Mental health is a tricky line to stumble on, and it's one of those things that while growing up, I never questioned, but realize that in the back of everything, my sanity was being tracked and understood by my mother.
My mother works the impossible job of being a grade school psychologist. It is her job to take kids, test them, and see wither or not they are normal, or if there is something more to their head that is banging around upstairs that requires something more. As a kid, all I knew was that she tested kids. I thought they were like normal tests, they just gave you a grade, told you how smart you were, or anything else that you could tell from a test. It was just tests, and she gave them all the time. I even knew what types of tests they were because she gave them to me first when she got a new one.
Wait a second. . .
Yeah, it took me far too long to see that one.
I'm not even going to tell you when it finally sunk in the excuse that my mom was 'just practicing' with me for the students that she would have to work with later in the school year.
Yeah, I believe that one.
That doesn't stop there. My mom, without hesitation would not keep work at work. All while growing up, especially when middle school and high school were kicking into full gear and I was attempting to have some resemblance of a social life, I quickly learned to never bring a friend home. The reason, as soon as my mom would see a person in my life, a stand partner, a friend, or even a random person that went to my school, she would start the diagnostics by looking at them, and then asking me a dozen or so questions once they were out of earshot (because that would be mean if they heard).
People around me were diagnosed, classified, and given their mental health updates without any regard to further personal history. It came clear to me that everyone is bonkers. Everyone has something wrong with them. Everyone, if you look hard enough, is crazy. People become paranoid, people think in voices, people have obsessions and compulsions that they have to follow, and people are harmful to themselves. Everyone is crazy. Everyone has something wrong with them, the tricky part is when you go past the light grey areas that most people live in where you're only sort of insane, and you dive headfirst into the murky greys of clinical sanity.
The one thing that scares me to this day is my own sanity. I've never had a mental break. I've never had anything go drastically wrong with me, but it's that self diagnostic that really makes me worry. I don't know what is keeping it all together, but I'm so afraid that one day everything is just going to snap and I won't be the same person I am right now. I don't know what it is, and I don't know what it would take to get there, but part of me is seriously worried about the circumstance that would pop up and throw my brain in a blender and make me need some serious medication to be anything close to normal.
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