"Broken."
"Not the way God made humans."
"Wrong."
The first week of January, I conducted a survey to see how many of my writing friends, schoolmates, and acquaintances—in short, the people around me that I interacted with on a day-to-day basis—were "normal". (If you're wanting to take the survey, it's here with only a couple of questions.) Originally, it only had two questions: seeing if the participants themselves were neurodivergent, and seeing if they would consider themselves "normal".
Then, as I received more answers, I got curious. What did people think constituted "normal"? Did they think not being "normal" was bad?
At first, the answers I got surprised me a little. More than 2/3 of the people I asked admitted that they were not normal. I don't exactly know why this surprised me, but surprise it did. As responses flooded in, most of them were encouraging. However, one response stood out to me, and it hurt me when I read it.
"Being abnormal as in having anxiety, depression, ADHD, etc. is "bad" in the sense that it isn't the way that God originally designed creation, and will be no more after Jesus comes again. But of course, people struggling with these things aren't "bad" because of them, and I believe that God uses all the struggles of his children to continue to sanctify them, bless others, and glorify Him...."
At first, I was angered, then saddened, and I didn't know why. I agreed with what the respondee said. I agree that God used specific burdens—ADHD, depression, anxiety—to further his kingdom.
I was confused, however. It seemed that thoughts like these attacked something that wasn't my fault, that couldn't be changed, and was ingrained in me. ADHD is thought to be a defect that starts in the brain—a defect that cannot be cured completely because, at the core, it is because of the way a brain is made.
Even as I thought those thoughts—"It's something that's a part of me, that's not my fault"—I knew that this was an argument used when thinking about original sin*. It's a part of me, something I didn't do, and yet I am blamed for it?
That mindset couldn't be correct, I knew. Then why was I upset over this response?
After pondering the response for a couple of days, I realized why.
Every time I heard something like this, it focused only on the brokenness surrounding ADHD, depression, and anxiety. It pointed out the differences between these specific defects from the rest of the world. It looked at people who had something different from them and labeled those different people broken.
One of my favorite styles of art is kintsugi. According to theconversation.com,
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. If a bowl is broken, rather than discarding the pieces, the fragments are put back together with a glue-like tree sap and the cracks are adorned with gold. There are no attempts to hide the damage, instead, it is highlighted.
Every human is broken.
Every human is not the way we were supposed to be.
There is no human on Earth who can claim to be perfect or the way God created us.
Yes, we are all broken. But through Jesus, God places the broken shards of our hearts together, highlighting some of the brokenness, but in the end, creating something even more beautiful than before.
