Mental Illness

From time to time, I get accidentally introspective. The last thing I try to do during my time alone is get introspective. Sure, that might seem odd but, for the most part, I prefer to avoid thinking about all of those things that are wrong with me and my life. If I were to indulge that need, I’d probably end up in a place many a proud self-loather has landed…and the clean-up is just so damn messy. Still, occasionally, it seems to happen without my knowledge or consent. Sitting quietly reading a news clipping or watching Ted Kennedy make a fool of himself and WHAM, a fact of life has stricken you out cold. Today, I hit quite a few.

I am hesitant to admit this. I’ve made it through four or five almost-posts and deleted them before they made their way to “Preview” because I realized that posting them would only open a can of worms I don’t want opened – too many misunderstandings and a window into information and assumptions I don’t want. I’m still not sure it’s a wise idea, but at least given my current, semi-nauseous state, I’m inclined to think that the lenses you’re all wearing might take on a tint that fairs favorably for me not losing my mind with any of you in the next few weeks. I accidentally landed face first in a conversation about Colin and Sean and, as is want to happen when I’m discussing Colin – the event, not the individual – with a female, the darts started flying almost immediately and the sick need to defend him surfaced. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not new – even in the immediate days following I defended him with what energy I had after defending myself and that is sign of a psychosis I wouldn’t even ask Aaron Beck to explain. Everyone knows by now that I’ve reached a peace with him I didn’t necessarily anticipate would come – I promised not to run him over with my car as long as he promised not to cross any lines…like the ones that would involve him talking to me. Gracious, no :P That’s not the point – it might be a new admittance to some of you but how much I care is really limited. Alas, I am not as cold-hearted and cruel as I wish I was (or as any of you think) and, yes, it’s quite a bit disappointing. The point is that, midway through having this discussion with her, painting the pretty picture and trying to issue a defense which I suspect is less faulty than I sometimes need to believe, I was faced with the lonliness that is very familiar now. I miss him. Why tonight was so difficult I don’t know, but there I sat, clicking around because I knew if I clicked long enough, I’d find a post on someone’s blog that I could get inside of enough – that could take me back to a moment that could make me loathe him again. I got there, no problem – the difficult details aren’t hard to drag out, no matter how deeply I bury them – but I find it’s somewhat sick to realize how fully we all rely on our loathing.

When you can’t deal with something – you hate it – simple human nature. We rebel against the things we know are right for a hundred reasons. Sometimes, like now, we do it to restore strength in a conviction. Others, we do it to avoid a reality. Whatever the case may be, each and every single one of us needs hate. You hate your boss to avoid dealing with the fact that you made a mistake last Friday afternoon. You hate your employees to prevent yourself from admitting that you trained them poorly. As children, we hate our parents because, as much as we believe we know better, we know there are situations we really can’t deal with – and we hate them as adults for not preparing us for those circumstances. We hate the government for getting too big and meddling in our lives, and we hate it in others for not regulating more heavily to avoid taking responsibility for our own lives – research, discipline… In the end, it seems that hate is always a way to avoid responsibility.

Just when that subject was getting dangerously close to ending in the core of everything – the “P” word – I double-clicked my digital pacifier and queued up a few episodes of Firefly. Tonight felt like a firefly kind of night. Besides, Nathan Fillion as Malcom Renolyds is always yummy and River is just fun. It never made sense until just now, why I watch this show when I miss King, but 13 episodes of it are the first things I watched when I got the news that he died. 13 episodes, straight through, without interruption. Anywhoo, I made it all the way to 88 before the anesthetization started to really take effect, but by what would have been 72 , another interesting fact surfaced. This one isn’t particularly new either, it’s something that I’ve known about myself for ages – I attach to actors in the role of their characters and, even more strongly than that, I attach to my concept of a character.

Another sickness, and another one without proper medication (though I bet if I took enough Xanex, I wouldn’t connect quite so fully.) The DVD extras on Firefly destroyed my love of the series for nearly three months all from one comment Nathon Fillion had the audacity to make – first, because words were put to why I was attracted to that and every other character I’ve ever fallen for and then, too quick to follow, because those reason were dashed by the statement that actor had no grasp of character. The quote was something to the end of “I’m not that hopeless, tortured man Malcolm Renolyds is.” A few hours soul searching and, well look at that, what a pervasive set of personality traits? Sad. Predictable and overwhelmingly ill.

What’s sadder is I realized, it’s just me. I have no favored actors – no one who could convince me to see a movie. Mike will give pretty much any Tom Hanks movie a chance, unless it’s You’ve Got Mail!, but my mother is the only person in the entire world who liked that movie and she only watches it for Meg Ryan. I can’t watch a Robin Williams movie unless he plays a generally well disposed character with a core of sadness somewhere within. The saving grace of Keanu Reeves is that so much time passed between Bill & Ted and Siddartha and A Walk in the Clouds and The Matrix I can scarcely consider it the same actor – but tell me he’s in a horrid band and I’m disgusted. I had a similar relationship with one Shane West. Bring the movie he did with Mandy Moore within 50 feet of me and I swear, I’ll scream harassment, because I won’t watch it and as long as I don’t watch it he can remain the irresponsible rocker he played a few years ago in Once and Again and he’s playing all over in ER and everything will be a-OK. The mental blocks are good, of course. Show me Matt Czuchry in Eight Legged Freaks, and my impression of Logan Huntzburger won’t be tarnished, because I built myself a wall around Logan that even the atrociously written episodes Amy has been putting out lately can’t hurt him..

What to do!

And finally, we end up at the last, somewhat amusing and sadly, completely true. It has long been said that I have a skewed and somewhat insane impression of the way that friendships were meant to be. I only know one way to have a friendship and it’s a apparently fantastically inappropriate, but it’s what I know and, ultimately, it’s what I love. I leanred to cope and I thought I was over iand yet today, in a binge to clear out some of my unanswered reviews, I thumbed through a story only to find that I’d convinced almost half the people who reviered were convinced that the married woman was having an affair with one of her husbands friends. Have I lost all grip on reality – or, more appropriately, did I never have it at all and I still don’t have as good a grasp on it as I thought.

My inclination isk, of course, to remind you that these are the same people who can’t figure out whay “Please remove the banner in your chapter summary” means, and that the vast majority couldn’t’ navigate themselves out of a sentence, let alone the complex concept of an intimate friendship, but I’m reminded that, from what I can tell, these kinds of relationships exist only on television and in the bubble which I have built for myself. Unlike the television versions, mine always seem to end badly.

Two and a half pages of rambling is enough for me at nearly 6 am. I’m going to stare at the ceiling for a little while before I decide to tackle “potential.”