There is nothing wrong with you
A couple of weeks ago, I started a new project (that would be number 24) brilliantly named There is nothing wrong with you. I found the name. Sort of. Below is the story behind all of that…
Anyone reading this blog or knowing me — which is most likely one and the same — will know that I am a rather energetic kind of guy. Meaning, I will not easily let you speak, I have a lot of things to say. Always. Not everyone will assume that this comes with a lot of unwelcome thoughts though, except for my family who know about that part all too well…
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As a kid, my specialty was to refuse going to bed, which meant that my mother would routinely spend 20-30 minutes talking me into it, while I went through what my 9-year old mind was concerned about that day. Truth be told, I don’t remember what that was, but chances are these were (way) cruder versions of my current line of inner questioning… Note: there is (also) a back story to that sleeping situation, which stems from me becoming aware of my own mortality, but that’s a story for another day. Again, lots of things to say (or write), always…
The point is this: I’ve always asked myself a lot of questions. Which is in no small part the reason I opted to study philosophy and humanities after high school, in something we call prep schools in France, i.e. a couple of years of extremely intense cramming in the hopes of getting into selective grad schools, be they literary, business or science-oriented. I thus chose the former, only to be met with a resounding “no”. And by that I mean I didn’t stay in prep school long enough to even take the entrance exam: at the end of the first of two years, I was not invited back. Two options then lay before me: either go to university and keep on studying philosophy — something I absolutely saw myself doing, my parents not so much — or take the exam to the Political Sciences Institute (nicknamed Sciences Po over here), another selective grad school that let you take the exam right after high school and/or prep school. At the time: that prep school route doesn’t exist anymore, so the rest of the story would have probably unfolded in a vastly different way a decade later…
I took the Sciences Po exam — and got in. Against all odds, including my own: I knew I was intellectually capable of doing that on some level, but coincidentally felt wholly unprepared for the exam, which turned out to be an advantage… For one of the exam’s subjects, 19th century history, the assignment we got was “The industrial revolution in France in the 19th century”. Two problems with that:
My father is an economics university professor and I took economics in high school, long enough to understand that “real” economics are nothing like what historians claim to practise: very few of them ever studied macroeconomics, let alone micro… As a result, I unilaterally chose to opt out of all economics-related history topics. Call it a (French) strike;
That assignment was super generic. In other words, anyone who’d actually studied the topic, even just for a day, would have known more about it than me. As a matter of fact, the summer prep school I went to to prepare for the exam (so many prep schools…) gave us a memo with that very title. I didn’t even read it.
And so I found myself trying to list out all the things I remembered on this eminently sexy topic: dates, events, facts… Unsurprisingly, that list turned out to be pretty short: all in all, it featured 9 items. At it happens, history essays in France tend to have 3 parts and 3 sub-parts. So the math was pretty easy: one item par sub-section and Bob’s your (19th century) uncle. As I got out of the exam hall, I called my mother to tell her the news that there was no way I would ever get in, because economics is bullsh*t.
Turns out the opposite was true: I got a 16/20 mark (my best out of all 4 exam topics) and got accepted on that very basis. Later, I actually went and read my copy to find out what the reviewer could have possibly found in there. Her note read: “very clear and well structured essay”. Of course it was: this was literally all I knew…
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You would think that is the end of the story — and this rather long post — but it isn’t: even though I did get into Sciences Po, life kept being hell for me. The fact that the program started right after high school (or very near that) meant that the first year there was effectively another prep school, albeit internal. Meaning we would get all sorts of crazy assignments that were designed to test our resolve and/or ability to work without sleep. A good example was the history course (again): our teacher, a very funny man for anyone who wasn’t in his class, would have us hand in an 8-page minimum essay every week. Based on at least one book we had to read back to back — every week. And that was just one class. History courses were on Wednesdays: needless to say I didn’t sleep much on Tuesdays…
By the end of that first year in Sciences Po, I arguably felt even worse than the year prior. I also failed that year (for a bunch of reasons, including my contempt for that history teacher), which meant I had to take another (albeit internal) exam to get into year #2. And that’s when the shit hit the fan in my head: how long was this nonsense keep on going, with authority figures arbitrarily giving us absurd assignments rather than us actually trying to learn anything significant, or useful?
I was at a loss. So I went to my parents for a favor: ask a psychiatrist friend of theirs to see me. When in need, ask a pro. I vividly remember entering into that man’s office: he was smoking a cigar (this was the year 2000), sitting in a massive armchair behind his desk. He let me blurt out my spiel for a few minutes. Then he looked at me dead in the eyes, took a pause and went: “Young man, I’m gonna stop you right there: there is nothing wrong with you”.
I was positively shocked: how could he say that? There was absolutely something wrong with me, my life was quite obviously a complete mess! I mean, how many more exams and assignments could I take? Beyond that, what was I to become? I hadn’t found that out in no history essays, that’s for sure…
He went on, explaining to me the difference between going through normal life hurdles and having actual psychological (let alone psychiatric) issues. What I was experiencing was basic growing pains, the kind everybody encounters on some level or other. I just had to learn to deal with it, take a step back to realize things were actually not (that) bad and that life would indeed go on. His words, not mine.
As I got up to leave, the psychiatrist went to his book shelf, took a small book out and gave it to me: “You should read this, everything is in there”. That book was called How to deal with difficult personalities. I thought it was a little on the nose but I took it. The point was, I might have been a little more difficult than others, but that was merely a scale everybody was on. And had nothing to do with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder — the man’s specialties, I found out later…
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I will be honest: it took me years to figure out what that doctor had told me. In a way, I’m still figuring it out. His key point was, and I believe it to be 100% accurate, most people tend to greatly exaggerate the normal hurdles of life. And live with an overbearing feeling of fear when they could go faster and farther if they just listened to themselves.
Over the years, that core belief turned into a personal philosophy. Which I proceeded to abundantly distill around me — again, ask my folks. But never quite beyond that: I wrote a few things here and there, started an Instagram account under the There is nothing wrong with you name but stopped posting after a while… In short, I never gave my ideas a real shot. Because I had too many of them as it was, because these were eminently personal, because I had something to lose…
At the grand old age of 42 (this summer), I finally felt the urge to make this philosophy public, in the best way I know how: by creating a blog. I’m half joking: the plan is to do more than that, create a community of like-minded people, hopefully help a few along the way… But for now it is basically a blog.
Hope you enjoy it.