I Have Mental Problems......The Sequel

This totally crazy thing used to happen to me when I was a kid. I would hear a voice in my head that would tell me to do something and if I didn’t do it, I would have to suffer the consequences. For example, if I was too chicken shit to jump off a 10’ high roof (as a 4’ person should be), the voice would say “if you don’t jump, your mother will be killed by an axe murderer.” And so I would actually convince myself that by jumping-even if I broke my leg in the process-I would actually be saving my mother from her certain bloody demise! Of course I would jump! What kind of sick and twisted kid wouldn’t?! Oh wait…who’s the sick and twisted kid?

Around the time that I was being plagued by these disturbing voices, my mom was finishing up her PhD in psychology. Interesting coincidence, no? I remember clearly the day that we sat in my kitchen and I explained hearing these “voices” to her. She was (naturally) excessively alarmed. After years of reading behavioral psych books and prepping herself for conversations of this nature with total strangers, I think I took her rather off guard when, at about age 9, I told her that I was hearing voices that predicted her grizzly dismemberment…and that of my father and sister too. Looking back on this day from an adult perspective, I believe that she thought I might be showing signs of early onset schizophrenia. She made me promise to tell her about the voices every time and we devised a strategy of talking back to the voices to tell them to go away. I’m not sure that my 9 year old self was able to properly convey what the real problem was. These “voices” were not random or external, they were not coming into my mind out of nowhere and commanding me to do something dangerous, the voice was MY voice. It was my way of pushing myself to overcome my own physical or emotional boundaries. And for some reason, the only incentive that I could come up with that was convincing enough was the threat of death in my family. Thinking back on it all now, and knowing who I am today, I think it really had more to do with an overactive imagination, some dark creative genius, and some very deep anxiety.

I was reminded of all of this--the voices, the darkness, the death and dismemberment--the other day when Joe failed to show up at my house on time….or even within many hours of on time. In fact, no phone call and no answer to my 10 or more attempts at reaching him. And so, fed by my anxiety, my imagination began to go haywire….and once the blood and guts start oozing, there ain’t no stopping the imagination train that’s heading straight to Horrorville. In my head, I had Joe tripping in front of a car just in time to have his head run over, his skull crushed with a great POP that left brains, blood and eyeballs spattered all over Bloor St. Or maybe he had been attacked by a dog that went straight for the neck and he bled out, blood spewing like a fountain with every weakening heart beat. I can still see his eyes starting to go milky as he gasps for one last breath, blood bubbles forming from his open windpipe.

Okay. So Joe wasn’t dead (though I could’ve killed him when he finally DID show up, but that’s another blog topic entirely). What is it in my deeply disturbed brain that causes me to go to these awful places? And why does it seem so damn real? When I was a kid, if my dad was late coming home I would work myself into an absolute panic within minutes. I was able to convince myself for SURE that he had been killed in a car accident, a head on collision with the most gruesome outcome possible. I was orphaned in my own daydreams more times than I can count.

These images that I can conjure in my imagination don’t feel like make believe, they feel like memories, like I have actually SEEN Joe’s grey matter mashed into the tire tread, or my dad’s face break through the windshield on impact, his body hurled through the air like a bloody rag doll. It’s enough to make me feel physically ill sometimes. And now, as a mother, there is no greater pain that I can imagine than something awful (so awful I won’t even write it) happening to my child. I could cry just thinking about it. So why do I do this to myself? It’s emotional masochism and I can’t seem to turn it off.

Now before you go calling the insane asylum on me, let me tell you that I KNOW these things aren’t true. It’s just my overactive and runaway imagination, spurred on by some anxiety disorder that probably has a name. Having lived with this for so long, it has become manageable. I’ve developed ways of talking myself out of a panic and bringing myself back down to reality. I do know the difference between reality and delusion, which is what separates me from the truly insane (among other things, I hope).

It would be easy to blame all of this on the trappings of the modern world. I could argue that images from horror movies, TV shows, or even the 6 o’clock news have all contributed to my bloodbath of an imagination. Furthermore, my anxieties are constantly being fed by the “fearmongering” and constant speculation of terrorist plots that is rampant in the media recently. I mean who isn’t feeling more anxious these days? Anyone with even a shred of OCD has been bleaching the bathroom, washing their hands, and checking the stove with greater gusto than ever before. It’s just this world that we live in…it’s making us all crazy! Sorry, I don’t believe it for a second. As the brilliant Viktor Frankl once said, “We cannot control our surroundings, we can only control our reaction to our surroundings.” And, having survived the Holocaust, he should know that our surroundings are not what drive us to insanity but rather our internals.

So now that I have exposed my own craziness, my Nightmare On Elm Street anxiety disorder, maybe you can start feeling better about your own particular brand of lunacy. And don’t try to tell me that you’re completely mentally sound, I’ll only think that you’re suffering from acute delusions of grandeur, which, in my untrained opinion, is crazier than I am. Yes, we are all nuts in our own special way. But before I go and check myself into the loony bin, I think I’ll give David Cronenberg a call and see if he wants to collaborate on a film. After all, it’s a very thin line between genius and madness.