Mental…

Posted June 20th, 2003 by Sean Williams

It’s that time again. I should know when this shit is hitting me, I can taste it in my mouth. It tastes like metal, I brush my teeth for ten, twelve, fifteen minutes three or four times a day and I keep buying gum. Then I can’t get to sleep, when I sleep I dream constantly, and I wake up before my alarm. I snap at my fiance, I bitch out my family at the least provocation, I am always wishing I was drunk.

Yesterday, I even was dying for a cigarette, something I haven’t even thought about in a year. I just wrote a 5 k email complaining about Spam. Why would I complain about Spam when I get about 1/10th of what my mom gets? Or rather, why bother complaining about Spam? What am I a stand up comedian? “I get too much spam, and my wife… oy! Don’t get me started…”

It’s ridiculous but I don’t seem to know it’s happening for a few days into it. I have no self awareness, despite all my navel gazing, I always forget that when I am watching stuff happening I am also there happening and others are watching me. So I just barrel through my life like a wrecking ball and I can’t seem to get my shit straight.

Two separate things I want to talk about.

I romanticize my bi-polar disorder, and I hang on to it. I like it, in many ways. The depressive bits are comforting, in a way, because my mom was always a bit of a depressive growing up and I also have a sort of Judeo-Christian fascination with my own failure to achieve. The manic times sometimes live up to what they are supposed to be in movies. I’ve never run up on stage and conducted the orchestra, but I did find myself, eyes closed, conducting my newest mix tape on the subway yesterday.

(as an aside, I could have been conducting on the subway with my balls out of my pants and no-one would have cared on the subway. However, an Arab man was taking pictures of his wife and three kids on the subway and a black homeless guy came over and yelled at them for being terrorists threatening to blow up the N line. It was humiliating to see affluent tourists being hassled by crazy homeless people, I was ready to kick the bum’s ass. But the Dad dealt with it really well, just getting off at the next stop and switching trains.)

That being said, this fear of flying that I have developed is in no way good. It’s terrible. It is actually destructive to me. I want to go to California and see my dad, I want to be able to go around the country and do recordings or shows if the opportunity arises. Jordana and I have been talking about honeymooning, and I think she would love Hawaii, but how they hell are we gonna get there?

I find my mind wandering to being in the cabin of the plane. Turbulence hits, and I see the back of the seat in front of me, I feel my hands gripping the armrests and the seatbelt tight across my lap. And I hear women screaming. Seriously, it is out of control.

I have to fly on July 5, and ever since I found that out I have been miserable. Every time I think about it I want to barf. I even talked to Jordana last night about borrowing her car and driving out, but I won’t be able to get the car back. The bus or the train will take three days, and I will lose hundreds of dollars in missed work.

So, yeah, mental illness can be hilarious and you can hang your hat on it if you want to. But delusional paranoia, especially irrational, new found paranoia, just sucks.