“There’s something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head… All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.”
– The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, Stephen King

When I was a kid, I thought I wasn’t special. Regardless of how I feel about myself now, that’s how I felt at the time.

I watched movies and read books and thought there was more to life than I was seeing. More to life than I was participating in. And I started to get the wrong ideas.

I watched A Beautiful Mind, I read The Virgin Suicides,  I watched Girl Interrupted, I wrote poetry, I looked deep into myself and thought, “There’s more than this normal life that I’m living.”

I desired to be crazy.

I wanted to have something clinically wrong with me. I wanted to be different. I didn’t want to fit in, I didn’t want people to understand me, I didn’t want me to so damn normal. I wanted to be someone people who remember meeting. I wanted to be…off. I met people who had been institutionalized and I wanted to be there. I wanted their story.

Don’t ask me why; I can’t explain it. I don’t know why I wanted it, I just know that I did.

So I made myself that way. I tried to be different. I tried to act different, I tried to dress differently, I tried to see things differently. I wanted so badly to hallucinate seeing and hearing things…that I started seeing and hearing things. For real. It scared the shit out of me. There’s nothing more terrifying than turning to your best friend sitting next to you in a field at night and saying, “Who’s coming to meet us here?” pointing to the girl walking towards you only to have her look at you confused and say, “What are you talking about?”

I thought crazy was cool. I thought depression was cool. So I tried them on like normal teenagers try on clothes. But what I discovered is that it’s not like trying on clothes. You can’t take them off quite so easily. You can’t say, “look at how cute this is!” and then move onto the next thing without blinking an eye.

You get stuck.

And I was stuck for a really long time.

There’s a quote from Girl Interrupted (the book) the goes,“Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.”

And I was. Flirting with it that way. But then suddenly I was sucked in and I was living it and I couldn’t get out. For a few years I didn’t actually want to get out. You can translate ‘a few’ to be about 7 years. I didn’t want to get out because even though I was miserable at some point it was just who I was, and at least I was interesting. At least I wasn’t just some other girl that you met and didn’t remember.

At some point I became aware that I was done with it. So done. I was destructive to myself and those around me. I wasn’t interesting; I was unreliable. I wasn’t intoxicating; I was just intoxicated. I had long grown tired of who I had become and I had grown tired of wanting to change but not actually changing.

So I changed. I made a huge effort to do the opposite of what I would normally let myself do in most situations. I tried to reverse everything I had done to myself so many years before. And I succeeded.

Mostly.

Depression, mental illness, insanity, eating disorders, self doubt…they’re all things that never entirely go away. They’re lurking behind every door, every conversation, every mirror, every look, every drink you have. You can be who you want to be twenty four hours a day every day for weeks before you let your guard down for a minute and your old habits sneak up on you. They’re never entirely gone and you’re never entirely the same.

So some nights, like tonight, it’s just one little thing. One thing that, for reasons even unknown to you, sets you off. And here you are, in bed, back to where you were six years ago, feeling like the only thing you can do is write. You know you’ll wake up feeling differently tomorrow, and that everything will be back to normal tomorrow, but you’re sitting here now thinking,

“What’s really me?”