What Is Actually Happening to You
On Labels, Bats, Buildings and Kombucha at a Birthday Party
I want to start with something uncomfortable.
Four separate conversations happened in the same month. One about a psychiatric diagnosis that changed how someone moved through the world. One about a bat researcher in South Asia who spent three years trying to name something that had no name yet.
One about why a particular corridor in a hospital in Chandigarh made patients feel worse before they even met a doctor. And one about kombucha at a birthday party, where a colleague said, half-joking, that it tasted like something her grandmother would prescribe.
At first these looked like four separate threads. Then I kept sitting with them. And I started to see that they are asking the same question from four different angles.
The question is: How much of what you experience is actually coming from the world, and how much of it is coming from the story you have been handed about the world?
That is what this is about. All four stories, one question.
Part One: The Label You Were Given
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association voted.
They took out their ballots and they voted homosexuality out of the DSM. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The bible of psychiatric classification. Something that had been a diagnosable condition on Monday was, by Friday, no longer a condition at all.
Think about that for a second. Not new research. Not a scientific breakthrough. A vote.
I am not saying the outcome was wrong. The outcome was correct. But the process reveals something that we rarely say out loud: psychiatric categories are not discovered. They are constructed. And once constructed, they do not just sit passively in a manual. They go out into the world and start changing the people they were meant to describe.
The philosopher Ian Hacking called this the looping effect. When you label a kind of person, that kind of person begins to behave differently in response to the label. The label and the behaviour start shaping each other in a loop that neither side fully controls.
Here is a version of this you may have seen closer to home.
A child gets told, at age nine, that they have attention deficit disorder. That label enters the room before the child does. Teachers interpret their boredom as a symptom. Parents interpret their daydreaming as a diagnostic signal.
The child, being perceptive the way children are, starts to interpret their own experience through the lens of the label. They stop wondering why they find this particular class boring and start wondering whether it is their condition acting up.
This is not a conspiracy. Nobody is being malicious. It is just what labels do when they are applied to living people rather than inanimate objects.
Me: Do you think you would have struggled the same way without the diagnosis?
Friend: I honestly do not know. The diagnosis explained a lot. But it also made certain things feel more fixed than they probably were.
That conversation sat with me for weeks. Because it names the real problem. The diagnosis was not wrong. But it was not the whole story either. And once it became the main story, other stories became harder to tell.
The 1990s epidemic of Multiple Personality Disorder is a cleaner example. In 1980, there were fewer than 200 documented cases in the entire psychiatric literature. By 1990, there were thousands. What happened?
A few high-profile cases. A bestselling book. A film. And suddenly clinicians were finding it everywhere because they knew to look for it. And patients, who were often deeply distressed people genuinely seeking explanation, found a framework that organised their experience. The framework and the experience shaped each other.
This does not mean the people were faking. It means that human beings are story-seeking animals. Give us a coherent story about our suffering and we will inhabit it. That is not weakness. That is how minds work.
The crisis in psychiatry right now is not that psychiatrists are bad doctors. Most are not. The crisis is that biology became the only legitimate language for suffering, and that language cannot say certain things.
It cannot say: your anxiety is a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. It cannot say: the problem is not your neurotransmitters but your neighbourhood, your relationship, your workplace, the gap between who you are and who you are being asked to be.
Biology as a framework produces biological interventions. Which are sometimes right and sometimes insufficient and almost always incomplete.
We are treating the soul through a biological blindfold. And we inherited that blindfold in the 1990s and never fully took it off.
Institutional progress almost always stalls at the threshold of cultural reality. Because institutions run on consensus, and consensus is slow, and the things that most need changing are usually the things the consensus was built to protect.
The label is not your enemy. But it is not your autobiography either.
Part Two: The Bat You Cannot Name
Somewhere in South Asia, there is a bat that has not been described yet.
