Leave Yourself Unsolved

Diagnoses are curses

- Gordon White

There was a time when we described people in stories. She was fiery. He was stubborn. They were tender-hearted, hilarious, strange. We used the language of feeling, metaphor, family, folklore. Now, we use diagnoses. And somewhere along the way, we traded the soul for a checklist.

This shift didn’t happen all at once. It was slow, packaged in the language of care. Mental health awareness became a cultural force. Therapy-speak filtered through social media, schools, HR policies. But the effect was cumulative and corrosive. We began to see ourselves, not as people in motion, but as profiles to be decoded. Symptoms to be solved. Every habit, flaw, quirk or contradiction became evidence of some deeper dysfunction.

We no longer ask, "What kind of person are you?" We ask, "What do you have?"

You’re late all the time? Must be ADHD. You crave connection but struggle with trust? That’s attachment trauma. You feel too much, or too little, or differently from others? Autism spectrum. Bipolar. CPTSD. We’ve become so used to these frameworks that we barely notice how they flatten the full breadth of who we are.

There are no generous people anymore—only people-pleasers. No loyal friends, only those afraid of abandonment. No dreamers, just dissociative daydreamers. Even ambition, once a virtue, is reframed as neurotic compensation for childhood neglect.

This isn’t just linguistic drift. It’s a transformation in how we imagine the human being.

Because when you view personality as pathology, you inevitably turn life itself into a clinical problem. And life can’t survive that for long.

We’ve lost the old ways of speaking about character. There used to be poetry in our flaws. The friend who couldn’t keep a secret was also the one who laughed the loudest and loved the deepest. The uncle who drank too much and told wild stories wasn’t reduced to a diagnosis; he was a chapter in the family saga. Not idealised, but lived with. Understood. Loved.

Now, even memory is forensic. Children grow up analysing their own parents with DSM checklists. Grandparents are retroactively diagnosed with conditions they never knew existed. We’re so busy interpreting everything that we forget to experience it.

And that’s the real loss. Not just language, but life itself.

Ask someone now why they love their partner. You’ll hear trauma compatibility theories, not affection. Ask why they want children. You’ll get economic projections, not longing. What once would have been described as fate or madness or romance is now reduced to "attachment patterns."

This is the logic of a society that no longer trusts the mystery of being.

And yet we celebrate this awareness. We call it emotional intelligence. We say we’re more conscious now, more evolved. But are we? Or are we just more suspicious of anything that can’t be solved with insight?

Because if everything must be explained, then nothing can be sacred. No decision can be impulsive. No emotion can be unreasonable. Everything must be brought to heel. Every shadow illuminated. Every ghost named and neutralised. We’ve medicalised the soul. We’ve made the heart a threat to the mind.

Even freedom is filtered through diagnosis. The right to be different must now be certified. You can be weird, but only if you have paperwork. You can be sensitive, but only if a psychologist says so. You can live off-grid, reject modernity, love fiercely, speak loudly, dress strangely—but only if it fits within a spectrum someone else defined. The wild parts of us must now be explained before they can be allowed.

But what if we rejected that?

What if the most radical act today is to be just a person?

Christopher Hyatt, the iconoclastic psychotherapist and chaos magician, saw this coming. He warned that language itself is hypnosis. From childhood, we are trained to think in systems. We’re taught to use words to explain everything, and in doing so, we lose the felt experience of being alive. Language becomes a cage. Psychiatry becomes a map of what’s allowed.

He taught that most of what we call the "self" is armour. Tension. Programming. Learned reactions. He offered tools to break that down: not to make us better-adjusted, but to make us free.

His methods were brutal. Breathwork that unraveled your emotional knots. Exercises to collapse your compulsive identity. And most importantly, an invitation to stop believing your own scripts.

Hyatt didn’t promise healing. He promised disillusionment. What comes after that is up to you.

And maybe that’s the point.

Not everything has to be explained. Not every feeling needs a name. Sometimes, you’re not avoiding intimacy because of a wound. You just don’t like that person. Sometimes, you don’t have ADHD. You’re just bored. Sometimes, you’re not burnt out. You just need to walk into the woods and scream.

Maybe the bravest thing isn’t to "do the work," but to live without constantly interrogating yourself. To be unsure. To let the moment pass unlabelled. To risk being misunderstood, or even mistaken.

Because the self isn’t a puzzle. It’s not a story you need to get right. It’s a thing you inhabit. An unfolding. A gesture. A contradiction. A risk.

So leave yourself unsolved.

Let people guess. Let your feelings confuse you. Let your memories sit without commentary. Let yourself blush, stumble, forget, laugh too loud. Be kind, even when it makes no sense. Be stubborn, even when it would be easier not to be. Let language fail you. Let mystery in.

The world doesn’t need more perfectly explained people. It needs souls. Stories. Strange, messy lives that defy neat description.

You don’t need to make sense. You just need to be real.

And that’s enough.