Thoughts On Mental Illness

Stay away from crazy people.

There, I said it.

Their craziness will not infect you, but it will draw you in just like you were Brer Rabbit trying to deck the tar baby.

I've been thinking of suicide since I was about nine years old. I didn't know what else to do with myself. I existed as a punching bag for my mother's overwhelming pain and maltreatment at work. Asking for help made people turn away from me. And made my mother that much angrier.

When I was a teenager, I would get a double-edged razor blade from my parents' medicine chest and start drawing faint lines on my arms that would leave little bubbles of blood. There was a metallic zinging of pain, but that was the whole point - to provide me with the illusion that if I caused the pain, I controlled it. It was a good illusion and it lasted a long time, the satisfaction I got from cutting myself. I also liked to light candles and then pour the dripping wax onto the backs of my hands. I did this in the living room and my mother read the newspaper while I did it. "You're going to burn yourself," she said and I thought, exactly the point, but nothing more was said about it than that.

I had a little dance with anorexia when I was in college, eating 500 calories a day. It worked, too. I lost a lot of weight but then I started having hallucinations. I started eating again.

When I was in my mid to late 20s, I drank too much. I stopped that. Just stopped it right then and there. Never did street drugs. Used whatever was prescribed to me and a bunch of stuff was prescribed to me. Oddly, I attempted suicide with a big bottle of aspirin. When my mother found out I didn't take it all, she found the bottle, put it in front of me and said, "Finish it."

Yes. So you see, the reasons to avoid crazy people is that they may seem relatively okay for awhile and then, boom, out of nowhere, they are all about the craziness.

Forget that the person had been observantly taking prescribed medication. You will never know about the efforts made in private in that person's life to control the crazy.

All you know is that they are crazy.

And therefore, much to be avoided.