Crazy Is As Crazy... Doesn't?

Throughout my life I've often pondered if I'm answering correctly when I'm asked if I have "any history of mental illness" and I say no.  My medical records show only one recognized psychological issue where I saw a therapist. One might guess that, with my past, it was related to my abuse. One would be wrong. It actually stemmed from a burn injury inflicted on me at age 7. I'll tell that incident later as it's not the point of this post.

Basically, while I spent three weeks in the hospital getting soaked in bleach water and having my ruined skin picked off my left arm daily, my best friend's house had been struck by lightning and caught fire while she and her teen sister were there alone. The kids  had gotten out unharmed, thankfully. Their family kitten hadn't. It was found in the debris, burned to death.  My young mind already had freak fits just looking at fire on the TV. Hearing the news of the house fire, my brain made a quick connection: Thunder is lightning noise. Lightning makes fire. Fire hurts! Fire kills little animals caught in it! Already traumatized by the burns and further shaken up by the painful burn treatments, it made my brain equate such terror with just thunder. It wasn't clear until I got home. We'd had an oddly dry spell while I was in the hospital, entirely thunderstorm free. But that first week I was home, we had a big one and I had my very first panic attack. I shrieked and panicked and fought my mom as she tried to hold me down and calm me down. I had no idea where I was trying to run to other than the blindly fearful thought to get out of the house before it burned down.

Doing that at all any time it thundered (and that happens a LOT along the coast near Galveston) was bad enough. The doctors said it would probably calm down as time went on, though Mom seemed skeptical about that prognosis. Then I was cleared to go back to school finally. I was nervous because I was already getting fat by then. I'd stopped growing up and started growing out instead. I already wore ratty hand-me-downs since Joe drank so much of the household money. So, having to go to school with my left arm wrapped in a bulky hard plastic brace and compression bandage affair intended to keep my hand from curling into a claw wasn't my favorite idea ever. I knew I was just going to get picked on more.  I did. But it was worse after that first freak out at school. I laid out two teachers as they tried to stop my blind panic. They had to call  the nurse and Mom and they sent me home. Yeah, that was a self-esteem builder. And all the kids just added that to the arsenal of jibes they already had.

When it continued to happen and I got picked on for it more and more, Mom put her foot down with both the doctors and Joe and decided I needed to see a psychologist. I didn't want to, even at that age. I thought the guy I was sent to was an idiot. He talked to me like I was stupid and I would make up shit to tell him just to see what kind of bullshit I could make him believe. It got to be a game and I actually took a malicious sort of glee in it. In the end, it wasn't the shrink who did me any good. In the end it was me reading about how lightning worked and studying it that helped me ease the panic. It still would make me startle or gasp, but I could close my eyes, count to ten and tell myself I was being stupid and to just stop it. Breathe in. Breathe out. Stop being stupid.

There are so many things in my life like that. When I became a pre-teen alcoholic and pill popper, it wasn't some intervention or rehab that cured me of it. It was me looking into the mirror and seeing Joe. Scared straight. It was hard, but I pushed that garbage out of my life by sheer force of will along with those people who refused to stop clinging to it. I lost a ton of friends that way. But they refused to change and had to be left by the wayside.  I understood that to beat it, I could not be around people who did it. When I would recognize that I would suddenly be trying to replace that addiction with cigarettes or chocolate or whatever, I would step back, take the deep breath. I would close my eyes and tell myself. "Stop being stupid." I refused to be controlled by it. It's a cycle that still repeats now and again even now. I slip up and find myself repeating old mistakes and have to put the brakes on.

I recognized that the traumatic life I had growing up had done things to me as it had to my mother. She was a hoarder. Once Joe was no longer around to yell at her for it, it escalated until it took over most of the house. As I grew older, I fought that for both of us, too. Once I was 16 and working and helping her pay bills, I had enough leverage to lay down rules in our home. I made her start sorting and properly storing usable items and ridding herself of what was garbage and debris. Every six months, like clockwork, if her things had crawled out of the one room she was allowed for her "stuff", there was a great purge and she was forced to constrain her hoard to her designated space again and strictly organize what she kept so it wasn't a mess. Every six months, I purged my own belongings, too,  ridding myself of things I could say I no longer enjoyed or could no longer use. Needless to say, Goodwill and Salvation Army loved me. I was always dropping off huge bags and boxes of things for them. Hoarding is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder. What made it odd in the case of both my mother and I was that we recognized this tendency. We worked at controlling it. It was never diagnosed, because we never let it get to the point of those people you see on Hoarding: Buried Alive and we never sought counseling for it. Of course, back then, they knew so little about OCD and hoarding behavior. They've made leaps and bounds in knowledge with a lot of metal illnesses since then.

