On the Edge of Sanity

The other day, I took sort of a mental day from blogging. Technically, I still wrote something, but my "Bitch on Retreat" entry was a long-winded way of saying, "I don't want to blog today because there is this person I don't know who wants to express herself. And she scares me."

And I started thinking of mental illness. You know, neuroses and psychoses. Okay, the last time I was in a classroom discussing these was a few years ago, well more than a few years ago, but it is hard to claim to be 29 with so much real world experience. In the grand scheme of things, psychosis is worse than neurosis. Well, I should say that those with a psychosis find it more difficult to interact with the real world. Maybe those with serious psychoses have are better off than the rest of us, but I digress.

I was thinking about, and this is the technical term, "crazy people" the other day. I have actually seen a crazy person – someone with one heck of a psychosis – someone that had several personalities, who ate parts of his own body (and I am not talking about chewing fingernails). But when I was interacting with this individual, one thing that kept racing through my mind was, "but by the grace of God, that could be me." And my mood the last few days sort of reinforced that perspective.

Now I am not saying I am some sort of nut job – because I am not. Sure, I have my own inner demons, but most of us do. But if I was born into a different situation, where my parents beat me or abused me, where they did terrible things to me, perhaps I would have coped by becoming a nut job.

I have actually worked with someone (a different person) who did not have a real grasp on reality. He was a sweet old man, and he had spent most of his life institutionalized. He lived in what could be described as a "half way house," where he had structure, communal living, and a family, and he worked half days performing custodial tasks.

You could not talk with him about philosophy or politics, but he like talking about dogs. He understood dogs, and he would tell you about them. And I saw him with dogs, not his, mind you, but any stray dog that would come around. Dogs I would cross the street to avoid, he would talk with, pet, and love. It always scared me – that he would get hurt – but to my knowledge, he never got bitten, scratched or harmed.

So part of my reason for not really wanting to expand on my bitchiness (let the bitch out, as Muse so eloquently said; she writes like a poet, that girl), was that the bitch scares me. Not that I would not trade places with my old man friend, but I really don't want to eat my own skin.