I need my friends.I never used to.
But as I've gotten older I have realised that without them, I would live solely inside my own head.
A strange and eventful place.
Luckily I attract forcefully creative and emotionally dynamic people, and the insides of THEIR heads makes the inside of my own look manageable.
I say this with love.
If I wanted to live in white bread world, I would.
Having said that, too much of the 'Drama' and you will find me sitting very still in a corner.
Stupidity terrifies me.
I like crazy as entertainment, not crazy as a brutal imposition on my daily life.
However, as to what counts as 'normality' these days, I am beginning to question.
When I look at the news, and I see people killing each other because they thing that their God is better than another God, I want to reach in and smack some heads.
That has to be the most morbid insanity there is.
I am an avowed atheist, therefore unburdened by the need to seek responsibility or cause from a higher power, but even if I wasn't, the idea that a creator would seek destruction seems absurd.
Logic has no place in religion, this I know.
Men are animals driven to dominate, this I also know.
These two statements are inextricably linked.
To what extent, I do not know.
As for logic in my neighbourhood...sometimes also MIA.
And this is where my friends come in.
I sometimes need to check with the treasured inner sanctum that it's not me.
Twice in the past two weeks I have sat myself down with a quiet hot chocolate in hand and thought about the line between what is eccentric ( and therefore delightfully entertaining) and what is just mentally unwell ( and therefore way too much trouble).
The people who have given me this pause for thought are both relatively high functioning and educated creatures.
Both can be disarmingly charming and have moments of genuine contribution.
Both are egocentric- but then so am I and I don't give a shit- and they both nurture others throughout their day.
And they share one more common bond.
Professionally and superficially outstanding, inwardly they are both damaged.
And I mean broken.
Does this make them crazy?
Is that what that is?
'Cause if it is, I am pretty damned damaged myself, and that can logically only lead to one conclusion.
So I run my crazy past my friends as a mental health check sounding board.
True, the people inside my circle of trust may appear- at least to the outside world- nutty as squirrel poo, but I like them so it works for me.
One very dear friend insists on reminding me that we are all a little damaged.
She is right of course, and it would be foolish to imagine that without that little bit of scarring we would be able to fight the good fight.
One can not forge steel without first beating the shit out of it.
This same friend, and she will know who she is by reading this next bit, told me that her partner was 'dropped on the head at birth type damaged' but that she liked the type of damage he had.
That really made me stop and think.
Hard.
Is it that the crazy that I find so appalling, the selfish and juvenile kind, presses some button deep within my wounded place?
I guess this must be true.
Because if you tell me you believe in faeries, or that you remember things from your past lives, or that you once saw a ghost, or that you only eat yellow foods on even numbered days, or that place the furniture JUST SO to enhance the flow of energy in your room, or that you wish you were a woman even though you were born a man, or vice versa, or can't go into tunnels 'cause you dreamt that they would collapse on you, or that you secretly transform into woodland creatures during the full moon...I will be OK with that.
None of that will surprise me, in fact it will delight me.
I love the diversity of the human psyche.
But if your crazy causes me pain, or causes pain to others........
Not so much.
But that's when I need my friends, just to check that I am not seeing demons where there are none.
That's my kind of crazy, I think too much.
Which appears to be different to many people whose crazy is that they think too little.
Which I consider to be insane.
Reality is based on perception.
So , it would appear, is mental health.
Which makes the majority of us not actually crazy, just a little unwell......and the 'sane' ones, positively barking.
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