To be honest, I view them as kind of… gifted.
You ask a neurotypical what would make for a good day and they’ll answer with fanciful things like going out on a hike with friends, or sitting down with a movie and having their favorite meal, or winning the lottery and getting a smoking hot date while they’re out cashing in their rewards. If you ask me the same question, my immediate answer would be “not contemplating suicide for a full 24 hours.”
Neurotypicals might wake up and moan about Monday, knowing they’re going to have to go back to work and that they’re going to have a bad day because of it. People like me might wake up, immediately know that it’s going to be a bad mental health day, and won’t have the energy to get out of bed unless there’s something compelling them to do so. If we have to get up and go to work that day, we spend our day in a miserable haze in which you feel like your brain is made out of cold, month-old pea soup that’s starting to develop some cloudy layers at the bottom. Imagine the flu with no physical symptoms - just generally feeling like crap. Some of us even get bodily aches from our own terrible mental states. Amazing how that works.
You ask a neurotypical to make plans and they’ll consult their schedule first. A mentally ill person will most likely wonder whether or not that day will be a good mental health day, whether or not there are any foreseeable events the day before that could negatively affect them. Mix that with a tight work schedule and you’ll probably get a more polite, socially acceptable way of saying “no, I’m not sure I’ll be sane enough to do that,” because if there’s anything someone with a mental illness learns, it’s that honesty about our conditions are not socially acceptable.
The best example is Ajas Mohamed’s answer. We work hard to feel okay. To a neurotypical, feeling okay isn’t good enough. You have to be good, or else you’re somehow lacking. To me, feeling good is a triumph. Feeling good is a fleeting thing that might last an hour or two at a time, maybe come around once or twice a week if I’m lucky. If I have a day in which I don’t have a minor suicidal episode, then that’s a day I can call good. And if I do something interesting that day? Amazing! Hope I won’t be too burnt out by the end, though, because then I won’t have the energy to shove away horrible thoughts before I fall asleep. I’ve had wonderful days filled with joy, only to come home and stare at the dark ceiling because I need to distract myself from what my mind comes up with.
To be honest, people without mental illnesses can seem a bit sheltered. Most of them probably don’t know what it’s like to be a slave to your own cruel, abnormal, malfunctioning mind. Once you go through that, you just don’t quite look at the world the same way.
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