Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [12]
Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts. Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done. Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow actually responsible.
I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms—it’s to frighten off extroverts. It was on purpose that I didn’t stick out, but I never thought I had a choice. Even when I had a full beard, hair halfway down my back, and was headed out to British Columbia to start a commune, I figured that anyone born and raised the way I was would be doing the same thing; I thought I was white bread.
When I didn’t eat or sleep for two weeks, lost twenty-five pounds, and came to in a nuthouse with labels like schizophrenic and paranoid being thrown around, that was the first thing in my life that seemed not white bread. The downside of not sticking out, not being a high-wire act, was that I didn’t have any excuses. The other thing was that I probably would never be loved.
After the orphans came, I tried to be as little trouble as possible. Breathing a little less air and taking up a little less space seemed like the least I could do. I moved into an attic space over the kitchen that you couldn’t stand up in and told myself and everyone else that I liked it, another wolf den. I tried to breathe next to no air and leave next to no footprints.
A psychotic break is the exact opposite of not taking up much space and being as little trouble as possible.
“Mark’s in the hospital.”
It hurt my feelings that no one, during my first series of breaks, in the seventies, or the last one, in the eighties, ever asked, “What kind of hospital?”
I’ve found it helps a lot to get older. Now when honking cars start sounding like my name or other things happen that could be the voices warming up, I’m not thrilled or terrified. “I’ve got a lot going on,” I say. “You’ll have to wait your turn.”
If I wasn’t optimistic, who was?
(Vonnegut family photo)
chapter 4
Hippie
To live outside the law you must be honest.
—Bob Dylan
I went through junior high, high school, prep school, and college like an unremarkable person. I tried to say things I remembered Steve saying in similar social situations to see if they would work for me. I did a little bit well at sports and then decided sports were unimportant.
I always had a job and I always worked hard. Whether it was mowing lawns or clearing brush or loading trucks, I liked to sweat and get into a rhythm where I could think. I wasn’t sure what thinking was good for, but I was resolved to pay attention to what went through my mind just in case. If I had a job, like pumping gas, where there were lulls in the work, I always had a book to read and argue with.
I took up painting and felt lucky and not particularly responsible when the paintings came out well. It wasn’t like I knew how I did it or thought I could do it again or that I thought painting was important. I did well on standardized tests, but everyone knew how inauthentic they were. I loved playing music but didn’t think I was good enough or had the balls to become a full-bore musician. People said I wrote well. I liked learning about history and literature. I gave up math after nearly flunking calculus in college. I took learning seriously and was probably perfectly prepared for something. Sometimes I thought I was a genius. Sometimes I thought I was a coward and a phony. I got along pretty well with just about anybody. I was serious about being serious and wasn’t about to adopt just any old notion of what that might mean.
My hair got longer and longer. I grew a full beard right