In all honesty, one of my favorite takeaways from this book was the validation it provides a ton of people with. Every day people are faced with harassment, cruelty, and judgement for things that are out of their control, such as their body weight, their mental health, their sexual preferences, their addictions, their anxieties, their overall strength, etc. And for a lot of these, you hear people say “It’s all in your control,” or “That doesn’t exist in nature,” or any number of ignorant things. This book puts a lot of those things to bed.
As someone who has struggled with a good number of the conditions described in this book, it gives me a great sense of comfort knowing that there are solutions and connections being made. It’s nice to know that my mental health issues aren’t just some strange complication of being an *intelligent being* to aid in a forever growing existential crisis. I’ve literally had malignant melanoma more than once and I hate talking about cancer because it’s so real to me, and yet this book gave me unique angles on my exact experiences that were previously never mentioned to me- and honestly I don’t know why they weren’t.
I understand that this doesn’t apply to everything; I’m not going to excuse bullying just because some primates do it somewhere. But this knowledge provides an opportunity for improvement. Even if knowing that these conditions exist in a higher quantity complicates the dataset, it’s still more data, and when has that ever been a bad thing for science?
