Help you help you

Mental Health

Vanessa Bootstrap, uncredentialed therapist, had such great popular success with her book Smile Your Way out of Depression that the next year, she came out with a thematic sequel: Stare at This Book Until You Become Literate. 

Curtains for the windows to the soul

Mental Health

Here is a boy whose eyes really do display the contents of his soul. It's not just an expression; if you meet his gaze, you will see, refracted as though through thousand-faceted diamonds, what he has experienced and what it meant to him, what he wants most in life and what he fears, the people who matter most to him and why. 

He will feel you seeing this, in some impossible-to-describe way, and he has learned, after much hard experience, that he cannot participate in the otherwise universal human experience of inner privacy. He knows that you, and everyone who has looked into his eyes, know him perfectly, as well as he knows himself, while he cannot have the same glance into anyone else. This is not fair to him, but he also knows that it is not fair to others. To know another completely is a dreadful burden to bear.

By the age of fifteen, he will have carefully carried out his plan to make it look like an accident when the high school chem lab's acid destroys those windows to his soul. He will be certain that it was the right decision.

As long as you look at it just right

Mental Health

"So you're telling me not to ask your competitors about you. Or listen to former employees."

___"Well, yeah. They're obviously biased against us, so why would you want to do that? That's not going to be accurate."

"And you're saying I definitely shouldn't read your online reviews."

___"Those internet reviewers are probably just bitter because they didn't, you know, interact with our organization the right way."

"Hmm. But I can read your own organization's reports and histories, right? If I want to know more about it?"

___"Well...we really recommend against it. It can be, uh, difficult to understand what it really meant. It's easy to get the wrong idea about us if you're not careful." 

"I see." 

___"So...ready to sign up?"

The real value of imagination

Mental Health

The forces of imagination and creativity save my life on a routine basis, but I swear it's not in a platitudinous or clickbaity way. 

I do not, as I dreamed I might when I was a kid, make my living by creating with words, music, ink, human taxidermy, etc. Whether or not I live a richer inner life amidst fantastic mental creations is a matter up for debate; if I do have such a place, it sure seems that my roommates there keep changing the locks without telling me, and it's getting harder to find windows to climb in through. After I take care of the mundane tasks of daily life, I'm often too exhausted to even think about working on extracurricular projects. My adolescent self would be pretty disappointed with the current state of affairs. 

And that's why I say that imagination and creativity save my life. I try to be a realist, which leads me to believe there's pretty conclusive evidence to strongly suggest (if not outright prove) that most things most of the time are mostly terrible. Still, I plod through existence. I schlep. I trudge. And I can honestly say that I owe that forward movement, however torturous or half-hearted it can be, to the ability to imagine something worth experiencing an hour, a day, a month, or a year from now. Or, for that matter, to look at the terribly sad and ugly world around me and see it through a different lens, not contradicting or ignoring the real horrors but noticing the good or even seeing how to repurpose the bad into something livable. 

I'm going to try to sum this up and be done, here: It doesn't matter if a kid grows up to be an actuary, an artist, or an assassin. To be a living human being day in and day out, in spite of the observable realities, creativity and imagination are some of the best survival tools you could ask for.

Prepared for life

Mental Health

Being a living human being is never easy. To cope with the difficulty, Gary spent weeks and months compiling complex lists and decision trees, and made sure to run through them repeatedly until they were automatic and totally reliable. This was how he would live his life, how he would survive the conditions in which he found himself.

The system worked fantastically until about the time Gary turned twelve, when he and his family moved to a different state, his parents began to work at home, the family dog ran away, and he began to experience puberty. At each major change, he told himself he would just need to develop a modified routine. Before long, working on the routines was itself the only consistent routine, and Gary was perpetually behind on his reaction to every aspect of his life as a human being. 

The kind of person who does that

Mental Health

Some words cannot be unsaid. When she told him that, if he were a cough drop, he would be the lemon-flavored kind, he knew that things would never be the same between them. He knew he wasn't consistently a grapefruit, but he put a lot of effort into at least being at orange's level.

Metamorphosis? More like "meh"-tamorphosis

Mental Health

As Greg Sampson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found that he had been transformed into a monstrous beetle. He remained motionless for several hours after discovering this fact, but it was not due to the nature of his new body; this was simply his usual habit every morning.

No one else in the house discovered the terrible change until that evening, when his mother descended to the basement and uneasily knocked at his bedroom door several times, at first asking if he would like to join her and his step-father for dinner, and then growing increasingly concerned not to hear the usual grunt of assent from Greg. Greg, who was mightily irked that his new insectile legs couldn't operate a touchscreen, was watching Netflix on his desktop computer, and tried to respond to his mother's through-the-door questioning in the usual way but found that only a threatening hiss would emerge from his new vocal physiology. 

His mother evidently couldn't hear the hiss, and opened the door with eyes at first averted and then, when no cries of "Geez, mom!" came, dared to look around the room. This is when she saw what had become of her son.