#me: being unfair at respectable dead authors from last century writing characters with mental illness/disorder WRONG

[novemberthecatadmirer]

Thoughts about “The Wind in the Willows”(I HATE IT) as a Person with ADHD 

So I finished listening to the Audiobook of the Wind in the Willows

(And figured out a difficult illustration composition while listening to it, GOOD!)

AHHHHHHHH I have THOUGHTS

I love everything around the Mole and the Rat.

I hate, I HATE everything the narrative writes about Toad.

SERIOUSLY I AM FUCKING MAD

As a person growing up with ADHD I hate the way Toad was written, I HATE IT SO MUCH

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Having quick, intense obsession over one thing following another, having SO MANY hobbies then getting bored and dropping them one by one

Your strong obsessions hurt you, hurt your health and hurt your life and hurt your reputation

You mean well, you try so hard, you want to have everything IN CONTROL because you have so little control over your crazy obsessions

AND PEOPLE SAY YOU ARE IMPATIENT AND WANT YOU TO BE NORMAL AND RESPECTABLE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE

And you know there is something wrong with you, but you do not know what is exactly wrong, you just know there is something wrong with you because why it is so hard for you to just be like everyone else

And you believed, you believed these well-meaning people older than you, who know better and love you and are concerned about you, that you are impatient and ungrateful and you just need to try harder to be GOOD and NORMAL

You want to believe them because then that means there is nothing wrong with you you just need to try HARDER

But you do not really believe them. Because you tried and you are trying and you have been trying all your damned life and IT JUST DID NOT WORK and you are exhausted and you do not want to try anymore

Because no matter how HARD you try you cannot be “good and normal”, you just cannot. These people are supposed to love you, and you love them, and they looked at you and see someone impatient and not trying enough. FOREVER.

They want to fix you and then they can love you but you know you cannot be fixed so they will never love you the real way they just love the potential fixed version of you but that fixed version of you is an illusion and no one will love you the way you currently are

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In my teenage and early 20s that nearly drove me mad. I got into crippling depression and anxiety. It still drives me mad, the condescendence from a parent figure that just want you to be fixed and be normal and blame you for not trying hard enough.

I did not actually yote myself over some metaphorical cliff. Mostly thanks to school counsellors, extremely supportive friends, and accidentally stumbling into a reddit post about ADHD (I never knew the term before, growing up in a social environment extremely blind to mental illness). However it was a kind of close call, before I realized oh it is really not something wrong with me, it is just something different.

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Then I searched the author Kenneth Grahame and I was like WHAT

He based Mr. Toad on his SON

Alastair Grahame. Who was born disabled. An only child. Committed suicide 5 days before reaching 20 in 1920

His demise was recorded as an accidental death out of respect for his father. - Wikipedia, Kenneth Grahame

LIKE WHAT. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK

According to Cardiff University Professor Emeritus Peter Hunt, Grahame shared a house in London with a set designer, W. Graham Robertson, while Grahame's wife and son lived in Berkshire. - Wikipedia, Kenneth Grahame

So yeah.

I think he was figuring out things about himself. But he was also a distant father. He had his own troubles to figure out. But I think he sucked at being a father.

The way he wrote Mr. Toad. The way he wrote Toad’s obsession as something BAD and PATHETIC and FUNNY.

The way he initially created the whole story to entertain his son. Created something with LOVE. Tried to connect with this son he just could not understand with metaphorical stories. 

But the metaphors were BAD. The story is biased and condescending and the story JUDGES.

He tried to teach his son maturity and respectability by creating a character and mocking the character.

His son, Alastair Grahame, who was a child with disability and was sent away to boarding school, tried so hard to have his father love him. His son called and called for helps in letters and letters. But this respectable author turned away because he saw troubles in his son and he could not understand and he probably had his own bucket of troubles to deal with and it was all too overwhelming. So he turned away. 

