Oh, lordie, when I’m around others and I feel high or low sugar spikes, I’m forever saying, “Excuse me, I’m diabetic and I need some sugar!” Or it’s opposite.

Naming my most damaging illnesses defines what I do and what I do defines who I am. When I (if I ever again) leave my home I travel with both physical and mental pharmaceuticals. The needs that I have for survival, as prophylactics and possibilities.

I am now cancer-free. I can only say that I have had (or, if contemporaneous, have) cancer. Cancer is usually more descriptive, though, as there are very public and very private cancers (though the latter is fading, maybe; we’re all breast-cancer aware). I might announce my prostrate cancer but keep quiet about testicular cancer because our testicles are part, and parcel, of our genitalia.

The words that describe me. To my shame. I control, more often than not — a really big, giagantic not — the extent to which I am, the dimensions of my Ego. (Snarky laughter.)

Broadly, then : I have mental disorders (though I could also say that “I’m mental,” I suppose)... and then I could choose to name the specifics.

When I write I am usually very conscious of the act but not when I write here. I am always involved in something that I consider to be more worthwhile than this belated anonymous script. I’m not my generation’s Peyps and I am destined to be eternally late to the dance.

I love the em-dash. I love phrases that lend themselves to hyphenation. I wish that I was more familiar with fashionable slang. I wish that I knew of more psychiatric illnesses and treatments. I try to catch up, I do!

What do you think a 21st-century asylum is like inside? For many wards (double-entendres!) conversations still exist and, in that setting, we are our diagnoses. When we are aware we might choose to exchange our illnesses with another, a fellow inmate that we’re drawn to only because they exhibit our own behaviors. We become cliques. Long-term inmates become loose cliques and may satisfy the smallest need for society. I don’t know this but I have felt this.

I feel that “I feel” is so affectatious. A feign used in some therapy to put distance between genuine emotions.

But here. Here I overuse punctuation and abuse grammar and misspell words. This is my social media. As social as it gets.

Okay - both are correct but one, for each illness, is more correct, for each illness.

When the summer sun beats on my naked back and chest and shoulders I expose my most intimate scars. I make them public and others might ask, “what happened here or here or here?” The scars of a violent knife on my left shoulder (knives don’t wound people, right?), the surgical (and liturgical) scars.

I think that, where applicable, I prefer the great “I am.”