I spend most of my days in slippers, scuffling across the broken tile in my apartment speaking in soliloquy. I don’t really talk about anything interesting and I bore myself as a companion, in fact, most of the time I just repeat what I need to do or complain. I spend a lot of time rehearsing things I want to say to other people, or rather, I spend a lot of time having arguments with others by myself. “No, like I said, you’ve done too many things to make me feel bad and there’s no going back now! I don’t want to have sex because I’ve given up, it’s pointless, you could get more enjoyment from your hand. Oh I’m sooorry I’m not twenty-three and I don’t like to have sex in public places that smell like pee and hepatitis.”
My dog, thinking I’m talking to him, often stops and sits in front of me waiting for a word that he knows so he can follow a command. When I realize that he can hear me speaking too, I feel like an idiot. I can’t figure out why I do it since I never feel resolved after. Instead, it pisses me off more, I become angry because the other person didn’t respond. “No use in talking to her or him anyways they clearly never have anything to fucking say.” Though I never actually gave them a chance since they weren’t physically present during the conversation. After, I realize that I’m angry at a person for not participating in a discussion where they weren’t present, and the fear that I’m going to become schizophrenic sets in. Then I start to worry that I’m hearing voices and I listen for them and pray that I don’t hear anything. So far I haven’t.
In a psychology class in high school I learned that a lot of mental “disorders” are genetic. Shitfuckdamn. My uncle was/is schizophrenic. He was fairly normal until I reached junior high (as normal as someone related to me could possibly be) and then one day, BAM! He was bananas. I felt bad for him both of the times he had to go to the crazy house. The second time I even called my grandmothers house to warn him that the people were coming with a straight jacket. I was punk rock. I was anti-establishment. I was worried they might shock therapy him to death. I didn’t find an institution fuckcunt to be necessary even if he was parading around the house with a loaded shot-gun in his underwear. Somehow at the time, “loaded shot-gun” was like “christmas tree”, the idea seemed silly but non-threatening. He seemed fine after he’d been given a mix of seretonin uptake inhibitors and a few months at Benchmark Mental Hospital. After he didn’t threaten suicide anymore, and he had less freak outs, though from time to time he would occasionally still call me and demand I hack into his girlfriends email address or to tell me that “LIFE IS FUCKING BULLSHIT”. Ballscunt. I didn’t know how to hack things, so I’d say I couldn’t and that would get him going and he’d scream hysterically while I slowly lowered the receiver thinking, “oh that uncle is really somethin'”. Being related to a schizophrenic was kind of exciting though because I was young and didn’t understand it, like finding out one is related to a unicorn.
It seems a little less novel when you catch yourself having tea for two, for one, in a dimly lit living room due to some kind of agoraphobia. Sometimes I think really horrible things. I think, “it’s really not so difficult to pick up a knife and stab someone repeatedly. I try to imagine what it would feel like. Like stabbing a steak? Shutter. What stops me or anyone from doing it, is it because at my core it’s morally wrong or because I don’t want to live in a cement cell with someone named Laquita for twenty-five-to-life? Fagwhoreslut. The motion is easy. And then I get nervous that I’m thinking about it and avoid knives for the rest of the day. But what about possession? How could I stop myself from stabbing someone if I were possessed by say, a demon?
“there is a wide variety of possible symptoms of demon possession, such as a physical impairment that cannot be attributed to an actual physiological problem, a personality change such as depression or aggression, supernatural strength, immodesty, antisocial behavior, and perhaps the ability to share information that one has no natural way of knowing”.
It’s clearly more common than one thinks. My boyfriend says I watched too many scary movies as a kid, he says I just have an artistic imagination when I develop random fears-my dog’s head popping off in the elevator, for example. He might be right or it might be in my blood. More likely, it’s an anxiety disorder with a touch of fear OCD.
My mother was on Zoloft for manic-depressive something or other when I was a kid. In high school, she had her girl guts removed to try to even-out her moods to save her marriage. I read once that estrogen injections make lab rats homicidal, so if we’re anything like rats it was probably a logical move. My great-grandmother, a lovely woman with hair the color of strawberry lemonade, was institutionalized for a nervous breakdown in the 50’s, leaving my grandmother, then sixteen, to care for her four siblings. My grandmother grew up with a dependency on both whiskey and bad men. Addiction. Vafanculo. All cycled to my mother, my uncles, my aunt, and me. Genetics, or maybe the fact that for generations we’ve been recycling bad parenting. Every generation repeating the mistakes of the past. We’re so smart, we think, so observant but we fail to notice when we become everything we hate and then pass it to our offspring like a sexually transmitted disease. fuckshitdamncuntballswhore! This is why I think I’ll be an unfit mother.
As a witness to my own private workings and generations of those like me, I worry about anything that might free itself from my womb. After watching the movie Damian, I was pretty sure I was going to be the unlucky bastard to have satans baby. But realistically and with paranoia aside I just don’t want to have a normal baby and then spend a lifetime sprinkling it with either inherited or learned insanity until it eventually drowns, or buys a clown outfit and starts burying people under the house. I don’t know about John Wayne Gacy’s mom, but I would be really embarrassed to be its mother. I might be okay now but who knows where I’ll be in ten years. On Zoloft, institutionalized, wombless, fuckdamnshit. Or not. I might be fine.
Oftentimes it’s the people who hold things in that you have to worry about, the ones who bury things deep, who don’t vent. My boyfriend is that type, he holds it all in, silently keeping score in his head of who has crossed him, he hates a lot of people but you’d never know it. He’s well versed in how to appear well in public. He’s gonna go nuts for sure. In Human Development I learned that having a mid-life crisis is fairly predictable, it’s the ones with over-bearing parents, straight-A students, people who always do what other people want, who one day say, “I want to do what I want”. And that thing might be the secretary. Fuckduckdick. But maybe it’s like osteoporosis, or gingivitis, where knowledge is half the battle. In that case, I’m prepared for mental health.
I take vitamins, drink wine, and write violently in my journal. I talk to myself.
