Status Updates From Girl, Interrupted

This time I read the title of the painting “girl interrupted at her music”
Interrupted at her music: as my life had been. Interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?

“I’ve never been there” I said. Then I thought maybe I had been. I didn’t say anything, I’d learned not to discuss my doubts.

I was thinking of whether I could graduate from high school if for the second year in a row I failed biology. I was surprised to be failing it to because I loved it. I loved it the first year.

Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and classmates. I wasn’t convinced I was crazy though I feared I was. Someopel say that having a conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity but I’m not sure that’s true. I still think about it I’ll always have to think about it

“The disorder is more commonly diagnosed in women” note the construction of the sentence

The college business. My parents wanted me to go, I didn’t want to go and I didn’t go. I got what I wanted.

Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation despair and depression.

What would’ve been an appropriate level of intensity for my anger at feeling shut out of life?

A solution to what? I quote from the manual “this behavior my counteract feelings of numbness and depersonalization that arise during periods of extreme stress”

“Self mutilating behavior (wrist scratching or in my case thigh and stomach scratching)” I’ve skipped forward a bit. This is the one that caught me by surprise. Wrist scratching I thought I’d invented it. No body knew I was doing it.

“Instability of self imagine, interpersonal relationships and mood…uncertainty about… long term goals” isn’t this a good description of adolescence? Moody fickle faddish insecure: in short, impossible

It appears to be a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche. Though to quote my post Melvin psychiatrist: “it’s what they call people whose lifestyles bother them.”

“Uncertainty about several life issues such as self image, sexual orientation, long term goals or career choice, types of friends or lovers to have” I relish that last phrase. I still have that uncertainty. Is this the type or friend or lover I want to have.

It’s a fairly accurate picture of me at eighteen minus a few quirks. It’s accurate but it’s not profound . I’m tempted to try refuting it but then I would be open to further charges of defensiveness and resistance.

The brain talks to itself and by talking to itself it changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not entirely false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.

If I who was previously revolting am now this far from my crazy self, how much further are you who were never revolting, and how much deeper your revulsion?

I stopped telling people there was no advantage to it. The longer I didn’t say anything about it the farther away it got until the me who had been in the hospital was a tiny blur and the me who didn’t talk about it was big and strong busy.

Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person. Is kept inside or snatched out to prove something about the family’s mental health.

For many of us the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison’ though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. The hospital shielded us from all sorts of things.

Which is worse, under load or overload? Luckily I’ve never had to choose. One or the other would assert itself, rush or dribble through me and pass on. To where? Back into my cells to lurk like a virus waiting for the next opportunity? To wait for the circumstance that would provoke its reappearance?