My folks were insane. I don't mean like hey man, those wacky parents of mine. I mean they were literally not in touch with reality. My father had an "episode" his freshman year in college, and both my mother and father were stormy and pretty psychologically toxic in general, but after my youngest sister's death, over time my mother lost touch with reality and suffered from persecution dilemmas, which went from thinking the government was spying on her to the belief that we, the rest of the family, were poisoning her. "I know what you're doing," she'd say darkly. My father was always childish and unreasonable and an Aspergery engineer, but a few years after Mom went 'round the twist, Dad went from being a secret agnostic posing as an enthusiastic church-goer to placate my mother to believing that he was a modern-day religious authority along the lines of St. Paul. People on city buses were afraid of my father and changed seats if he sat down next to them.
I hasten to add that none of this involves mood disorders. The world is -- um, intense -- and most of the people I know in real life have struggled with anxiety and depression. What I'm eager to head off is a mental state incongruent with some version of reality in which a reasonable number of people outside myself accept. How many? Well, for relgious Jews you need ten people to make a minyan and a jury of peers is a dozen people, so how about eleven? I need to keep my mind mostly-aligned with the minds of eleven people at a minimum.
My middle sister, Eileen, once gloomily pronounced, during a rare long-distance phone conversation, "You know, we're both going to end up crazy too." And I said no we weren't. And Eileen said, well look at Mom and Dad. And I said, ah, but we can make different choices. Because they didn't end up as complete loons all at once. And probaly it was like falling down and slowly slipping down a gradual slope over a gritty gravelly surface, but my parents could have grabbed a tree branch, a boulder, each other. And instead, they kept up a steady daily regiment of poor mental health hygiene.
Since I lived right there and I am an abservant person, I saw What Not To Do Unless You Want People On The Bus To Move Away From You. So I have started this blog series in which I give a few of how I've managed to remember what my name is and what your name is and am aware that I am not important enough for the government to spy on me and not rich enough for relatives to poison me to gain my assets and I have not been sent by God to tell others how to live.
Rule #1: I Do Not Cold-Brew Myself in Unhappy Thoughts and Feelings
It was true of my mother and father that they both had such personal histories of pain that if they couldn't find something awful in their current existence to focus their thoughts on, they had merely to flip back a page or two in their mental scrapbooks and they'd find somethg soul-destroying where they could settle in until they were cuckoo.
When I am outraged or furious, I go to the kitchen and put the digital timer on for two minutes and as the numbers click down, I cool my overheated emotions so that my former 8.5 or 9 is now a 6. Okay, 6.5. Or 7. But cool enough that I can grab my keys and go out and walk off the rest during an unecessary run to the convenience store.
For something bigger, like hopelessness or grief, I give myself half a day. I keep doing what I need to do, but in a slower and more distracted way, and I explore just how bad the pain is and how cruel Life is and all the mistakes I've made to bring myself to this Slough of Despair. And then I look at the clock and at a defined time on the clock, I stop the mental gerbil wheel. I know I will still feel the emotions from time to time, but the crazy-making repetitive reconsiderations of what can't be altered half to stop. I have to go on from where I am and I need what's left of my poor mind to make life work. Yesterday I was very sad about things I can't control and I shut that off at 6:45 pm on the dot after about five hours of steady misery. Today I am daunted by All The Things I Must Do and I'm gonna give that a few minutes. Let's say eleven. And then that's enough of that because I've seen what happens, over time, to people who don't stut of the mental whirling which makes the brain trying to solve for an algebraic answer they'll never get because they don't have eough data to plug into their problem-solving mechanism.
Standard Blog Post Disclaimer: If you feel that my viewpoint is askew, that my facts are doubtful, and/or that I don't know enough to be writing about whatever my chosen topic is, then that's what you think It is not necessary to tell me that, or imply it in comments. I'm not a spokesperson, a jornalist, a public official, or an influencer. Even if I'm off the mark, I doubt that anything too terrible is going to happen.
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