the depths of despair
March 29, 2002 09:49 AM

I am insane.

I think I've made a case for it before. But I have to say, it especially struck me last night. The boy thinks I'm just vulnerable to suggestion, that once one thing happens, everything is instantly colored by it. It's no slow process of dialysis, either. Drop green food coloring in the water, and not only is the water in the tube green, the water outside, even the fucking glass is green.

Point: last night I was suddenly overwhelmed with the innate horridness of everything. It was so horrid I started weeping and couldn't stop. No real reason.

Except, I saw two people walk across the street when we were down in the end of town where everyone moved when they moved away from the city. People who aren't poor moved into these suburbs that are connected by streets without sidewalks or buses. People who aren't poor took the city with them, and all the crap-paying service jobs went, too. They sent the jobs out there, but they didn't send sidewalks and they didn't send buses.

So people who are poor have to walk across six lane streets and in the road. Or they have to buy cars that mean less of their not enough money for other things.

This strikes me as fucked up.

But there's a difference between a useful reaction to this - trying to learn more, or change things - and my reaction. Which was to go from a perfectly happy day to a perfectly crappy night. To plunge into the depths of despair.

And even worse, these histrionics were quieted by putting on a winter hat and scarf and drinking a chocolate milkshake, not by any sort of resolution to improve the world. Because sometimes the wildly swinging moods come from somewhere at least vaguely meaningful, but mostly they just come from the shallow places.

Like I've been transformed from miserably depressed over a job that won't last to utterly delighted by the purchase of a pair of shoes, ignoring the circumstances that make emotion A a hell of a lot more valid than emotion B. At least none of this is ever expressed at work.

I think the problem comes back to something I said a long time ago. I think the problem is I learned how to feel by reading the Anne of Green Gables books. It means I'm constantly reacting, overreacting, and never stable. And the thing is, this is all in my head, in ways I've trained myself to react to things; it's not like I really fight it, and it's not like I'd really choose to be different given the option. Nor, for that matter, is it anything like the experience of someone whose brain can't quite get the chemical balance right on its own. It's purely manufactured.

Still. I think it might be nice to be stable, even if it meant being a little less like me.