I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean there are bat species in South Asia that science has not formally characterised. They exist. They have been flying around for millions of years. But because no researcher has sat with a specimen long enough to write a species description, they do not officially exist in the system.
The researcher has spent years on this. Not on the charismatic megafauna, not on tigers or elephants or the animals that fundraisers photograph. On bats. Small, fast, poorly documented, ecologically critical bats.
And the thing that strikes me about this work is not the bats themselves. It is what the work reveals about how we think about conservation.
We talk about protecting ecosystems as though we understand them. We mostly do not. We have basic data on where many species live. We often lack reliable methods to identify them even when they are in front of us. And we are making life-or-death decisions about habitat, about which land to protect and which to release for development, based on this incomplete picture.
This is not a criticism of conservationists. It is a description of an epistemic situation. We are running a race against climate-driven extinction, and we are doing it partially blind, and most of the public conversation about conservation pretends otherwise because uncertainty is a hard thing to fundraise around.
Here is a conversation I imagine happens more than it is documented:
Researcher: We cannot recommend protected status without more data.
Policymaker: We cannot wait for more data. The forest goes in eighteen months.
Researcher: Then we are making a decision without adequate evidence.
Policymaker: We are always making decisions without adequate evidence. That is just called governing.
Both of them are right. And both of them are correct to be frustrated.
The reason I put this alongside the psychiatry story is that the same structure is operating. In psychiatry, we built categories before we fully understood what we were categorising, and the categories then shaped the phenomenon. In conservation, we are trying to protect things we have not yet fully described, and the gaps in our description are shaping which things get protected.
The bat that has no name has no advocate in the policy room. Not because nobody cares. Because the system of care runs on classification, and classification requires the thing to be named first.
Discovering what we barely understand is not a lesser form of science. It is often the most urgent form. Taxonomy, the work of naming and describing species, is unglamorous. It does not win prizes. It does not trend. But without it, the protection apparatus has nothing to attach to.
We spend enormous resources on conservation management. We spend very little on knowing what we are managing. That is a structural problem that looks like a resource problem but is actually a priority problem.
Part Three: The Building That Was Making You Feel Worse
I want to tell you about a corridor.
It is in a hospital. Long, fluorescent-lit, slightly narrower than it should be given the foot traffic it sees. The ceiling is low. The walls are a particular shade of cream that reads, to the human nervous system, as institutionally grey. You walk through it on your way to a consultation room, and by the time you arrive, something in you has already contracted.
The architects did not design this corridor to make patients anxious. They designed it to move people efficiently between spaces. Efficiency and wellbeing are not the same goal. When you optimise for one, you often actively work against the other.
Every space you walk into has been making decisions about how you feel. The ceiling height, the warmth of the light, the way a corridor creates anticipation before a room opens up. None of this is accidental and almost none of it is consciously noticed.
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A high ceiling does not just look different from a low one. It activates different cognitive states. Research on this goes back to the 1990s, and it is not complicated: high ceilings correlate with abstract, expansive thinking. Low ceilings correlate with detail-focus, sometimes productive, sometimes anxious. A cathedral does not make you feel small by accident. It was built to make you feel small. That smallness was the theological point.
Temples feel calm for overlapping reasons. The proportions are often deliberately scaled to create a sense of containment without compression. Natural light, when it exists, is diffused. The materials, stone, wood, terracotta, have acoustic properties that soften sound rather than bounce it. And there is the variable of approach: most temples require some form of transition before you enter the primary space. A courtyard, a step, a threshold. That transition is doing psychological work. It says: the rules here are different.
Architect friend: You know the Chandigarh Assembly Hall does something very specific. Corbusier put a skylight directly above the main chamber. Natural light falls on the people making decisions. It was not decorative.
Me: He wanted the legislators to feel observed.
Architect friend: He wanted them to feel they were working under something larger than themselves. Whether it worked is a different question.
