Skip to main content

How do you know that you are sane?








I expect what I mean is: what is it that stops people from seriously 
doubting that they are anything other than "normal".

People are constantly shrieking things like "AGgghh! You're driving me Mad!" "Hell! Now I'm losing my mind!" "I'm going insane!" They might even legitimately feel that they are - the levels of stress they've gone through are overwhelming their thought-process. It's madness-for-a-moment.

They accept that the human condition is to do mad things, and behave in mad ways, but that this doesn't define a person as "mad". So then, how does one know when one has just enough eccentricities? phobias? aberrations? How many of the afore-mentioned are the tip-over point into lunacy? How do we - you - me know  what the acceptable "norm" is?

Lest this sound for a moment disingeuous - it's prompted by genuine feelings: I'd thought I was starting to get though the fog and, well, horror of the last few years.  I've finally been forced to recognise, without ducking, that I haven't.

Yet, I've been marking the last two years by "steps".

Step 1. Committing to coming back to work
Step 2. Being able to take on more: - more research, more writing, more Social Media.
Step 3. Letting my protective guise down a little - wearing jeans & t.shirts again every once in a while.
Step 4. Holding on to my opinion in the face of (any) criticism

...you get the drift. It pleased me privately to count up these achievements.  Every once in a while I'd share one on Twitter a propos something else.

But it seems that, all the while these bits of things were happening, nothing had changed underneath.  Deep in the unknown mind of this Cireena, the well-worn treads of 'unstable' Cireena were scored indelibly.

How the hell, after years of living with a mental illness, could I not recognise that I was heading toward a point where red lights should have been flashing, bells shrilling,  - or at the very least an old man with a hand-held plaque with DANGER on it should have alerted me. How do you know, faccrissake, when you are an acceptable part of the human condition and when you aren't?

In the end, last Friday, it wasn't I who brought up the question of my mental health.  It came from within family.

And I almost felt a sense of relief.

It actually is really simple. I am broken more thoroughly than I had allowed myself to admit
. I'm facing two choices: either -

1. I'm in a state of mental collapse. I don't have the strength left any more to fight through that. 

2. I'm in the early stages of Alzheimers. There is nothing I can do to fight through that.

Whatever - this is a whole new version of Reality to me.

 It's rather scarey.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Don't Quote Me.......Failing our Children: Doesn't it Enrage You?

I subtitled a post "Don't quote me" a while back because I wanted to make it clear that what I was expressing was my own - vehement - opinion/idea which was not representative of any group or affiliation. Feel the need to to add this to the same category.     One afternoon, in 2016, I saw on my Youtube page that there was a televised debate between two American contenders for the presidency. Needing a break from the piece I was writing, and with the realisation that my outlook was becoming rather insular as I struggled to understand the Homeland I'd recently settled in, I poised my mouse and clicked. I can still remember the shock of that introduction to contemporary America; in fact I was in a state of shock for the rest of the afternoon. The spectacle of two grown - in fact elderly - people shouting, yelling, talking over each other, using personal abuse (and, dear gods, one actually stalking the other around the podium!) horrified me.  I was involved in a form of ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Victorian Women. Period.

  The first time I ever acted in an historical play we were coached in the ways of walking as women of yesteryear did. Which didn’t seem at all strange to me at the time: at convent boarding schools we had been taught to walk the nunly walk: which turned out to be exactly the same method. But sanctified. I didn’t really understand why women used to walk differently then, and neither did my mother; who told me that her mother had also instructed her that a woman’s footprints should always be in a straight line: — one foot directly in front the other, as we’d been taught on both stage and in convents.  Yet it was only about 6 months ago that I suddenly had a lightbulb moment: women walked in that way because they menstruated! This thought didn’t arrive out of the blue; I had, by then, been researching the history of menstruation for months. With the help of the Brighton Museum I’d been able to start my research back in the Palaeolithic. Since then, I had become aware that apart ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Our house was a very, very, very nice house.....

It started out as a late Victorian – or perhaps early Edwardian – family home. It steadily declined until such time as, with much fanfare, it had been stripped inside and turned into flats. The 'fanfare' was not not a figure of speech: there really was a fuss made – with coverage in the media which shows the lovely old place being officiated over by  local MP. Caroline Lucas. Our building was presented as part of an initiative to assimilate those on Benefits into the local community. The stigma of being banished to the further reaches of town to live in seething communities  in brick blocks would not attach to the lucky occupants of this building.  Its sympathetic conversion ( one or two original ceiling roses and some restrained ceiling mouldings have been left in place), while incorporating modern interior architecture, blends well to showcase apartments that would be the envy of many of those chasing accommodation in the private sector all over Brighton and Hov...
Post a Comment
Read more