VIRB

I've often heard it said that if you can ask yourself if you're crazy, it means you're not. Crazy people don't ask questions like that, they're too busy behaving crazily. I don't necessarily know if I agree with that, as I've wondered that about myself since I've been around 18 years old.

When I was younger, I didn't think much about it. I was filled with the sort of ego that teenagers have by default. I spent my time with the people I chose to surround myself with. I just assumed everyone was stupid but me and a few other very specific people. I never thought I over analyzed anything as I sat in my bedroom some nights contemplating my invitation to go to a party verses the definition of fun and how much actual fun was there was too be had in the world, as if it was an equation.

At the time, I was taking a lot of LSD and other hallucinogens. I would have huge revelations about the world while I was high. Mostly, I came to believe at that age that the world was overblown, that the ideal American life was bullshit which was being marketed by companies which were seeking to get rich on people's gullibility. Try being a seventeen year old girl with those ideals in high school, and then try to imagine discussing these theories with other seventeen year old girls, perhaps over the latest edition of Sassy magazine.

When I entered college at age 18, I started having strange occurrences where I would hear, for brief periods, everything I was thinking shouted through my head angrily; any random thought whatsoever. For example, 'I SHOULD GRAB SOME COFFEE BEFORE I GO TO CLASS' or maybe 'I THINK I'LL LISTEN TO THE SMITHS ON THE BUS LATER.' I worried about this a little, but mostly tried to dismiss it and control it. Eventually, it did go away. But I began to wonder at about that time, if perhaps I was not quite right.

I got married for the first time when I was very young, at about 19. My grandmother had just died, my parents had divorced and I had just graduated. My mother was selling our home, and I felt an enormous loss of stability. I figured I'd been with my boyfriend for four years; the most logical next step was marriage. I also figured, what the hell, I can always get divorced. About four months after I married him, I split.

I moved in with a friend and never looked back. I never had a residence for more than about three months. I took a job at a head shop and dropped out of school. I spent the next two years ingesting as many drugs as I could possibly get my hands on, preferably heroin. I became a thief to support my habit. I never harbored any guilt for my actions whatsoever. I was excellent at justifying my behavior. For example, Nordstrom is taking advantage of people by selling insanely overpriced merchandise mostly on credit cards and then charging them insane interest to pay those items off in the meantime. Nordstrom deserved what they got. I was like a Robin Hood of sorts.

I grew tired though. My boyfriend, although unbelievably gorgeous was erratic and mean, he was possessive while at the same time expected me to let him run around with whoever he wanted. I was sleeping with him even though I knew he had HIV. I imagined I was desperately in love with him. Maybe I wasn't even imagining it. He was utterly my life. Every morning I would awake and the first thing I would do if he wasn't in bed next to me was seek him. Usually if he was out of bed, I would find him in the bathroom sitting on the toilet with a bong in his hand. He'd hold out his arms and I would sit facing him on his lap and he would speak to me like a child, telling stories of how he fell in love with me at first site; stories I never tired of. There was nothing greater, nothing softer, and nothing which made me feel more okay than everything he was unless he was being abusive. Sometimes I don't know if it was him I was in love with or the words, the beauty and the easy score.

Eventually though, I had to get a restraining order. He did all sorts of crazy shit, like follow me around town hiding in doorways and crashing his car into mine when he found out I was with someone else. He confronted me at a girlfriend's house and when I wouldn't leave with him he rubbed leaves all in my face and hair and stuffed them into my clothes. I did a lot of crazy shit when I was with him too. Once I threw like six 22 ounce bottles of microbrew in the air while screaming at him at the top of my lungs in front of his parents house because I didn't think he was doing enough for me for my birthday. We were horrible for each other.

It broke my heart to want to be with someone so bad, yet to have people telling me that if I didn't leave I would lose my family and my job. So I found someone who I thought he would be terrified of to replace him with, and he was. He left me alone after that but three months later I was pregnant with my first son. Within three months of finding out I was pregnant the father was in jail. After they released him my mother announced to me that she had cancer. She would be dead within the year. Hopefully she would be able to see the birth of my baby.

We moved to the country and I had Ward. My mother died when he was three months old, about a month before I got married again. My husband told me curtly I had to hold it together. I had a baby who needed me. I spent a lot of time in his room, holding the blanket my mother had crocheted for him pressed to my face, concentrating on how each strand in the blanket had run through her fingers. Sometimes in the middle of the night the telephone would ring, and I would lay in my bed rigid, afraid that it was her calling from wherever she was. But it was always my stepfather, extremely drunk, wanting to talk for hours about how much he loved my mom.

I had a second baby four years later. During that time I had done everything I could to become the perfect mother. My tendency toward perfection and obsessive compulsiveness had peaked at its finest. My home was the most spotless, my children were the most well behaved, the most stylish and intelligent. The food I cooked was the most delicious. I took exceptional care of my home and everyone who belonged to me. I ran three miles every day and made sure my hair was gorgeous and my face flawless every time my husband got out of his truck after work every night.

I spend hours scanning the carpet for spots, eventually finding something which I would scrub clean immediately. I had a huge, white, vinyl kitchen and dining room floor which I mopped every day, including running a sponge around the baseboards to make sure there were no dirty edges or corners. I washed the glass every day because you know babies smudge those window right up. I swept the enormous deck, battled the laundry until there was none, searched for new recipes in the cookbook, clipped coupons as a sort of personal game to see what sort of record I could set with money saved and washed the Cherokee and cleaned the interior every time there was a single spot. I don't know if I ever allowed myself to think at all during those years. To think was to realize boredom, or sadness, or loneliness or all of the above.

