Reading back over, it seems like it’s really important to me to have an Official Diagnosis.

But is it really?

Let me tell you a sliver of a story about the time I got one. Not a psychiatric label, but a bodily physical one.

Best I recall, I had been on the earth for 23 years, and

I should have been a man by then, but I wasn’t, so I went to the Endocrinology Man, and he ran this test and that test to validate or invalidate hypotheses and produce a label for my condition.

The label he eventually produced and the treatment he proposed as a result had many consequences, but one of the most important things about the diagnosis was the first word in it, which was:

“Idiopathic” failure of this hormone and that hormone.

Meaning: shit’s broke and we don’t know why, thusly.

The term ‘idiopathic’ derives from Greek ἴδιος idios “one’s own” and πάθος pathos “suffering”, idiopathy means approximately “a disease of its own kind”.

idiopathy (n.)
“primary disease,” 1690s, Modern Latin, from medical Greek idiopatheia, from idios “one’s own” (see idiom) + -patheia, abstract noun formation from pathos “suffering, disease, feeling” (from PIE root *kwent(h)- “to suffer”). Related: idiopathic.

Down to the roots, this Official Medical Scientific Diagnosis literally meant:

One’s Own Particular Suffering.

Not only that, but “Certain medical conditions, when idiopathic … are preferentially described by the synonymous term of

cryptogenic

“!!

“Cryptogenic refers to something of obscure or unknown origin. It is commonly used to refer to:
Cryptogenic disease
Cryptogenic species”

Doing the word math thus renders it as

Ones Own Suffering
Of Hidden Origin

You know what I’m a-thinkin, cadets?

I think that if I ever even did get that thing I want so bad,
an official diagnosis for my mental illness …

It would come back exactly the same.