Tag: insanity

Getting Real

I have only a few days left to say whatever I might have been holding back this past year. I’m going through the list to see what I might have missed as issues of note.

I have come to realize I write to stay sane. Was I ever insane? Well, no. Not in a clinically diagnosed sort of way. But I definitely drifted far enough away from the piers of nice North American female normalcy that caused many, and me, to wonder.

I didn’t have you would call a “normal” childhood. At least, I now know what a normal childhood means. A set of parents (or caregivers) who were consistent, available and sober.

Children knowing what bed they were going to sleep in every night. Kids who had a right and got to enjoy their privacy. They could slap a “no boys allowed” sign on their bedroom door and expect it to be respected.

Nope. Didn’t have any of that. So forgive me if you have read all this before. Essential backdrop if you haven’t. My father was an abusive, alcoholic, womanizer. My mom got through the marriage with countless bottles of “Mama’s little helpers.”

No one was there to answer my questions and help me sort out difficult situations. Just as often when I would bring an issue to my mother, I was mocked and invariably silenced. A very dry well.

It wasn’t so much that my parents were not interested in listening. For the most part, it was more that they simply weren’t there. Booze and pills are famous – and relied on – for taking you far, far away from your troubles.

Looking back on my life from this vantage point, I can see what was missing and forgive myself for the things I did to stay alive. The caregiving gaps in my early childhood affected me. What I did to make up for those gaps was rarely what I wanted or needed.

Booze couldn’t take the place of genuine love. Sex was a particularly transient and unsuitable substitute for comfort and belonging. I was a very poor conformist, no doubt partly due to my upbringing.

I never could happily adapt to the 9-5 life. I did one mindless contract after another over the years with the single intention of keeping body and soul together. No joy. no sense of purpose.

I didn’t have the courage to follow my dreams of international photojournalism. I had limited faith in the Universe at that point. My great dream of international media stardom never came to pass.

Truth be told, fame was never a real goal. Most of the time, I was just happy to have the press credentials to get me behind the scenes at a lot of big travel events. The official opening of Disney World’s Chautauqua Institute as one example.

I look back with some bemusement on the doggedness that led me to do a deep dive to see why I landed where I’d landed. I learned a lot. For starters, no man is an island. We are all part of a bigger story. Our people were working-class stock through and through – a fact I believe chagrined my mother.

To compensate for the lack of family pedigree, she imbued her three daughters with an undeserved sense of specialness and entitlement that could never have been sustainable in the real world. Even the best and brightest will falter and fail to thrive without safety and careful sensible nurture.

What I realize today is that above all else, I needed stability and safety to grow. I am only just finding it in my life. The stability gap between my life today and where I came from is vast.

In retrospect, mine was a story of survival that grew into eventual stability. It is not the sexiest script out there, I realize. But it is mine.

From the age of fifteen, I tried to find the source of my constant emotional discomfort and deep insecurities. I swung from one vine on the healing path to the next and the next.

I learned a lot along the way, including the importance of my famous catchphrase, “sayin’ ain’t doin’.” There is lots and lots of talking in the world. Backing up what people often say with action, however, is just not as common.

So this year of daily writing has been about seeking answers and finding my own authenticity. What matters to me and what most emphatically doesn’t.

It has caused me to look back on many of the roles and work I tried on just to get by. Some of it was ridiculous. A lot of life is actually if we give it a hard look.

Now I am planning the next phase. The final one. And mentally exploring what I think I want to do and where I might go one day.

I now have the time now to pursue any dormant passions. I have cleared most of the interfering childhood crud out of my psyche.

The future beckons and is also right in front of me.

Armed with my emerging sense of a solid self, I say, “Bring it on.”

Just Come Back

Mental illness – to somewhat understate it – is a controversial concept.

I accept there are biological conditions that throw the brain and body seriously out of whack. I accept that anxiety and depression are real. I know. I spent a lot of my life there.

But looking back, the source of my mental distress was completely traceable. I was carrying around so much emotional pain that it squeezed out everything in me that was valuable. I didn’t have engaged parents. For their part, as long as I “appeared” to be doing well, their job was done.

And while dragging my pain around, I still had to create a life. First, I had to scramble to learn enough to get a job. Later it was imperative to make a living. I had babies to raise.

If I ever had a clear vision of what I wanted in life, I wasn’t sure what it was. My mother had soured me on marriage. I would say she was pathologically afraid of marriage given how hers had worked out. Worked out being a euphemism for disastrous long-lasting personal consequences. For Mom and for her children.

For Mom and many of her peers in the Fifites, marriage was a trap that heavily benefitted men. For women then – especially the bright and ambitious – it was often a prison. Conforming to the social expectations of the day, marriage often not only eroded a woman’s self-worth but subjugated her own dreams and needs in service to her husband and family.

Selfishness was akin to murder, rape, and incest for Fifties housewives.

The tragedy of women’s repressed dreams was explored in the movie Revolutionary Road. Starring Leo Dicaprio and Kate Winslet, they play a nice, young couple living in a Connecticut suburb during the mid-1950s. Kate hates where they have landed in life. The lingering memories of the adventurous and freewheeling life they once lived and planned to again is lost. She pushes Leo to move to Paris while they still have time. Plans are well underway when he gets a promotion and pay raise. Paris gets shelved.

Moving to Paris is a prison break for Kate’s character. They struggle in their marriage to come to terms with the disconnect between them in their hopes and dreams. For Leo’s character, it was good enough for his Dad – a career long company man – so it is good enough for him. As was common for men in that decade, his avenues for relief and distraction were far greater and readily available than for her.

By times, the scenes in Revolutionary Road play on the nerves like fingernails scratching on a blackboard. The low-key struggle of the cookie-cutter lives of Fifties suburbia suffocated so many. The show achingly shows the emotional roller-coaster and internal torture Winslet goes through. She effectively goes mad.

And her type of insanity was a normal response to a tortuous situation from which she had no acceptable avenue for escape. She was not the first trapped woman who had to fight for her freedom and sanity. She was also not the first victim who didn’t make it out.

As people are regularly pushed to their boundaries of pain tolerance, life is deemed not only miserable but devoid of value. The message they must hear is to hold on. Find something bigger outside yourself to believe in. Never give up.

“It’s alright to go insane. Just come back.”