Whether it worked is always a different question. That is the honest version of architecture. The intention is legible. The outcome depends on the people who inhabit the space, what they bring with them, what they have been told the space means.
This connects back to the label problem. A space means what we are told it means, and also what our nervous system independently registers. These two things are not always the same. You can tell someone a particular room is safe and their body will still read the low ceiling and the harsh light as threat. The body has its own classification system and it does not care about the sign on the door.
The reason this matters practically is that we build a lot of spaces where people are already under pressure. Hospitals. Schools. Offices. And we rarely ask whether the space is making the thing that happens inside it harder or easier. We ask whether the space is functional. We ask whether it is efficient. We almost never ask whether it is kind.
Kindness in architecture is not softness. It is precision. It is knowing that a corridor which gives someone twenty extra seconds of natural light before a difficult conversation changes the quality of that conversation. It is knowing that the temperature of a light source in a meeting room affects whether people feel alert or depleted. These are not aesthetic preferences. They are physiological facts that get designed away because they do not appear on a cost sheet.
Part Four: Kombucha at the Birthday Party
Now. The one that seems like it does not belong.
There is a birthday party at an office. Someone has brought kombucha. Not the usual cold drinks, not the cake-and-chips arrangement that most office celebrations run on. Actual live-culture fermented tea in a brown glass bottle with a handwritten label. People are standing around it with the mild suspicion that modern Indians reserve for things their grandmothers would recognise but their nutritionists have only recently validated.
Colleague: It tastes like something went wrong.
Someone else: It is supposed to taste like that. It is alive.
Colleague: That is not a selling point.
I find this conversation interesting. Because the discomfort is not really about the taste. It is about the category. Kombucha sits in an uncomfortable position in the modern food taxonomy. It is health food that looks artisanal. It is fermented, which sounds vaguely medical, but it is also sweet and flavoured, which sounds like a soft drink. It requires explanation in a way that Pepsi does not. And things that require explanation at a birthday party have already lost the room.
But here is what is actually in the bottle.
A SCOBY, which stands for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast, is a living mat of organisms that transform sweet tea through fermentation. The organisms consume the sugar. They produce organic acids, small amounts of alcohol, and carbon dioxide.
What you end up with after a week or two is a liquid that is markedly lower in sugar than where it started, contains various acids that have been linked to gut health, and has a flavour profile that shifts based on temperature, tea variety, fermentation length, and whatever fruit or herb you add in the second fermentation.
Rupini Devi, who has spent considerable time on the nutritional side of this, would put it more precisely: the benefit is not in any single compound. It is in the consistency of a live fermented food as part of a diet that otherwise lacks them.
Urban Indian diets have largely lost fermented foods. Idli and dosa still exist, but most of the packaged versions use batter that was never actually fermented properly. Pickles are often pasteurised. The gut microbiome that Indians maintained for generations on naturally fermented staples is being maintained on very little in many urban households.
The gut is not a passive receiver of nutrition. It is a system that expects to be populated with specific organisms and becomes dysregulated when it is not. Fermented foods are how traditional diets maintained that population without knowing that is what they were doing.
So why kombucha at a birthday party? And why at the office?
Not because it is trendy. Because it is a reasonable replacement for something that should not have disappeared in the first place. The birthday party is a social moment. It is where norms get set. When someone brings kombucha to a birthday party and people try it and do not die and actually feel fine an hour later, that is information. The body updates its classification.
The office is where you spend eight to ten hours a day making decisions that deplete your prefrontal cortex. What you put in your body during that time is not a wellness preference. It is a performance input.
The difference between a person who spends that stretch on three cups of coffee and no food and a person who eats something that includes a fermented component is not ideological. It is metabolic. The blood sugar management is different. The gut signalling is different. The afternoon crash is different.
The SCOBY health matters more than most people realise when they start brewing. A weak or contaminated SCOBY produces something that tastes wrong and provides none of the benefits. A healthy SCOBY, fed regularly, kept at the right temperature, not disturbed mid-fermentation, produces something consistent.
