Mental Health Mullet

Having a mental illness sucks. It sucks so badly, I'm literally forced to pay people [psychiatrist, therapist] to talk to me about it. Everyone else is four sentences away from realizing they have something less uncomfortable to do. 

As a society we've broken through many gender, racial and religious barriers, so why is it that when it comes to the the stigma of mental illness, we're still a slave to the rubber stamp and it's arbitrary "crazy" or "sane" label? 

I've found that it isn't necessarily mental illness itself that is so wildly unlikable, it's the way mental illness makes other people feel. Mental illnesses are....strange and different. Tell me that you have cancer and I'll understand how to appropriately react. I know not to ask if you could beat your cancer if you would just try a little harder or secretly think you have cancer just for attention.     

Imagine telling someone with cancer that "Hey guy, it could be so much worse, you could be bipolar or have schizophrenia. You could struggle with depression or experience persistent anxiety.". But tell someone you're bipolar, and you not only relinquish any sympathy and/or basic empathy you'd normally garner from having an illness, it also give strangers the green light to ask you weird questions:

"So, do you have multiple personalities?"

"Aren't you like really good in bed?"

"Can you fly?"

No, yes, and sometimes.     

Mental health issues still weirds people out, which frankly, pisses me off. Because thanks to the combined efforts of three different mood stabilizers, suddenly, I'm the sanest person I know. And when it comes to psychological wellness, I've discovered the average person wears a mental health mullet: normal in the front, fucking cuckoo bananas crazy lunatic in the back.

They don't know they're crazy

Boring Work Days and Me: 5 Things I've Learned Before 5:00pm - Part VIII

1) The final scene from The Pursuit of Happyness. I'm not crying, I'm just allergic to heart warming inspiration.
2) To "show your butt" is a Southern idiom meaning to figuratively show one's backside by acting rudely, crassly, or inappropriately. To do so literally, is still just called Title 25 § 11.408.
3) On April 18, 1924, Francis Leavy, a firefighter, was cleaning a window when he suddenly announced that he might die that day. Moments later the fire department responded to a raging fire that claimed the lives of nine fireman including Leavy. Soon after, a handprint appeared on the very window Leavy had been washing the day of his death.
4) Shave and a Haircut....

5)  How many Freudian analysts does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to change it, and the other to hold the penis. LADDER. I MEANT LADDER!! (I didn't mean ladder.)

Sicilian Defense

I used to play online chess. Don't judge me. I got pretty good at it too. I said no judgement!! Really good actually. At least...according to my computer. The trick, was to master each game, step by step, move by move. But if there was any deviation in the sequence, I'd either lose or have to start the game again. 

Looking back, I actually wasn't good—as defined by the USCF—at chess at all, I'd merely developed the appearance of aptitude through a combination of classical conditioning and memory. And compared to what other members of the animal kingdom have accomplished with similar memorization based skill-sets, my chess game has been found wanting.   

But it made me think about the various skills we acquire and master throughout the years. Just how do we differentiate which skills we consider to be valid or successful from those that, like my chess ranking, are simply illusory?

You could point to commercial or financial achievement as indicators of success if history weren't full of artists and inventors whose astonishing talent went unappreciated in their time. Vincent van Gogh committed suicide a penniless hack at thirty-seven, while there have been four separate installments of the Sharknado franchise.

So in my search for the definition of success, I poured myself a glass of wine, downloaded the old chess program and committed to mastering the Sicilian Defense, a counter move that Chess Grandmaster John Nunn praises for "its combative nature; in many lines Black is playing not just for equality, but for the advantage...."  

I learned a lot that night. Black begins every chess game at a disadvantage. They're perpetual underdogs that must play smarter, think more moves ahead, make fewer mistakes, all just to level the playing field. Also they can drink a full bottle of wine before I pass out and put lipstick on my queen. (But it doesn't help her game like it does for the rook.) 

And when every underdog finds the elusive measure of success, it's often miles away from where the search began. 

"Success isn't how far you got, but the distance you traveled from where you started." ~Steve Prefontaine