For the past few weeks, I started to worry a bit that I was going crazy. I figured I was finally losing it. I found myself compelled to do strange things, and I didn't really know why.
I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and scissored off a few inches of long straggled hair that I had just let grow wild for the past few years. I hadn't been shaving much, and hadn't had a haircut in a few years. I had been going for an abandoned lot kind of look. I just wanted the world to know that the premises were not being taken care, that they were unsafe, that you should stay away for your own good. At any point you could stumble through an ant's nest, or step on a rusty nail. You might get an infection from that nail, and you wouldn't die, but it would hurt like hell and maybe the first round of antibiotics aren't very effective and they switch you to another drug, which works, but it makes you sick. You beat it. You feel better eventually, but maybe you'll always have a twinge of pain in the sole of your foot before a thunderstorm or when you stretch just the right way, like shifting forward onto the balls of your feet to get a serving bowl from atop the highest shelf in the kitchen. Sometimes the pain is shallow, and you just remember to never go exploring in abandoned lots, and sometimes the pain is deep and you feel like you're pushing your foot onto that rusty nail again, and it all comes back, the pain, the aftermath, how long it took till you felt better again, and maybe you drop that bowl and it falls to the floor and shatters. You just have to protect yourself.
So I was leaving my hair long, not shaving, not really caring, leaving this lot unkempt, nature's way of saying do not touch, so no one would come around and get hurt, and one day I just cut a few of the worst inches off. I don't know why. I just did. I guess, if you want to take the above metaphor out to it's logical conclusion, I realized that having a lot you don't care for increases the risk of people being hurt. The correct response is that you actually work on that lot. You clean it up. You mow. You tear down the ruins of the previous structures and build a new foundation. You reestablish connections to utilities. You build something. You sell it. People move in. They use the lot. That is being a responsible person.
The other thing I did recently which I thought seemed a little crazy, was make an outline of things to do to improve my life. I know that doesn't sound crazy, but it a had a multiple paragraph intro, a kind of corporate jargon style. It was weird, or at least I thought so. As I made the actual outline, though, I began to get a much better perspective on some things that I needed to work on. All those things that I needed to do, from getting new tires to self development, didn't seem as insanely overwhelming as they had before. I had built this tower in my head of all the things that I needed to do in my life, and was so intimidated that I was effectively paralyzed, but looking at them as bullets on an outline opened a door in the tower revealing a staircase. Maybe it wasn't an impossible attempt to scale a sheer tower, but instead a long journey with many steps. This crazy thing I did helped. I went back to it. I added things. I crossed things out when I completed them. I feel like maybe I am moving again, just a little, but some.
So, these things that I thought were crazy are instead little pieces of sanity creeping back through, bobbing up to the surface. The truth is that I have been crazy a long time. I have been so depressed. The past two years have been real hard, and the two years preceding that were difficult too. I feel like maybe I am coming to an end of this darkness. I think my mind has had enough of this, and is implementing it's own plan to get me better.
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