Everyone wants to feel like they're in control of their life, their surroundings, their reality.

Of course.

Everyone wants to understand what's happening, why it's happening, and what will happen next,

whether it's a relationship

with a family member or a friend or a romantic partner or a job situation or a health

situation or anything. Everybody wants to feel that they can shape their role in that reality,

that they have the tools they need to move through the world in a way that is desirable and possible.

We all want that agency.

For people who never deal with mental health issues, this control is often just there.

They don't have to acquire the control.

It's built in.

Factory-installed brain feature. And they don't worry about it. For people

with brains that are a little more interesting, the issue of control is absolutely something

to worry about. To worry about a lot. Sometimes to the point where the worrying is so constant and

pervasive that the worry itself becomes something to worry

about. If you have complications with your mental health, the issue of whether you can control

your role in the world is an existential question. How can you live unless you get it all under

control? How do you live if you can't?

And of course, these are the people for whom that control feature is not factory installed in their brains.

These are the people least equipped to retrofit such a mechanism.

These are people who have to work a hell of a lot harder in the world.

I think a lot of those people are listeners

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