Consistency is the whole point. A single serving of kombucha does nothing measurable. A regular habit changes the composition of the gut over months. This is not magic. It is microbiology operating at the pace microbiology operates.
The hands-on brewing question is worth addressing directly. Why would you make it yourself when you can buy it? For the same reason you would grow a plant rather than buy a bouquet. One of them teaches you something about how the system works. Once you understand what a healthy ferment looks and smells and tastes like at each stage, you stop being at the mercy of labels. You can read the thing directly.
That is the through-line. Everything in this article is about learning to read things directly rather than through the categories you inherited.
What These Four Have in Common
The psychiatric label that reshapes the person it was meant to describe.
The bat that cannot be protected because it has not been named.
The corridor that makes patients sicker before the doctor says a word.
The kombucha that gets laughed at because it does not fit the birthday party script.
All four of these are situations where the framework we have for understanding something is actively interfering with our ability to see the thing itself.
In psychiatry, the biological framework obscures the relational and contextual. In conservation, the documentation framework lags behind the ecological reality. In architecture, the efficiency framework overrides the physiological. In nutrition, the marketing framework has replaced the traditional knowledge that the body actually needs.
None of these frameworks are villains. They are useful within their limits. The problem is that every framework eventually starts defending its own limits as though they were features. The DSM stopped being a working document and became an authority.
Conservation stopped being a descriptive project and became a management project before the description was complete. Architecture stopped being a conversation with the human body and became a conversation with the budget. Nutrition became a marketing category.
When the map becomes more important than the territory, the territory starts to suffer. And the territory in all four cases is a human being, or a bat, or an ecosystem, or a gut. Something alive and responsive that the framework was supposed to serve.
The answer is not to throw out the frameworks. You need categories. You need names. You need budgets and manuals and fermentation schedules. The answer is to hold them with less reverence. To keep the part of your mind that looks at the territory directly, that asks what is actually happening here before it asks what category this belongs to.
That capacity, to see clearly before classifying, is what I call the breath hacker lens. Not because breathing is metaphorical. Because the first thing stress does is change your breathing pattern, and the first thing clarity requires is that you slow down enough to notice what you are actually looking at.
The label is a starting point. The bat needs a name but it existed before the name. The building is telling you something your mind has not processed yet. The kombucha is doing work that the category cool-wellness-drink does not fully explain.
In every case, the thing is ahead of the story we have about it.
Four lectures, one argument: the categories we use to understand our experience are not neutral containers. They shape the experience itself. They determine what gets protected and what gets ignored. They make buildings kind or cruel without anyone deciding to be cruel. They determine whether a birthday drink is a conversation starter or a punchline.
The crisis in psychiatry is real, but it is not unique to psychiatry. Every field that works with living systems faces the same problem: our frameworks freeze, but the systems they describe keep moving. When the gap between the two gets wide enough, things start to go wrong in ways that look like individual failures but are actually structural ones.
The bat researcher who spends three years naming something that had no name is not doing lesser science. The architect who asks whether a corridor is kind is not being impractical. The person who brings kombucha to a birthday party instead of another bottle of something that makes everyone feel worse by 9 PM is not being difficult.
They are all doing the same thing. They are insisting on seeing the territory before they reach for the map.
That is the only move that actually helps.
The label is not your enemy. The loop is. When the story about what you are becomes more powerful than what you actually are, the story needs to be questioned. Not destroyed. Questioned. There is a difference.
Question the diagnosis, not to dismiss it, but to find what it cannot say about you. Name the bat, because unnamed things cannot be protected. Design the corridor with a window, because the body keeps score whether or not the budget does. Brew the kombucha yourself at least once, because understanding how something works from the inside changes your relationship to it permanently.
Good things take time. And the things most worth understanding are the ones that resist being quickly categorised.
Come curious. Leave with something alive.
