Paranoia

The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893

I remember as a child, wondering when my parents would tell me that after due consideration and much deliberation, all the doctors in the entire United States had consulted and determined my brain to be inalterably and fatally deformed. My parents hadn’t wanted to tell me of course because our Idaho Dr. Marcus Welby said the truth would make me feel bad about myself and medical research had proven that knowing my IQ score would reduce my mental capacity to a lethal level which meant my parents would be complicit not only genetically, but behaviorally, too. 

Now that I was a budding teenager, acting as if I were so damn smart by questioning meaning-of-life answers that had been good enough for generations back to Methuselah, the time had come for my parents to break the sorry news: their daughter, the eldest in a family of five, was mentally retarded. I imagined how reluctant they'd be to tell me the truth but I had left them no choice. In addition to that bit of lousy news, Dr. Welby also suspected I had a terminal disease so horrible, so despicable he daresn’t speak the diagnosis aloud. What difference would it make? The disease would end up killing me whether I read up on it in Mom’s Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedias or not. I had this creepy sense that everybody knew about my illness and questionable intelligence… even my siblings. And that’s why they laughed at my jokes and shared their ration of animal crackers without complaint or stinginess. They knew they wouldn’t be obliged to share crackers with me forever. 

This childhood memory, which really wasn’t a conscious memory as much as it was a ‘feeling’, returned to haunt me when I was working through the inescapable fact that I’d been duped, scooped and rebuked. How many friends, family members, and neighbors had known about my husband’s affair and why didn’t they tell me or at least send an anonymous cut-and-paste letter in the mail? Segmented words clipped from Woman’s Day and People magazines would have been a compassionate gesture even though it’d hurt at first, but I’d at least question my belief that I’d married my best friend. Maybe clipping words from The National Enquirer would have been more appropriate since my life had degraded into fodder for tabloid news; only the saddest commentary I can make about our society is that affairs are not headline news and don't motivate grocery shoppers in the checkout line to fork over hard-earned dollars just to read about two average-looking people cheating on an everyday housewife with a middle-aged spread. Unless I was ‘somebody’ and my husband was ‘somebody’ and his girlfriend was ‘somebody’, nobody really cared and nobody wanted to know the details. Except for the wife of course. She wanted to know even if she didn’t because she probably already knew but couldn’t put her feeling into words and so it stuck with her, poisoning her innards and shrinking her brain and making her feel as if she were alienated and defective and deservedly so. 

It’s humbling admitting to yourself that you’d been talking with people who were privy to more information about your life than yourself. That sometimes, not always, but occasionally, people conspired to keep the wife out of the loop her husband was hanging her with. Perhaps they believed it was the compassionate thing to do, which I can relate to since that’s my excuse for silencing myself when I suspect a woman’s being cuckolded by the man she professes to be her best buddy. Let a wife live in blissful denial for as long as she can because wouldn’t we all like to pretend infidelity only happened to narcissistic movie stars and nagging shrews and the more everyone colludes ignoring the facts, the less likely it will be that it’s true. 

All my life, I’ve had these ‘knowing’ feelings that couldn’t be put into words; well, some writers can put treacherous feelings into words and that’s why their books are at Costco and they get paid to say what most of us can’t. I find it painfully difficult containing miserable feelings long enough to even know they’re there, much less describe them to other people. Which is why I use an adjective like ineffable when I cannot cram big, huge feelings into alphabet letters. Still, the average person doesn’t use a word like ineffable. Maybe not until they try to communicate with other people and share their truth so that none of us feels alienated or defective or alone with feelings defying description. When we attempt to define our feelings, that’s when must-write-or-die-people search a thesaurus for a word that accurately says what really can’t be said in the first place. We cop-out of a frustrating exercise in futility by saying our most profound emotions are ineffable. Because they are. 

What I have learned in writing about my life is that you cannot be literal and get anywhere close to the truth of the human experience. 

So when I read this poem by Philip Lopate, I felt a rush of relief accompanied by a liberating sense of gratitude because he described the teenage angst that had followed me into adulthood. He said what I’ve secretly thought more times than I probably ought admit on a blog about narcissism. And he made me smile. Okay, laugh. Okay, howl with laughter. 

We who are your closest friends

By Philip Lopate

We who are

your closest friends

feel the time

has come to tell you

that every Thursday

we have been meeting,

as a group,

to devise ways

to keep you

in perpetual uncertainty

frustration

discontent and

torture

by neither loving you

as much as you want

nor cutting you adrift.

Your analyst is

in on it,

plus your boyfriend

and your ex-husband;

and we have pledged

to disappoint you

as long as you need us.

In announcing our

association

we realize we have

placed in your hands

a possible antidote

against uncertainty

indeed against ourselves.

But since our Thursday nights

have brought us to a community

of purpose

rare in itself

with you as

the natural center,

we feel hopeful you

will continue to make unreasonable

demands for affection

if not as a consequence

of your disastrous personality

then for the good of the collective.

Hugs all,

CZBZ

Resource

Philip Lopate http://www.philliplopate.com/