Nine Kinds of Crazy

So, don't take this post to heart and assume that I'm going to go plunging over the balcony or anything. I'm in good hands, and so on and so forth.

But I have just had a real crazy person wakeup call. I have been planning a trip to a writer's workshop in mid-February for months now. And the workshop is taking place now, and I'm not there.

I could curse myself, and claim idiocy, and throw myself on the mercy of the court, but fuck it. This is the product of a brain gone wrong. I have been having more and more of these kinds of incidents over the past two or three years, and I need to bring this up the next time I talk to the doctor, which will be in a week or so.

This is a lovely capper to my recent bout of worry concerning my mental health. Right now I'm trying to get a mix of two anti-depressants and an anti-psychotic right, and the result is that I am perpetually feeling as if I'm on speed. I'm tapping my teeth, pushing at them with my tongue to the point where my whole mouth feels weird.

But I am sleeping, and if I give myself a half pill over the prescription of the anti-psychotic, I sleep eight sound hours, just like a real boy. It actually kind of weirds me out -- I'm used to a few hours of vivid dreaming interspersed with desperate writhing.

Holy smokes, though. One of the doctors I spoke to described me as 'perfectly complex,' and that ain't the half of it.

Let's see. Every grandparent. That's four. And both parents were drunks, and one was a writer and the other an artist. So that counts for at least one more there, I reckon.

Fetal alcohol syndrome. Brain damage from a fever in infancy. And, for that matter, who are we trying to kid here, more than likely some kind of head trauma. I have been shown the stars more than once.

Post-traumatic stress disorder. When I mentioned to my dad that this was one diagnosis, he responded, "Well, I'm not surprised." And a deep lack of surprise was conveyed by his tone. Entirely too deep for my tastes -- he should have done an interpretive dance explaining how helpless we all are in the face of our upbringings.

So let's call it a nice round nine kinds of crazy.

I have spent my entire life trying and failing to act normal. It's as if I've been walking around saying, "I can walk it off, I can walk it off," when the problem is a missing foot.

But it isn't as if my life is over and I'm an incapable idiot. I'm just a periodic idiot, and most of the time I cover for it pretty well. But there is a real deficit here, one that's larger than I've let myself see before.

I'm not going to freak out over this. But it's close. This is a hard one to face. But in the end, it's a detail. It's not the important part.

Damnit.