Splinter of the Mind's Eye

When you are a Rasor, hallucinations are par for the course. The Rasors are my mother's family, and we are all mildly schizophrenic artist-musician-performer types. Or sometimes not just mildly schizophrenic, but entertaining even through the homicidal tendencies. My own misimaginings have always been relatively low key and of a tactile nature -- walking through spider webs, skin crawling with bugs, stairsteps that aren't technically there, and other things of that nature. They don't bother me particularly since I've never trusted by nerves anyway; this is part of the reason I have a remarkably high pain threshold.

Visual illusions are considerably less common, and equally unassuming. They mostly appear when I am either very tired or under a great deal of stress, and they actually tend to make life easier. By and large, I find them quite pleasant and feel they add a certain spice to my life which might otherwise be lacking. Avant-garde filmmakers torture themselves to come up with the images that come to me naturally; everyone should be so lucky.

Recently, the pantheon may have been joined by auditory hallucinations. It is the "may" which concerns me, because the "may" is the indication that I'm having trouble distinguishing between fiction and reality. To be fair, this is not my fault. In certain areas of my flat, (especially the bathroom,) I can hear the conversations in the apartments next to me. At Uberstott, The Parents' home, various televisions and radios are perpetually left on at low volumes, which is enough to make me mildly batty at the best of times. As if that weren't enough, my name, "Romie," sounds remarkably similar to "Mommy" and sometimes to "help me" -- both of which are frequently uttered in crowds. I also have a remarkably good auditory memory, such that I do a full-body cringe whenever I think of a fork scraping across a metal bowl. (And oh how I wish I hadn't recalled it just now. How I suffer for you, dear readers.)

After much consideration, (and consultation with my mother,) I have decided not to worry about it. Yes, I periodically hear voices screaming for aid, but this does not markedly impact my ability to live my life unhindered.

This, I think, is the best definition of sanity, and it is an important one. We live in a culture of self-diagnosed psychoses where every magazine carries the newest insanity for us to try on. Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. Attention Deficit with Hyperactivity. Golden Child Syndrome. Internet Addiction. Escapism. Three quarters of my aquaintences have taken Prozac. When I went in for career testing, the psychologist tried to badmouth my then-girlfriend and put me on medication.

I don't even take asprin, so you can guess how that went.

I never did get the damn career tests.

This is epidemic. No wonder everyone is unhappy; we are constantly told that we are, and that the small things which please us are wrong. It's an incitement to violence; it's an attempt to turn individuals into labels.

The truth is that psychology is not an exact science. I can say this benificently because I am a well-trained and fairly competent (unlicenced) psychologist myself, and I can and have interned with institutionalized psychotics. There is a difference between people who are insane and people who are not, and you know it when you're around them for any length of time. It's more intuitive than the tests would have you believe, and the best evaluators are almost mystical. It's true that psych students can get themselves admitted to mental institutions by faking the symptoms -- but the other inmates can always tell they don't belong there.

I do a lot of thinking about why we as a society feel the need to assign everyone a lunacy, and I haven't come to a solid conclusion. At first, I thought it was very altruistic -- permission for people to be cruel or destructive without our having to hate them or resort to a moral judgement. So we can be cruel and destructive without hatred. Later, I thought it was precisely the opposite -- an excuse to hate, and a reminder that we are superior, or at least excused. Then I thought it was just self-absorption, false modesty, the joy of an automatic out.

Anymore, I think it's a tumerous outgrowth of our desire to understand other people. We are empathetic, and it hurts us to know that we cannot connect automatically. It's easier to put it up to insanity than to worry that the perfect union doesn't exist. We're trying to come to terms with our lack of osmosis even as we look desperately for the fabled "one person who will complete us."

The truth is that there is no one person. The truth is that we are totally sane.

The truth is that the decision to love everyone is a deliberate one and not something that comes as a birthright.