Then one night while lying in bed, my mind began racing with thoughts about some money my husband owed an employee of his, and whether or not that employee was really earning his wage, and then my stomach tightened and I felt like I was going to throw up. I went and sat in the bathroom and, looking at the floor, I saw the tile swirling and changing like I remembered from the days when I took a lot of LSD. We had been out earlier, and I was convinced that one of the things I had picked up at the store had been laced with DMSO and LSD in a lethal dose. I couldn't breathe. I was convinced I was going to die. I woke up my husband and demanded that he take me to the emergency room. Everything in the room seemed ominous. Even the turning of the ceiling fan accelerated my panic. Instead he called my mother in law who came over with a sedative which they gave me and she rubbed my back and talked to me until I calmed down.

The next day, I spent the entire morning alternating between playing solitaire on the computer and rocking back and forth on the grass in the sun outside my house. I couldn't stop crying. My husband and mother in law spoke in hushed tones about me and made some calls and the next thing I knew I was filling out my first psychiatric evaluation form. I chuckled at questions like, 'Do you want to hurt yourself or others?' and 'Do you feel like everything needs to be perfect?' So started my relationship with anti depressants and anti anxiety medication. My therapist told me I had what was similar to post traumatic stress disorder.

I've spent a few years battling with the idea of medication. At first, I was okay with it. I felt that I would take anything that would help me not ever have to have a panic attack again. I was terrified and hurt that my brain had so deliberately betrayed me in such a manner. I was taking Celexa, and was alternating between having insurance or not, so I couldn't always afford it. Celexa, although the doctors say it isn't physically addictive, is extremely hard to come off of. So when I wouldn't have it I would get very emotionally unstable and also think I saw things out of the corner of my eye. I had a freak out in my doctor's office one day, crying and trying to explain to them that I couldn't afford my medication and they told me there was nothing they could do. They sent me a letter soon after saying they wouldn't see me anymore. I decided to go off medication completely.

It's strange, because I don't remember a whole lot of my life at that point. I know that I began drinking quite a bit. I drank a lot. I know that we were hanging out with some pretty unsavory people. I know I was ashamed at the behavior that I was exhibiting sometimes in front of my children. I know things soon became very out of control and there were instances of violence that at this time, I'm really not very prepared to write about. I know I'm no longer friends with those people and that I moved to Portland and went back on medication, which I went off of when I got pregnant with my twins, which I'm currently taking again.

These days I am aware of myself rising and falling. I catch myself trying to convince myself that being on medication for depression and anxiety is too much like Huxley's Brave New World. A part of me struggles to hold onto these cycles, to the colder, blacker side of myself. I feel like that part of me is the most powerful and, for me, it is definitely the most seductive and fun. Some days I feel as though I could conquer the world, as if I'm superhuman, supernatural, super beautiful, super everything. At these times I often do and say things which are shocking to others, rude to some. Some people seem to like me more for this behavior and others seem to dislike me for that very reason. Sometimes I can feel myself being inappropriate or even mean at these times and I rationalize it the same way I could rationalize stealing from Nordstrom. Or I simply return to the teenage ideal that everyone is stupid but me and a very few hand selected others.

But even the hand selected others aren't save if they don't behave in a manner that I find adequate. If they don't give me the proper amount of attention or disagree with an opinion I have or suggest that I'm somehow behaving in a way which is not sane, I seek to punish them. When people leave because of this I say whatever, I don't need people in my life that are that easy to shake anyway. I'm always going to behave badly in intervals, and if they're going to go, it's best they go before I get too emotionally invested.

Other days I fall. I hate myself. I become ashamed of my actions and my words. I feel that everything I do is not good enough or even embarrassingly bad, especially poetry. I'll spend days in depression thinking I haven't written anything worthwhile ever. I'll spend more days analyzing the worth of poetry in general and coming to the conclusion that everything I might have to say has been said before and about a thousand times more eloquently. I mourn the loss of people. I compulsively send emails. I become ugly to myself from within. I think life is hopeless and there is no such thing as love or understanding and people who do like me only do so because they have no idea who I actually am. I get paranoid that the world around me is moving too fast, growing too rapidly, spinning out of control. I get an impending sense of evil and doom.

Thankfully, there is a middle ground. With medication that middle ground comes more often. There is less rising and falling if I swallow a pill each morning. I am able to appreciate the things that I have and to believe that I will be able to work successfully toward the goals I've set for myself. I still alternate between self adoration and self loathing, I still check the chest in front of the couch to see that both ends are exactly the same distance from the couch. I still fold blankets with the four corners exactly one on top of the other. The screaming voice hasn't come back, although I sometimes worry that it might when I start classes full time at PSU this fall.

It's easy to get down on myself, to think that I'm not a good mother, a good friend or a good person. My own mother was an alcoholic and severely depressed. I know, though that I loved her with white hot intensity which still exists today. I think about her own compulsions, and how unhappy she was and think to myself well at least I'm doing something about it. At least I'm making an effort; at least I'm attending school. At least I'm not drinking a half case of Milwaukee's Best everyday and chasing it with four Contac at night. I guess that's something to feel pretty okay about. But I struggle through each day to make it enough.