There are very few features of my character that I am willing to allow people time to study. I don’t mind if they see them, that would be unrealistic, just that they see them in motion. I, bend, am best viewed in motion. This is a terrible thing. It leads very often to me getting my little heart broken, or being publicly shamed or privately cursed because eventually one has to slow down. Only that way madness lies! For when this dreadful deceleration occurs observers of any stripe can’t help but see the utterly horrific flaws of my constitution. Quickly they are just foibles, these characteristics of mine, but slowly they are god awful.
So it is a cause for celebration when I have an inoculated characteristic- focus group tested- that can be trotted out into the spotlight and illuminated for all to see. Well, dear friend, prepare to celebrate, because I have just discovered one totally benign and forgivably mundane feature. I am a rational crier or, if you prefer, a logical weeper. I cry rationally! Rationally, rationally, rationally! Now I don’t want to brag about this or rub in everyone’s face, but I am going to, I think it might be one of the twelve steps.
You see, being a Rational Crier (or an RC, as the insignia on my new club blazer reminds) is one of the finest things one can be. Let me prove it to you: I would prefer to be an RC over a stock analyst, or a Milk man, a taxidermist, a horse, a coconut or even Danny Devito. I am sure there are more things, but I haven’t the time to make an exhaustive list. So let us celebrate, you and I. For we are logical weepers. We are free of the arresting fear that we might burst into hysterics at any given moment. We see people crying at sporting events and we laugh. We catch out of the corner of our eyes the person who’s cab we just stole tearing up, and think them foolish. We are God’s children!
What’s that you say? You are one of these lamentable blubberers?
…
Well, my first thought is that this is never going to work. The thrill is gone, the romance is dead. And yet, I have already invested some four hundred words into this relationship.
This changes things. I can’t very well celebrate my rationality among the irrational. You are liable just rip up these pages and abandon what we have together. So fine, very well, let us change course.
Now I will confess- albeit in hushed tones- I once was a bellicose bawler, a sporadic sobber, too. It is because of this that I have such demonstrable empathy for you and your ilk (see second paragraph).
I have many memories of bursting into tears for no good reason at all. It was terrible, this life of mine. I was a slave to intermittent breakdowns. I couldn’t be trusted. I would be walking down a street and on one corner I would be fine but by the next there would be tears streaming down my face. For a while I thought I might have some type of terrifying memory repressed that was being subconsciously activated by un-contiguous contexts. I never disproved this hypothesis to a scientific certainty, so there is, I suppose, still a chance that I was once molested by a postman or something, but I would really like that not to be the case.
The theory I operated under- with the helpful nudging of psychologists- was that I was crazy. It was terribly easy to be crazy, fun too, at least when I wasn’t crying. Crazy people can do whatever they want, unless they are really crazy. Run of the mill crazies, eccentrics we like to be called, have it made. Once you get past the whole “I have a serious mental illness that will possible curtail any chance for happiness” thing, it’s enjoyable. The bad parts of my personality became symptoms. People- not just friends and family, but also authority figures- would write off my regrettable actions as symptoms of my underlying malady: namely, manic-depression.
Aside from the blank check of absolution that is symptoms, there are other benefits of being a manic-depressive too. You see, lots of people have in the history of the world suffered from the disease. Some of these people were also creative. Thus, conventional wisdom has concluded that all manic-depressives are creative. It’s not often that syllogisms like this work in my favor, so when they do I run them ragged. Everything I did was creative! The way I eat my potatoes, sipped my tea, buttered my bread, creative all! I wasn’t a very good student in High School, nor was I a terribly good person, so I discovered that there were ‘creative’ ways of doing homework and taking tests. One of my favorite creative techniques for homework was not doing it all. Tests were harder to do creatively. The approach I took involved taking the test in good faith, then, if the results weren’t particularly stellar, acting all crazy. This set a precedent that teachers needed to grade me on proverbial eggshells, lest I might have a nervous breakdown. No one wants to cause a nervous breakdown, teachers would rather just grade liberally.
Have I mentioned the social benefits of a Bipolar diagnosis? There are many! (Christ, I feel like I am trying to sell you aluminum siding.) Manic-Depressives can act with complete disregard for people, even the ones for whom they have a great deal of care. We can be jealous (crazy), callous (crazy), cruel (crazy) or anything else that would were it to come from a sane person be considered wholly a fault of character.
Now mental illness isn’t all strawberries and champagne. There are drawbacks. Most of them are silly. Off the top of my crazy head one silly one is: bouts of crippling depression, insomnia and mania. The greater drawback however concerns the approach people take to you. For one thing, crazies are forever taken with a grain of salt. Our emotions are tainted so by synaptic misfires that real emotions get swept under the rug. If I ever had a real feeling, a rational response to something, it was written off as craziness. Oh how it used to drive me mad! It would drive me all the way to…to… to tears!