I have other odd compulsions I fight with daily. My previous room mates had a toddler. My room wasn't big enough for me to keep my video racks in, so they were in the living room. While I lived with them, I discovered that keeping the movies in order wasn't just a preference. It was compulsory. When the baby would knock the videos down and they would just shove them up there in random order, I would actually just twitch upon discovering it. I would have to stop right there in that moment and put them back in order. It was making me twitch to have my things stacked up in the garage in totes. My environment was not MY environment anymore. I was crammed into a space that was far too small. My room mates would leave dishes in the sink overnight. There was really no excuse. We had a dishwasher that worked. I had to fight the urge to stop and wash them just about every morning. I had to tell myself "No. Stop. Deep breath. No time now. You have to get to work. Put the scrubber down and turn away." But there were times that didn't work even though I would tell myself, "None of this mess is yours. Your dishes are all in the dish washer. You are not their housekeeper. Leave it." Those days I would be late to work and say I'd overslept. It wasn't a biggie. I was always ahead of the game at work so five minutes or ten weren't much of a difference in what I got done.

Even before then, cleaning my own house was horrid because I would micro-focus on the "wrong" things, get distracted and flit to and fro like an idiot. I never seemed to get anything done. It took one of my boyfriends actually sitting me down and listing all the stuff I actually HAD done to make me quit beating myself up for that. It was just that at home, where I was in charge of the structure (or lack thereof), I wasn't as efficient as I was at work where I HAD to do things a set way or risk losing my job. Basically, if I'm in charge of everything including the consequences, things will slip a lot before I go "Bloody hell! What am I doing?? Stop being stupid! Get shit done! Move your ass!"

I've taken neuro-psychology tests at various points in my life. They used to give them to you in school sometimes back in the day. One was done when they discovered I had an IQ that was 5 points below super genius on the scale they were using back then. They got curious because I was marked as "precocious" with my ability to read long before kindergarten and my eidetic memory.  I had Duke University all over me trying to convince me to become a lab rat for some think-tank experiment they were doing when I was in 7th grade. They'd given me the SAT and been impressed with my scores, especially since I (unlike the other kids chosen from my school) had declined all of the prep classes because I wanted to see what my "raw score" would be like. My score was high considering I had no idea what algebra and geometry even were and still managed deduce right answers on some of that. On the non-math portions, I scored extremely high.  I took another neuro-psych exam when they were trying to assess me after the brain damaging complicated migraine incident in my 20's. Even in 7th grade, I was cognizant of the fact that I should not answer some of those questions truthfully if I valued my freedom. As a 20-something, those questions actually made me hunch over the desk in an attempt to hide my hysterical giggling. I was thinking, "Yeah, if you think I'm dumb enough to answer THAT shit truthfully, think again." I think that psychologist didn't know what to think of me, really. I seemed to confuse him terribly.

So, if you know that your truthful answers would probably mark you as insane and you don't answer truthfully, are you insane?  If you recognize that you have compulsive behavior and you fight to rein it in,  do you really have OCD? Or are you, as a human being, so fucked up and mentally fractured that you exist as several people at once. Maybe those several people you are each have control of certain things, so you can control yourself or disconnect a part that's fritzing one day so that a part that isn't so worn out can take over for a while. Or maybe those different parts can sort of "gang up" on things that one part alone isn't sufficient to handle. Sometimes it feels like that. Some days I'm just so fucking tired and I want to crawl under a rock and die. Then, after a while,  it's like I kick myself in the ass and say, "Oh, just fucking stop it, wuss. Drag your ass up and do what needs doing. GET OVER IT!"  I'll be okay for a while after that and it starts all over again, one giant fucked up roller-coaster, only without the benefit of safety harnesses. 

As I get older I wonder more and more if I'm certifiably crazy, too smart for my own good or maybe a little of both. I'll probably never find out for sure because I'm not the type who feels the need to go sign myself up for therapy for every little thing. I've always been wary of going to therapy. I don't like the feeling that someone is picking my brain. They're my cobwebs and I'll thank you kindly to stay out of them, pretty much. Up to now I've been strong enough to push through things. There are times, though, when I feel old and tired and wonder if I really can push through some of this shit anymore. It's like drowning in Jello.

Surviving My Family, Part Five

It wasn’t long after that I had a weird ass dream. I’d passed out on the sofa watching horror movies the night before. Mom had taken to sleeping in her own little room upstairs and letting Joe have the master so I could stay up and watch late night movies in the den if I wanted. Cable was new then and I was enjoying it. I was huddled up under my blanket and I had a dream that I went up to wake Joe up for some reason. I get up there and there’s this log in the bed. I shake the log, at first saying, “Dad, wake up! It’s time to get up!” Nothing. Then I tilt my head, grin slowly and loudly say, “Hey, asshole! Get your lazy ass up!” Nothing. I’m outright giggling by then and I start slapping where his face would be going “Dead-ass motherfucker! Get up!” I start chanting it in a sing-song, slapping and slapping the log where it rests on the pillow.

