This Mental Illness Among Us

(Originally 4/20/07)

My challenge is to face the world with mental illness. No, not just my own (which again, I'm relieved to note that I don't have a disorder which needs to be treated with medication, although sometimes I feel like I do, but I have some tendencies and hurdles which have adversely affected my development). I'm referring to all the mental illness everywhere.

This morning I got hit with a double-whammy. In my beloved fangroup, a member re-exposed her ugly side and wrecked my whole morning. She gave herself permission to turn the forum into a cesspool. She railed against another member who hadn't even been the object of her initial ire. She did this in the name of defending her actions against someone else whom she called immature, and with that action, she blew her own actions out of the water. She apologized before for rash and incindiary speech but she'd never done this before, which makes me think her apologies aren't worth the 1's and 0's that they're made out of.

Then I leave my house (HAHA! "my" house.) get in my car (BWAHAHA! "MY" car) and turn on the radio to hear some guy calling in to cuss someone out, saying that he was going to catch up to someone and really give it to her good--threatening and extremely nasty. I though he was calling the radio station but they were just playing his recorded message. Turns out it was Alec Baldwin, cussing out his own daughter, who is no more than 11 or twelve. And it turns out that the recording was given by Kim Basinger, as a defense for her own side in their custody case.

WHAT AN UGLY WORLD I LIVE IN.

I spend so much time in fantasy because it tears my heart out to have to face this miserable condition we suffer from. (Yes, "we". Like me in my car, for instance, when I can't say civil things to people just because they linguered at a traffic light for 6 picaseconds longer than I would have liked them to.) I'm taking responsibility for this tenderhearted weakness I feel like I have, but it does have a root cause. When I said in an earlier post that my mother treated her patients better than she treated me, I was totally not kidding. My mother would curse me out at the drop of a hat. She'd curse anyone out. Somehow, I developed a total fetish for a woman who cussed out their man, but at the same time, a phobia when I'm on the receiving end. No, a real I-can't-be-in-a-relationship phobia. I would walk on glass to prevent an argument. I had one girlfriend who never argued with me. Her I should have married. Yet I fear I probably would have been the abuser in the relationship, because again, I'm no saint.

I know I need to get over this. I can't be giving this much power to people's words. I've sold a good twenty-five years of my life away for a peace that doesn't really exist, and it hasn't improved my life at all, because I'm still vulnerable to negativity. I still crave, puppy-like, approval and acceptance. I can still be devastated by the harsh word from a loved one.