thing I most want people to understand.
A diagnosis can alter your circumstances without becoming your identity.
## When the Labels Meet
The difficult thing about having multiple conditions and labels is that eventually the boundaries become blurred.
Which part of me is autism?
Which part is bipolar?
Which part is schizophrenia?
Which part is psychopathy?
Which part is simply personality?
And which part is just being a flawed human being?
That last question is surprisingly important.
Because there is a temptation to explain everything.
He did that because of this.
He said that because of that.
He behaved this way because of the other.
Sometimes those explanations may be useful.
But sometimes I was simply being an idiot.
And there is freedom in admitting that.
Not every bad decision is a symptom.
Not every strange thought is illness.
Not every emotional reaction needs a diagnosis attached to it.
Sometimes I was angry because I was angry.
Sometimes I was selfish because I was selfish.
Sometimes I hurt somebody because I made a bad choice.
I don't want my diagnoses to become excuses.
They are part of my reality.
They are not a free pass through life.
## The Person Behind the Words
This is perhaps the hardest lesson.
You can spend so long being described that eventually you forget to describe yourself.
Doctors describe you.
Psychologists describe you.
Medical records describe you.
Other people make assumptions.
The internet has opinions.
Society has stereotypes.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, you can begin to see yourself through everyone else's eyes.
But what happens when you remove the labels?
Who am I then?
I am someone who laughs at stupid things.
Someone who overthinks.
Someone who has loved people.
Someone who has hurt people.
Someone who has been hurt.
Someone who has made spectacularly questionable decisions.
Someone who sometimes thinks too much and sometimes not nearly enough.
Someone who has ambitions.
Someone who has regrets.
Someone who wants to be understood.
Someone who occasionally wants everyone to leave him alone.
Someone who can be affectionate and distant, confident and insecure, generous and selfish.
In other words:
Human.
## I Am Not a Tragedy
I don't want this article to become a tragedy written about myself.
There is already enough tragedy in the world.
I have things I struggle with.
Of course I do.
There are days when my mind is difficult.
There are days when my body reminds me of its history.
There are days when other people's assumptions are exhausting.
But I also have ordinary days.
And ordinary days are precious.
I make coffee.
I scroll through my phone.
I listen to music.
I laugh at things that probably aren't funny.
I think about sex.
I think about work.
I think about relationships.
I wonder what I'm going to eat.
I worry about the future.
I make plans.
I change my mind.
I live.
There is something profoundly rebellious about simply continuing to live when people expect your diagnoses to define the story.
## What These Words Have Taught Me
Autism has taught me that different does not necessarily mean lesser.
Schizophrenia has taught me that perception is not always certainty.
Bipolar disorder has taught me that the mind can change its weather without asking permission.
Psychopathy has forced me to examine ideas about empathy, morality, attachment and what people assume they understand about others.
HIV has taught me that stigma can sometimes be more frightening than the diagnosis itself.
And all of them together have taught me something else.
Labels can be useful.
But they are dangerous when we mistake them for the person.
A map is useful.
But nobody would confuse a map with the country itself.
A diagnosis is a map.
I am the country.
## There Are Things I Still Don't Understand
Perhaps that is the most honest thing I can say.
I don't have everything figured out.
I don't know exactly where every trait begins and every diagnosis ends.
I don't know what the next decade will look like.
I don't know whether I will understand myself more at forty than I do at thirty.
I hope so.
But perhaps understanding yourself is not a destination.
Perhaps it is an endless road.
One day you think you've finally understood yourself, and the next morning your own mind presents you with a new riddle.
And so you keep walking.
You keep asking.
You keep learning.
You keep making mistakes.
You keep becoming.
## Five Words, One Life
So here they are once more.
Autism.
Schizophrenia.
Bipolar.
Psychopathy.
HIV.
Five words.
Five enormous subjects.
Five things that have, in different ways, shaped the person writing these words.
But they are not five cages.
They are not a sentence.
They are not a complete biography.
They do not tell you who I have loved.
They do not tell you who I have lost.
They do not tell you what makes me laugh.
They do not tell you what frightens me at three in the morning.
They do not tell you what I dream about.
They do not tell you what I regret.
They do not tell you what I hope to become.
They certainly do not tell you everything I am capable of.
The physicians may write their words.
The psychiatrists may write their assessments.
The laboratory may record its numbers.
Society may whisper its assumptions.
Let them.
I have learned that a man may carry many names and still belong to himself.
So call me autistic.
Call me schizophrenic.
Call me bipolar.
Call me a psychopath if that is the word you choose to use.
Call me HIV positive.
But when the labels have been spoken and the medical records have been filed away, when the room is quiet and nobody is watching, there remains a person beneath them all.
Me.
And perhaps that is the greatest thing I have learned.
I am not the diagnoses I carry.
I am the man who carries them.
And I am still walking.
Still questioning.
Still becoming.
Still here.