That was about the time I started waking. I could hear Mom on the phone in the kitchen. She was on with emergency services telling them to send someone because she thought her husband had passed away in his sleep and didn’t seem to be breathing. She sounded… numb, like part of her wanted to cry and she wanted to kick her own ass for it at the same time. I just listened for a while to try and figure out if it was still the same bizarro dream I was having or if it was real. It wasn’t until I’d actually started to drift back off thinking I was still dreaming, that she came into the den. I guess she’d been trying to figure out how to act considering how he’d treated both of us all that time. In the end, she chose matter-of-fact and told me she wanted me to go next door to the neighbor’s house so I wouldn’t have to see a dead body getting wheeled out. Being around corpses had always weirded me out a little because of the way adults acted around them. Since I wasn’t afraid to die, I couldn’t get why it freaked them out so much. So the whole vibe creeped me out a little. This one, though…. Oh, I wanted to see that dead body. I wanted immediate, undeniable verification that that son of a bitch was never coming back. 

But I went next door to make things easier on Mom. I think she would have been far more worried for me if I had gleefully watched them wheeling him out. I knew she was already pretty worried after I threatened to kill him. The neighbors were going to Astroworld that day and they told Mom not to worry. Their mom went to the house and got some clothes for me and they said they’d keep me for the rest of the weekend to give her time to “deal with things”.  It was kind of irritating because they all were tiptoeing around, nervous that I might suddenly break down and bawl. Then they were confused and concerned when I didn’t and, in fact, had a blast at Astroworld. As far as I was concerned I had just begun the greatest fucking vacation ever called “The Rest of My Life Without That Evil Fucker Tormenting Me”. But being around them and seeing their reaction, I knew I had to at least be quiet and not dance a gavotte and a jig in sheer joy at new-found freedom. 

I watched Mom and I realized that what made her cry wasn’t that he was gone. It was the fact the asshole hadn’t gotten any insurance because he didn’t want to go to the doctor. While that made us lose the house, it was probably better for us since the heart problem he wasn’t even aware of was what killed him. Congestive heart failure thy name in my book is justice. So Mom was worried about what would happen to us since there would be no money and only more debt from his death. In time, when our home and food situation was seen to, she started to relax and be a real person again. She never even dated after that. I think all of that time married to such a horrible person pretty much turned her off on the idea. Men were always hitting on her because she had an awesome personality when she wasn’t under some jerky’s thumb. She was smart, funny, creative and independent in her recovery.  She just ignored the men and went along her merry way. I was always grateful for that because I sure as hell didn’t want another daddy after the disaster I started out with, not even as an adult. No.. thank.. you.

I managed to get sober. That was probably a good thing since not long after I had what they call a complicated migraine. It makes all the blood vessels in your head swell. Left untreated for a week as it was in me, it can also make your brain swell. Brain swelling causes damage no matter how you look at it.  So my once eidetic memory became more like a sieve. I couldn’t drive for months. It took me a long time to get my scattered remaining memory back into somewhat correct chronological order (kind of like defragging a hard drive). Some things, like my work history, I have to keep written down or I can’t remember which job came after which too well.  But I still remember a whole lot of what hit me that horrid summer day. Still, there are some areas that never filled in even before the brain damage. As bad as what I CAN remember is, maybe it’s better that way.

Years later, after I had put up with all of that ridicule about lying about the abuse from my family and having NO ONE stand up for me, I had pretty much written the whole lot of them off. Mom was gone. I only ever went to family events because it made her happy and I got to at least TRY to give the kids something educational or useful when I could afford it. With her gone and no longer acting as a buffer and most of them still being heavy drinkers and/or drug abusers, I realized I just really couldn’t have them in my life even if I wanted to. I can’t be around people like that and stay sober for long. I’ve been sober for about 20 years now. If I find myself slipping, I just stop. I watch myself closely for the signs. I can have 2 drinks and stop. I don’t get drunk. I don’t even take my prescribed pain pills and muscle relaxers unless I am in so much agony I can’t even move. My doctors bitch at me about that. They say “You need them. Take them.” And I basically flip them off and tell them I’m mean and ornery and will take them when I damned well please. :-p

So I’m chugging along in life  trying to figure out just where I want and need to be. It’s weird… when you figure out why you’re so fucked up and start dealing with it, what you thought was a clear path in life suddenly reverts back to jungle you have to hack down with a machete again.  Funny how that works. Anyway, chugging along and I run into one of the nieces El Pervo had been abusing.  It turns out that she and one other BOTH decided it was time to deal instead of trying to cover it up.  My half sister also came forward and admitted he’d done it to her, too. The young nieces both apologized for not coming forward when my brothers were digging at me and calling me a crazy liar. I don’t know how most of the family took that version of things coming out. I still don’t communicate with most of them at all. I’ve talked to some of the nieces and nephews because it’s really not their fault their parents are total hose-heads. But by and large, I think we’re happier out of each other’s hair. They can’t annoy me or beg for money I don’t have and I don’t browbeat them for STILL being drunks/addicts and setting shitty examples for their multitudes of kids.