You are what you...

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." - Oscar Wilde

What am I passionate about? I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out over the last couple of days, but I have yet to come up with an answer. And now I’m supposed to write about one thing I’m passionate about. I don’t know. I could say my kids, but that seems silly doesn’t it? One day last week I was passionate about Twilight: New Moon. I think it’s stupid.
Yesterday I was passionate about buying healthy food. My husband wants to lose weight and I want him to be healthy. So that was yesterday.
Am I passionate about the sun? I love the sun. I need the sun. The sun can make me happy and change my outlook on a whole day. But I don’t think that’s passion.
I have very strong feelings about mental illness. Is it a passion? Hmmm… Maybe. After all, I am in school so I can be a psychologist when I grow up. It’s something I live with every day. I’m quick to try to explain mental illness to someone. Or to defend people who suffer from mental illness. I will definitely make the time to argue with you about the use of the term ‘bipolar’. A person is not bipolar. They may have bipolar disorder, or maybe they just aren’t good at making decisions and sticking with them. Or maybe they have borderline personality disorder. Or maybe they have dissociative identity disorder, so you think they are swinging back and forth between moods when what’s really happening is their personalities are busy that day. If someone has bipolar disorder, calling him or her bipolar is defining them by their illness. I don’t agree with that. And for the record, the same would go for ADD. I have a brother who has ADD, but he is not ADD. He is, however, a disrespectful creep. You can’t BE OCD. You may have OCD, but you are not OCD.
And on that note, I also can’t stand constantly hearing, “We all have something” to try and say that people who are suffering from mental illness have no excuse to act different. We may all “have something” but we don’t all obsess over the number of ceiling tiles over our heads. We don’t all lose years of time because we have other “people” inside who take care of things for you. We don’t all size people up and figure out the best way to kill them within the first 15 seconds of meeting them.
I guess I’m passionate about mental illness. Heh. Go figure.