Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [5]
If you don’t have flights of ideas, why bother to think at all? I don’t see how people without loose associations and flights of ideas get much done.
The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you’re just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you. Your genes will fall by the wayside. Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?
The psychotic state is a destructive process. A fire can’t burn that brightly without melting circuits. Making allowances for individual tolerances and intensity and duration of the breaks, complete functional recovery becomes increasingly unlikely much beyond about eight or nine breaks. Fixed delusions, fears, loss of flexibility, loss of concrete thinking, and low stress tolerance make relationships, jobs, and family next to impossible and then impossible. The biggest risk factor in determining whether or not you have a nineteenth psychotic episode is having had the eighteenth.
Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you.
It Is Good, 2009
(Painting by Mark Vonnegut)
chapter 2
Raised by Wolves
The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I’ve saved myself trying to be normal.
I grew up on Cape Cod. The vine forest a couple hundred yards from our house was two and a half acres of trees being wrestled down and killed by honeysuckle vines and wild grapes. There were flesh-tearing bull briars throughout the lower level. There was one path that got you into the vine forest and out the other side, where the abandoned apple orchard and old foundation were. I could hit that wall of green at a full run with a knife and fishing rod and disappear. I doubt anyone could have followed me even if they saw where I went in. I built wolf dens in the vine forest next to the pond and imagined I could live there if I had to. My mother was storing canned goods and water in the crawlspace under the house in case of nuclear war.
I was mostly left alone to figure things out. If I’d been raised by wolves, I would have known a little less, but not much less, about how normal people did things. My notions about how to brush my teeth, what could be left out of the refrigerator for how long, and where knives and forks and spoons went were odd. Having been raised by wolves would have given me an excuse. But I just had beautiful, slightly broken, self-absorbed parents like a lot of other people. One of the things I couldn’t figure out was why I had such lousy handwriting and why I couldn’t spell.
I fought at school almost every day during grades three, four, and five. I won most fights and was never mad or emotional about it. It was just the way it was.
What I liked best about the stories of children raised by wolves was that everyone snuggled in together in a nice warm den. And then there was the part when the people find you and teach you how to talk and wear clothes.
I had a rich, full, and seemingly complete world before I knew much. My father tried to explain about sex to me when I said “Fuck you” after a chess game. I said it in a perfectly cordial way; it was something I had heard and was trying to use in a sentence. Kurt told me something about going to the bathroom in the same toilet that sounded highly improbable.
When I knocked a few dozen bricks out of a partitioning halfwall under the barn and started making a bomb shelter, it was meant as a present to my father. It was something I thought he would have gotten around to eventually. I was surprised that he wasn’t more pleased. He thought that knocking those bricks out made it more likely that the already wobbly barn would fall over.
At this time in my life, my father