You’d thought I forgot about the crying, hadn’t you? No such luck.
The crazy led to the crying, that’s how it went. Now before we continue, you, dear reader, must do something. I have no way of enforcing this, so it’s on your honor. Only those may read on who are committed to change. You have to admit that you have a problem with irrational crying, and dedicate yourself to fixing this fault of form and function. You have a problem! That’s the first step. If you don’t take that step your recovery will be hollow and short-lived. You will almost surely fall off the weeping wagon. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but someday, someday soon. Perhaps you’ll be in a theater watching a Hugh Grant film, or maybe it will be at a birthday party, or a skating rink. Perhaps it will be in the rain, perhaps it will be on a train. Perhaps it will be here or there, perhaps it will be over there! So take the plunge, admit you have a problem.
Do you feel better? Is it as though a great weight has been lifted from your chest? Can you breathe again? Has the glint of child-like wonder been restored to your non-teared up eyes? No, of course not, because you haven’t done anything, at least not yet. I know what you’re thinking: But Bend, that was so wrenching? Do I really have to do eleven more steps to be like you, so pretty and smart and insightful and amazing? No, reader you don’t. You only have to do four more steps; making, for the arithmetically challenged, a total of five steps: Bend’s Five Steps™.
The first step is often describes as the hardest step. I am not sure I agree with that. The second and third steps are pretty easy, but the fourth can be surprisingly difficult. Well, I guess I shall let you be the judge. The second step is: leave wherever you are. (Easy!) The third step is: get to the nearest hospital and/or psychiatric facility. This can be challenging for someone in your delicate state, especially if you are relying on public transportation; the odds are you are going to be crying intermittently for next few hours. The fourth step is: have yourself committed. This is where the process gets tough.
To be perfectly fair, getting yourself committed is not, in and of itself, very difficult. You just chat with an orderly and fill out some paper work. The difficulty comes with actually being committed. Again, I know what you’re thinking: I’m not crazy! How could you think I am crazy? You’re stammering now: I thought you….why, I… well…. I, oh. Yes, here it comes: Oh my God! I am crazy! But how did you know? Well, friend, it’s a question of science really.
The internet would have us believe that less than 10% of Americans are mentally ill, but to this I say, “Bully for you, internet!” The thing of it is, I have, from high atop my perch, conducted some very scientific calculations and concluded that 100% of the world population is crazy. Let me explain: yesterday, I sat in the park with six friends, four girls and two boys. Our group had a total of seven people with a 4/3 gender split. I- through some measure of subterfuge and interrogation- found that 100% of the people in the group were insane. Thus, since it is well known that there is a 4/3 gender split in the United States, we can rationally conclude that 100% of Americans are crazy. Further more, if Globalization has taught me anything, it is that America is a microcosm for the rest of the world (they eat McDonald’s in Moscow, and cheer Barry Bonds in Beijing!). You see? It doesn’t take a mathematician to conclude that everyone in the world is insane. That, quite simply, is how I knew you had gone round the bend. Also, I was tipped off by the incessant crying.
Now I wouldn’t be surprised if you were still, at this late date, reluctant to have yourself committed. I assure you, it is the quickest way to get help. I am not, I should disclaim, speaking from personal experience. I’ve never been committed, of course; I am not that crazy. Oh, lordy: I am not that crazy either! Sure, maybe I’m crazy, you have proved that scientifically, but maybe I am like you. What was it you said you called you self? An eccentric? Maybe I am just an eccentric! Methinks you doth protest too much. Still, you are correct: there is a small chance you are not absolutely bonkers. Fine, well if you won’t commit yourself then you have to get average old therapy. This is going to prolong your treatment.
First you’ll have to find a doctor. It is critical that this doctor be able to write you prescriptions for drugs. You can’t just go some academic psychologist, talk therapy is for Oedipal men going through a midlife crisis. It will do no good for you. You need drugs! Specific ones, not just any drug, but a cocktail: it should be one part upper, one part downer, and two parts anti-psychotic. Once you have gotten the prescriptions from your doctor, you need to complete the fifth and final step: go to the pharmacy and pick up the drugs.
That’s it. You are cured!
Actually, I got a bit ahead of myself. There is another step; a sixth step (Bend’s Six Steps™): take the drugs. Take the uppers in the morning, the downers in the evening and the anti-psychotics anytime the clock strikes 5. Now you are prepared to enter the world as a real, rational person. If after a few weeks of steady medication you are still crying at moments that aren’t your wedding, the birth of your child, or the death of a loved one then you are a hopeless case, and you might want to have a conversation with your postman.
