I'm Cured!

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If you want more context for this week’s post, check out my previous essay. If that isn’t part of your path today, don’t worry, this piece can stand on its own two feet. I think she might even start walking soon!!!

Special thanks to my friend Hanna for her psychology-related insights.

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I finished The Twentysomething Treatment by Dr. Meg Jay almost two weeks ago, but I’ve still been carrying it around the house and bringing it on excursions like a toddler fused with a disintegrating “blanky.”

Of course, the blanky does eventually fall apart. Reading the book only makes a difference if I choose to change my mindset or material conditions. I needed the nudge to change both.

I’m self-conscious of coming off as a MLM schemer who is peddling the book and will soon join an author-led cult. (My affiliate code is slaythehousedownbootsmama). But I don’t know…this book brought me some comfort and lit a little something under my tushy. I now understand why publishers sell pocket-sized bibles.

My biggest takeaways might not seem so big to you and might even seem obvious, and to be clear I didn’t love the entire book. But maybe my Sparknotes version of Dr. Jay’s writing nudges you or at the very least pokes you towards something that feels enlightening. Maybe you’ll read the book and have some issues with it or won’t like it at all. That’s cool too, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Okay. Here we go.

Things that got me thinking

“Our twenties are the years when the number of unknowns peak, and they’re also the years when we have the least experience dealing with them.”

I recently fact checked a Q&A with Jenny Slate for work, and I loved listening to the interview audio. She talked to the journalist about how life has only opened up as she’s aged, how she is still learning so much, how past experiences can be treated as information as opposed to as regret. I like the idea of experience as data. We are all little scientists trying to do good and figure stuff out while navigating inconsistent variables and unforeseen circumstances and luck and chance.

If sitting with uncertainty makes you as anxious as it can make me, it would make sense as to why shit can get so goddamn uncomfy and bad! Dr. Jay introduced me to the term (but not the concept), “reassurance junkies,” people who go to friends, parents, therapists, or others for constant reassurance in the name of temporary relief at the expense of building self-assurance.

A lot of this is done as a means of “impression management.” Sort of a huge tenant of my being. Over the years I’ve gotten better. It can be deeply uncomfortable to sit in the moments where I want to text or call someone, but I care less (still a lot) about what people think about me and realize that, conveniently, a lot of people don’t think about other people as much as we think they do. Nice!

“Worrying about the unknowns in your life is different from having a mental health disorder.”

Well, shit.

I was in college when I saw a therapist for the first time. I remember asking her, “so what is this?”, referring to my incessant worrying and sustained low lows. She said it was anxiety and depression. So when I read this sentence, I quasi-panicked. Dr. Jay writes, “diagnoses can locate the problem inside the person rather than inside their situation.”

Could I have avoided those difficult years and those difficult years about being sad about those difficult years if I had simply embraced the unknown and felt less doomed or destined by diagnoses?

But then I read another line:

“The next time you start to describe yourself as anxious or depressed, use the word ‘uncertain’ instead and notice how this changes how you think about your situation and yourself.”

If my college therapist had offered me this sentiment as a response to my, “so what is this?”, I would have been clinically pissed the fuck off. And I likely would have circled into an even deeper place of hopelessness. If this is normal, I’m not interested!

It wasn’t all uncertainty. That’s for sure.

Going forward however, it will be helpful to ask myself, is this (anxiety, depression, etc) about the unknown? Is it situational?

It can be hard at times to question these things when we’re prematurely inundated with (often incorrect) answers…

“On all corners of the internet, public figures and everyday twenty-somethings are speaking out…some young people go online and find out that they’re not as alone or as troubled as they mistakenly thought they were. Others, however, mistakenly diagnose themselves with, or build their identities around, disorders that they don’t have or problems that might not last for long.”

We’ve all seen the videos, or heard the stand up bits. If you experience a, b, c, you have x, y, z. I agree with Dr. Jay that these videos can both provide comfort and create problems in that people self-diagnose and subsequently cling to that diagnosis. It makes perfect sense why these videos have taken such a hold—just when we’re asking, “who am I?”, there’s a person speaking in a confident tone, telling us exactly that.

What concerns me is that unlike WebMD, which requires us to list our symptoms, to actively search for answers, these videos on social media find us. I’ve found that a lot of TikTok users in particular don’t post but instead passively absorb videos that tell us how to live or what problems to solve before we’ve even asked. The platform—with its seemingly limited oversight—has anointed some creators unearned authority, and in a culture that believes every problem has a solution (and an immediate one), we eat it up, metabolize it, and later crave more.

In an upcoming post I’ll explore how content (including porn—which Dr. Jay discusses) finding us affects our romantic and sexual prospects.

And speaking of lovers…

“Although we may think of our twenties as an incredibly social time, they are in fact the loneliest years of all. About half of twentysomethings say they have no close friends.”

That’s a lot of people! And it makes so much sense! Dr. Jay writes that sometimes she “prescribes” being social to her clients.

When it comes to medication, we need “pills and skills.”

It’s common knowledge that we know relatively little about the biological mechanisms behind mental health issues and subsequently medicating these issues is often handled with an element of guesswork.

However, I hadn’t realized until reading The Twentysomething Treatment that the idea of depression being a “chemical imbalance” in the brain has largely been debunked. Serotonin might play a part, it might not. It really comes down to genetics and environmental triggers.

For “brain-based” mental health disorders like OCD, ADHD, and BPD, Dr. Jay is a proponent of medication and “skills.” (I did some digging and am still coming up short with what her use of “brain-based” means exactly—but I think she means conditions which are more neurological than situational, which as we’ve discussed is sometimes a difficult distinction to discern). However, it was interesting to hear just how much she seems to hesitate before recommending medication to (or diagnosing) her patients experiencing depression and anxiety. 

Dr. Jay writes that what we all really need is skills. How to make friends, how to deal with uncertainty, how to cook, how to date, how to deal with hard news, how to move through times of depression. But there are cases, she continues, when we need pills to learn new skills. I’ve been there. I am there. My friend Sarai once put it to me this way when I was upset about being on medication: we could jump and jump, exhausting ourselves, to get something on a high shelf, but we could also use a ladder to get there. One day, you might not need the ladder at all. Or you will, and that’s okay too.

I think where I’m at is moving towards what Dr. Jay calls an “internal sense of generally being alright.”