Hi, all, Daniel of 2019, here.
I'm making this my interlude week, even though it seems a little early, because I've decided I like posting the sabbat posts before the big day, not after--like how Christmas movies mostly come on before Christmas. It's a matter of anticipation.
For the first time in a long time, I find myself having to issue a clarification.
Reading over what I wrote last week...I described Sarah Kelly as sometimes seeming "crazy." I think I did use the scare-quotes, I was trying to indicate a subtlety of language that might have gotten lost. I meant that she sometimes acted in a a way that prompted me to think "she's crazy," probably because the bizarreness of her behavior frightened and confused me. I didn't mean that she actually was all the things that word implies.
"Crazy" is a pejorative, an insult based on the assumption that nobody wants to be compared to a mentally ill person. Of course, it insults mentally ill people in the process. So, first of all, I probably shouldn't use words, even in scare-quotes, that require me to explain the following week that I used insulting language but didn't mean it. I'm sorry.
Second of all, the popular ideas about what mental illness looks like are all wrong, or at least, I've never seen any of the several people I know who have such diagnoses act anything like what people do when they mimic mental illness as a joke--you know, maniacal laughter, exaggerated reactions to goofy hallucinations, all of that. So when I say that sometimes Sarah acted "crazy," I'm not only being insulting, I'm also not doing a very good job as a writer.
That word doesn't tell you what I mean.
I've never seen Sarah react to a hallucination, though she's told me about some of them after the fact. I have witnessed others' reactions--a large minority of the school population had them. The reasons, in a psychiatric sense, probably varied. Some had a history of hallucinogen use and had "flashbacks." Others had "natural" hallucinations for one reason or another. Interestingly, many did not define it as a problem but called it clairvoyance--the difference between a vision and a hallucination is complex and debatable and I'm not going to get into it now, except that there are people who see things and appear perfectly sane. Other people see things and don't.
Usually when someone sees something they know it's not real in the normal sense and don't react overtly, except possibly by seeming briefly distracted. They might react emotionally to what they see--the vision might be funny, confusing, pretty, frightening, or whatever else--but it's the way people react to emotional thoughts or memories. It's not like people ducking to avoid invisible birds or that sort of thing.
What Sarah did that frightened me into thinking of her as "crazy" was to seem subtly irrational. The "weird" or "off" behavior I noticed before she was hospitalized didn't come back, but sometimes when she spoke she would sound like she was speaking from inside the illogic of a dream. More often she was simply easily distracted or confused. I don't know how much of it was her meds and how much was the disease. It never looked goofy, free-spirited, or fun--she is all those things, but only when she's healthy.
I also said she couldn't be much of a mother--that, too, needs clarification. She couldn't be much of a care-giver, not for the first several years of Sean's life, not so much because of the dream-logic issue, though that didn't help, but more because she couldn't handle a lot of stress. But of course she was very much a mother in the other sense. She spent a lot of time with him, sharing affection and attention, while Steve and various friends and family took care of feeding, cleaning, safety, and all of that. Sean has no doubt whatever who his mother is.
Anyway, I wanted to clear these things up.
-best, D.
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