Mental illness isn’t funny. It’d be cruel to say it is. But it’d also be a lie to say its manifestations, if taken out-of-context, aren’t sometimes as hilarious as they are in-context tragic and sad. More than anything, though, in or out, there’s something morbidly fascinating about it. Family history aside, I’ve been the polite sounding board for the madness of customers or clients endless times in my scattershot life. When you work in a library or an emergency call center or the cell phone customer service purgatory or a bar or a café, let alone the lowest rung of the film industry, you absorb so much craziness often all you can do is succumb to the insanity yourself or just laugh.
People just want to talk, they are lonely and if they are suffering from delusions, they are even lonelier. I want to help people, ease their pain, some people that’s the best anyone could do for them. Humor it, listen intently, keep eye-contact, play along to get along. It’s a sort of comfort. But you eventually hear so many odd tales of alien implants in skulls, childhood kidnappings, building murderous cyborgs with Ed Begley Jr. and Bill Bixby because they were actually the doctors they played on television, transcendent encounters with Hindu deities that aren’t even from the Hindu pantheon rather from fictious American white-folks’ misunderstandings of the tradition, it all starts just piling up, while your own mind is left to try and make sense of it all.
I don’t want to judge. I have my own anxious and obsessive-compulsive neuroses. I have my own stories of nearly getting shot at by The Secret Service because of an ex-girlfriend’s poor impulsive control or delivering caramels to the famous Hollywood Rapist Harvey Weinstein. Doubtless without context and strung together in certain ways, my life sounds delusional too. Moreover, I wasn’t born with a gavel and powdered wig, I’m not on this Earth to judge folks.
So instead, to preserve my own tenuous half-sanity, I stitch those delusions together into little stories. I ask myself, “what if all this sorry bullshit what actually true, in one human lifetime, what would that even look like?” As if these people I try my damnedest to be kind toward are simply paranormal Forrest Gumps jumping from one impossible edgecase to another and I’m actually the crazy one for doubting them. No matter how many CIA sleeper agents involved.
Mental illness isn’t funny and non-judgmental attitude is a muscle that can wear out quickly. Regardless, I endeavor to make that center hold because it’s the only way I know to be kind. Psychiatry isn’t my bailiwick, I am a collector of tales, an aggregator of tiny facts, currently book-tending at the literary bar in a public library. It’s what I do to hold to that commission.
Because I always remember that if someone doesn’t know me well, I sound just as goddamn delusional as any of those unfortunate people I’m trying to help.
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