Inflection Point

Every time I come in, they tell me I’m completely normal.

You’d think a man walking into a nut house on his own free will would have some sort of credibility. After all, this is the kind of place that isn’t used to calm – they’re used to the guy who thinks aliens have miraculously saved his child, the guy who hears voices at all hours of the day, the guy who thinks he’s been transformed into the family heirloom grandfather clock. These are the kind of guys that don’t really deserve credibility. But the guy who walks into one of those polished oak parlors - I always imagine for some reason that every therapist’s office is tucked away on the first floor of some shabby and forgotten English manor - and declares himself mad? You’d think he would at least have the tiniest bit of clout.

Surely the man who’s done it three times must have some sort of screw loose. He’s gone mad by the sheer act of believing that he is mad. Been driven mad by the very thought of his own madness. Doesn’t it all come down to belief, after all? What does it matter how sane you are when you’re certain, when your full to the brim with the belief that you’re hopelessly mad.

Unless it comes down to honesty. No one is honest with themselves anymore. We can’t tell what we are, we can’t look at ourselves in the mirror – and I mean really look at, stare into those pale blue droplets that have impinged themselves on that polished glass across from you – and have the nerve to glimpse at what we really are. So instead we tell everyone the story of ourselves that we’d like to be known, and we tell it over again, for the first and second and third time, until it’s no longer our own, until the fake memory that we’ve made has gone out into the world and is there to remind us when we forget. Then it’s simply a matter of asking our closest confidants what they think of us – they’ll happily parrot back the lie we’ve sculpted for ourselves.

Or else it’s a Catch–22 – the Catch–22, in fact; no doubt shamelessly stolen and repurposed. The insane man who recognizes his insanity cannot possibly be so, and so he is not, and so off he goes back out into the world. I’ll leave it to the reader to understand how the reverse logic works, then – how the sane man who thinks he’s sane cannot possibly be so.

As if that makes any sense. And of course none of it makes any sense. I explain this to them - them, always amorphous, for I cannot remember their faces and they seem to all have adopted nondescript names - for the first and second and third time, lying on my back, faux leather riveted to the fainting couch, crackling – cackling, in fact – along with my increasing frantic explanations; whether in earnest or in jest, I can never tell. They smile and nod and write it all down and say that’s nice and ask me about my mother. Or maybe they write nothing down, maybe it’s all just doodles of Freudian fantasies or silly cartoons. And then when it’s all over they smile and nod again and hand me a little white slip with god only knows what kind of incomprehensible nonsense and say, take two of these and call me in the morning.

I don’t want the pills. I just want someone to listen. If nothing else, that must make me crazy. /right?

I’m convinced it’s a matter of timing. It doesn’t take a great engineer, thankfully, mercifully, to know that if you have a high point and a low point, then there’s a pretty good goddamn chance that there will be an in between. That’s when I notice it of course, when the up, up, ups start to become the down, down, downs. or the reverse, or is it the converse, or the inverse - whatever verse it might be – the down, down, downs climbing back to the up, up, ups. When I’m feeling not just this incredible pull from one extreme – when I’m feeling exactly where I am. Not up. Not down. Just In between.

When I find myself in that point of inflection.

I’m certain that this is where they catch me. That perfect balancing point of normalcy. That brief moment when you’re coming off the hideous high of mania ad headed right toward that horrible hole of depression. You’re weightless, in that moment, nothing’s pulling at you, nothing’s a rocket and nothing’s gravity. You’re just… normal.

You come home and all you think about is the leftovers from the fridge and the re-runs on TV. You come home satisfied with what you did at work. You come home not to scheme, or plan, pr plot, or ponder, but rather you come home to relax, to rest, and, tomorrow, to repeat.

That’s what it’s like to be an everyday human being?

That’s what it’s like to be ordinary?

That’s when I reach out for the phone and dial the suicide hotline.

Maybe my kind of insanity is normalcy. The desire to have a regular bedtime and a relaxing eight hours of sleep and to grow old with a loved one and have a kid or two and a backyard with a lawn mower and a garden with flowers only my wife can pronounce and a commute with a morning talk show and me yelling at the callers and the disk jockeys and the five lanes of traffic I’ve somehow been sandwiched between and a quiet day at the office with birthday cake and corporate gossip and 401(k)s and health insurance and fringe benefits and comparison tables and Gantt charts and dependencies and deliverables and college savings and worrying, worrying, worrying at 11:58 PM when my teen-aged daughter hasn’t pulled into the drive way yet and all of it and every moment of it without spending a second being a frantic maniac knowing you’ll change the world or a hopeless wreck knowing you’ll never amount to anything.

Not up. Not down. Just in between. That’s what I find so fearsome. That’s what I find so insane. Because what I live for are the highs. What I live for are the lows. I live for the moments when I truly think that the work I’m doing can make the world a better place. I live for the moments when I doubt myself and every thing I’ve ever produced.

What makes you a better person is thinking you’re nothing and proving yourself wrong. What makes you a better person is thinking you’re everything and proving yourself right.

What I don’t understand, what I’ve never understood, is wanting to prove neither of these things. What I don’t understand is not wanting to prove everything at all. What I don’t understand is that in between the ups and the downs are the in betweens - and most everyone is just fine with that. What I don’t understand is why I’m not.

I’ll never be okay with a life lived in between.

Surely that must make me crazy.

Right?