It kind of makes me feel better to take lots of photos of myself where I look nice and better than in real life like who cares if your insides are rotting and your heart is faulty, your outsides are still alright!
I realize that this is ridiculous but, you know.
I'm not a big fan of people making assumptions of me. Which, of course, happens a lot to all of us.
I wonder how much of personality is directly formed by our looks and people reacting to what we look like.
Maybe it's the number 26 but lately I have been feeling old. Okay, not old, exactly. More like an "adult" for the first time.
I feel like I'm maybe getting to the point where I could be a trustworthy upstanding grown-up.
I could at some point be trusted with a real relationship, work responsibilities, house-keeping, care-taking, childrens, and plants.
Haha that paragraph did not convince you.
I'm also feeling tired of old patterns and so on.
One of my favourite Saskatoon friends was in town this week very briefly I don't think I have a name for her here? Do I? How would I be able to tell? Anyway, she is very lovely and very smart and I hung out with her but first I hung out with her friend who got into town earlier than her.
These two women are two of the only three people I know who went through anything remotely similar to what I went through when Toad (who was my first boyfriend and also the subject of my story-telling last week, conversationally) was going crazy and was eventually hospitalized.
We've been tossing around the idea of putting together a book of some sort dealing with this sort of subject matter. We have found that there's not a lot out there for young people whose boyfriend/girlfriend is suffering from a mental illness.
And it's kind of needed.
I remember feeling a bit abandoned in a bunch of ways while Toad was getting really sick.
His friends had all abandoned him and it was hard to tell what was actual mental illness, what was his natural manipulative personality, what was him wanting to seem like a crazy hippie, and what was his drug use. Not that they're not all tied up in the same, but still.
And there's a stigma to dating someone who is going insane. Obviously. I think a lot of people thought I was just ridiculous for hanging out with him at all.
And I was such a kid. I was so, so young. And I've always been (and still am) easily swayed. I was so easily pulled into all of it.
And it's hard because frequently a bit of crazy is one of the most attractive things. Especially to young, impressionable, intelligent girls. It's almost like magic, I mean, he's technically a genius, he thinks so differently than me, he's so clever and has huge ideas and big plans and has a sense of purpose and confidence.
And there's also how sexuality is generally all tied up in mental illness. Which is bad news.
I think that's part of why I loved Francesca Lia Block's YA novels so much, she seemed to know about crazy and borderline crazy. And the romance and horror in that. If that makes sense.
My friend's friend is doing her phd in clinical psychology (?I think, I'm terrible with remembering which is which. ugh.) and so she has even more of an interest in all of this and so she wanted to ask me basically everything about everything that happened between Toad and I. And in some ways it was easier to be upfront with her (even though she was a complete stranger) because I knew that she had gone through a very similar experience.
I'm not in any sort of headspace to write about this properly today. I don't know why I'm trying.
I'm going to attempt to blog the story of what all happened with Toad at some point. I'm a bit nervous that he'll link over from FB and read this. But not really. I think he might be in the hospital again, actually.
It's still really hard hashing through all of it, even this many years later.
I've been feeling rather raw from it all week.
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