I don’t discount that it may be absolutely true. I’m saying that I do not have the bandwidth at this time to figure it all out. I’ve gotten this far. I’m just going to ride it out. But I do think that there are a lot of people who are in that mushy middle. Well, you know, it might be fun. It might even be a little clarifying, the way your horoscope might be some days. You don’t believe in it, but hey, that is really timely today. I do need to pay attention to my deadlines today. If I want to attribute it to Mercury retrograde in a quick joke to my friends in group chat, fine. But that doesn’t necessarily signify that I have changed how I think about myself. I’d be really interested in parsing out the difference between our shorthand, driven by internet speak, and the real changes for people who find either self-diagnosis or community, or how self-identifying as neurodivergent really impacted their everyday life.

Spiegelman: I was reading one of your Substacks, Mary, the one called “Why I Quit Therapy.” You were saying that, to some degree, the diagnoses had also caused you to hyperfocus on symptoms in a way that had felt like perhaps you needed to take a step back from it.

Choi: There’s an aspect to it that is incredibly stultifying, and there is an aspect to it — to your point, Tressie, what you were talking about, with the pandemic and isolation, where people talk about dissociation all the time. And sometimes I really do be, like, jettisoning out of my body, leaving that body for dead, where it’s just me and my brain now. It’s all pure cognition. And for me, talk therapy, even something like cognitive behavioral therapy, it got to a point — and I also did the 12-step, I’ve taken my own inventory, all of these things — where I’m just like, “By God, like, how much more do I need to parse effluvia of my own personhood?”

I don’t think I need to be in therapy to identify how I’m feeling. Alexithymia, which is an inability to really recognize emotions within yourself, or feelings within yourself, is an aspect of autism that I do also have. And so I was just like, I think that time is better spent for me really sitting down with a thing that I suspect to be sadness without curing it, labeling it, understanding it, routing it back to some sort of childhood phenomenon or something that happened to me, and just being like, “Apparently, you’re sad.”

McMillan Cottom: I think that is so important. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’ve been working on this memoir that, in part, deals with why the psychologicalization of the culture did not in any way empower me to better understand or to make better decisions in my family unit, that there is a difference between understanding your feelings and feeling your feelings. And understanding can have so much positive feedback attached to it, right?