These times are very interesting. Accepting, or not accepting, people for their sexuality is a heaving issue. You can turn to almost any blog, any politician, any tv show, and you'll see an opinion on sexuality. It is a highly discussed topic but then for so many individuals, an under-discussed topic. It's very weird if you just sit back and absorb that.
It makes me think about mental disorders and how frowned upon they still are. You can have an artist sing about being born of a certain sexuality, heritage, etc, but not mental stability. I guess it doesn't flow as well lyrically or matter as much.
On one of my low points recently I was browsing through documentaries on youtube and found one that talked about how adults with social anxiety *waves* are thought to have brains that are stimulated too easily (or something along those lines). They did experiments with babies where they held mobiles over them and some babies would just watch them moving objects with interest while other babies would cry at mobiles. I can't remember all of the experiment and can attempt to track down the documentary if anyone is interested, but it had to do with a certain part of the brain being over stimulated too easily, which is thought to be what happens with people who suffer from things like social anxiety.
I've had social anxiety for a long time now. I can think back and recall symptoms back to before the age of 10, but it became worse for me when I moved to California as a preteen.
I was unlucky in the fact that I never had anyone around me who recognized any sort of mental unwellness (I suffered severe symptoms of anxiety from a young age), so there was never any treatment or therapy. I was just told that I needed to get over my problems.
I was thinking about it yesterday and remembering when my mom took a trip away from me when I was around the age of 8 years old. She went to another state to visit friends. I cried the entire time she was gone. I called her every 15-30 minutes because I thought she would die. It was one of the worst anxieties I've felt. At that age I had no way to tell anyone what I felt because I didn't understand it myself. My mom was exasperated with me and everyone else just thought I was being a mommas girl. I literally thought my mom would get into a car accident and die. In Elementary school, if my mom was even a minute late picking me up from school, I thought she had died in a car accident and I would start crying immediately. If school was out at 3:00 and the person who was supposed to pick me up wasn't there at 2:55, panic was already setting in. At 3:00 if I couldn't see my ride, I was in tears. No one understood or cared to understand. I guess I was just classified as difficult.
Now I call this "Born that way" because I truly believe I was born this way. I could be wrong and I would love for some University to way to do studies on me (Urm, you know, nice ones, not old fashioned shock-the-brain ones) and let me know what they think. Because of that documentary and others I watched, it seems like there is just something that sort of dooms all of us in one way or another. Some people just get lucky and have amazing brains. Others have areas that are short circuiting. Sometimes that works out, other times not so much.
Anyway, where am I going with this? I guess I just hope that mental illness stops being looked at with such a stigma, like so many other things have in the past (and unfortunately still are by some people). I'm not trying to call being gay an illness so don't twist my words or jam any into my mouth/blog. It's about social norms and the ideas of those changing or at least more acceptance coming into the picture.