And he escaped into his stories where everything can be FIXED and Toad would learn his lessons and be A GOOD TOAD.

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I cannot stop thinking about it.

There is something extremely, extremely cruel and UGLY with the kind of fact that your father does not understand you and he mocked (unintentionally) you in his story. Then his story got popular and everyone loves his story and LAUGHS at the character that basically (unintentionally) mocks at something in you that you cannot fix.

I don’t know. I think that is the kind of thing that can drive someone over some edge.

(And the fact that Alastair Grahame’s suicide was treated as a shame. Brushed over as an accident.)

(Okay maybe I am being emotional because I got personal experience. There was this elementary teacher who wrote me in a self-promo article as some crazy troubled child that learned to be normal because of her loving help. She got the promotion and left to teach at another school probably with higher salary. And 9-year-old me got bullied by classmates because she gifted each and every parents of kids in my class that damned book contained her article. They went back home and told their children to stay away from the crazy kid. That damned experience fucked me up extremely hard. It literally took me YEARS to realize I do not have to be extremely careful with everything I do to not be viewed as a lunatic. Also my first experience with “sometimes the bad guy wins.”)

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I respect Kenneth Grahame the way I respect dead artist. His story is wonderful and nice. I really, really love the Mole and the Rat.

It just hurts a little to read Mr. Toad. And hurts a lot after learning that the Toad was an unintentional mockery based over the author’s own child with disability and likely depression who was emotionally neglected and abused by the author (probably unintentionally but abuse is abuse.)

And the book was written in this time period that the idea of Mental Illness and Disorder and Neurodiversity was NOT A THING. Like Damn it in early 20th century people barely understood psychology and had ALL THE RIDICULOUS IDEAS. Therapy? Go to talk someone in the church. Ask help from the God out there.

It is also extremely clear that Kenneth Grahame had his own struggles that he did not understand and needed help himself. Like, he probably needed so, so many therapies. How do you blame a parent who was far from mentally well themselves for not being able to meet their children’s mental needs? They are parent but they are also just another fallible human being. Yet emotional abuse is still abuse it still happened even when no one wanted it to happen.

To me it is just another “LOVE is good and powerful but LOVE does not fix your problems and LOVE itself is not enough and never enough.” Nah we need respect and listening and trust. Like trusting someone’s experience and struggle to be real even when we are not able to experience the world the same way they experience the world.

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I think it is really good that people know about ADHD now. (Still not enough) (Still not enough in my country) (My relatives still deny it despite apparently having it themselves) And there are medicines and methods to deal with it or make it easier. Even without medicines and helpful methods, merely recognizing it itself is a great help. For me it HELPS to know that this is not something wrong in me.

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The thing is, I don’t think it’s entirely miserable to have ADHD. (I don’t like to picture it as superpower though, it is just being different like being left-handed.) It is miserable because the society is designed for people without ADHD, or rather, the society demands efficient workers for labor, and ADHD is against that type of cold efficiency. So someone will look at you and see you as a misfit malfunctioning gear of a larger machine. And your parents fear for you because they worry you will have no space in this larger machine and be tossed out into trash. But the gear feels and the gear is not a gear and it should never be about some larger machine.

Some people say the ADHD obsession is bad. I agree to some extent. The obsession sessions is occasionally bad especially when I was not able to recognize that I was deep down in the pit of some weird obsession. But I could learn about it and recognize it and work with it. I cannot say that same obsession does not allow me to fully invest in things and bring me intense joy. The obsession comes and goes but the experience and the joy is real and I learned so much because the obsession makes me research everything madly.

(Also as illustrator I never run out of ideas despite having trouble finishing drawings. That’s like the two sides of it, the good part and the bad part.)

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Yeah this whole damned writing happened because my ADHD brain yelled at me “Yeah go write about your rant over some children’s story from early 20th century in public domain at midnight before writing that ridiculous witch story that may actually bring you job”

No remorse