For weeks, I've wondered how to begin this blog. Just how does one tell the stories of sane people who have lived on the outskirts of madness? How do you write with kindness and humor and demonstrate genuine affection for the lunacy that made you who you are? And how do you not offend people's delicate sensitivities by using the words "madness", "crazy", and "mental illness"?
If you know the torment of living with schizophrenic, manic depressive, or suicidal family members or have been coping with somebody else's assortment of personality disorders, dementia, Alzheimer's or some similar mental illness or disorder, then you know me. We have a common bond. But if not, then we cannot meet in that dark corner of acknowledgment, in that secret place of silent head nods where only people who have felt mad for being sane have hidden, where only those of us who have had our inner peace beaten with somebody else's crazy stick have curled up in a fetal ball and surrendered to the utter hopelessness of it all.
That is not to say that the rest of you won't find my stories interesting in a human oddity kind of way. If life is a circus, then certainly there are sideshows, freaks and human marvels that people pay good money to gawk at, pity, and feel ashamed for being fascinated by. No shame here. Gawk away. I hope it helps you or somebody you know. Mental illness is real and if it hasn't touched you yet, it will. Such is our world of chemicals, stress, biological enigmas, environmental deterioration, and hereditary conditions.
There's no cure for crazy. No matter what category it falls under - personality disorders, dementia, disease, brain injury. There are medications to help control it, maybe mask the effects, maybe slow the progression. But there is no cure for that result, that behavior, those consequences of madness that affect our society and inflict themselves on everyone else's comfort zones.
Growing up, I had a difficult time identifying the monsters in my life. I had a Mommy Dearest childhood mixed with the stuff that nightmares are made of - things children should not know of or remember. This made it difficult for me to separate "bad people" from "good people who once did something bad" or "people who aren't right in the head". No doubt, monsters are real. We see them on the news every day. But to a kid and to many adults, mental illness or deficiency makes people automatically monsters or sub-human in some way. This is just wrong. There's a huge difference in being a danger because of mental defect and being a danger that needs to be locked in prison. Both exist. Both consistently prove the system doesn't work. Until it does. And then it doesn't again.
What I hope and pray is that we, as a people, do not forget that the madness --or mental illness or whatever word fits your particular situation -- is the wake of what the brain is doing and that the brain is functioning inside a living breathing human being with rights and feeling. Today, my siblings and I are fighting like hell for the safety, security and welfare of the very person who, when we were kids, never fought for ours. Talk about an unfair circle of life.
But it is life.
