MENTAL ILLNESS : EXPERIENCE SIXTEEN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

When did you realize someone you liked or loved was MENTALLY ILL ? 

Did you encourage them to seek treatment? 

What happened in your relationship?

Alternatively, write about your own experience with mental illness. 

What's it like to be labeled? 

Is it a secret?

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

THE EXAGGERATOR

One of my most beloved friends, who long ago died, had a way of exaggerating that didn't qualify her as a bold faced liar but still had the effect lies did at times. I'm sure she couldn't see it.

She was a highly intelligent and sensitive woman who I met in a fiction writing class, basically a good person. She was the person who critiqued with care and caring. You knew that about her.

One day I gave her a copy of a short fiction piece I'd read in a magazine that I loved. The short story took place in England. She called me an Anglophile.

I'm not.

But it wasn't something worth mentioning.

Then, I met up with one of the writers in our class who'd written a fun story and was also quite popular in the class.

His character and personality outside of class quickly proved to be no fun. As a friend, he came to share a meal. I suspected he was on drugs because he was so shaky he managed to almost overturn the table. Later I suspected that he'd stolen from me while in my apartment.

We were never a couple. It wasn't an affair. We never kissed - not even a friendly hug. It was just a few meets - a go see - with a classmate.

I was incredibly busy in those days and I just let him go. No biggy. Until he climbed over an eight foot security wall, knocked on my door, which I opened thinking it was the neighbor across the hall, and threw flowers. They flew past me and landed inside my living room. 

He said, "I suspected you were with another man!" Then he stomped back down the stairs and out the gate.

I knew he was crazy. There was no "other man" but also absolutely no reason to think we were in a committed relationship that he should express jealousy or anger. And this kind of behavior wouldn't be acceptable to me if we had been.

I told my friend about this. I was irked when it got back to me that she said that because of this brief go-see I was someone who had "trouble in relationships."

Nothing, I thought, to the trouble in hers. She was living with a paranoid. He was suspicious of everyone, especially a new female friend, to the point where he'd accuse her falsely of lesbianism. She'd had to let me into her life slowly. He found it suspicious that I'd invited her to an exercise class held at a community center so he sat outside in their car sulking while she went in and joined us. He checked doors and windows every night in fear of an intruder and I guess that's always possible but they were living in a decent suburban area, without gang warfare. Maybe he had an enemy. Who knows?

He'd let her support him for years. She'd wanted that overturned. 

That is a relationship. That is trouble.

It took a while for me to realize that the grip on reality was slipping over at that house. 

These were the days when hugging was becoming popular and there was even a hug guru who said everyone needed a minimum of one a day. I was never much of a hugger. I had never touched her. I'd read in an Oprah magazine that you should tell your friends you love them. I never did. 

I hadn't seen her for several weeks. She'd called to tell me she'd been re-diagnosed with cancer. It had come back and I knew the treatment this time would extinguish her hopes of having a baby. I was heartbroken for her because having a child had become her obsession. 

When she'd told her mother, the woman had blurted, "Why are you telling me this, cancer doesn't run in the family!"

As if it had nothing to do with her.

Her mother had depended on her to financially provide all the extras. My friend had even bought her mom a franchise. 

Her husband had gotten a job after all. It was a good job but he traveled and worked long hours. 

Who was going to be there for her?

I wrote a little note that Oprah would be proud of and attached it to a few flowers I bought for her on my way home from work.

She had said she wanted a year to be alone, suggesting for spiritual reasons, saying there were three spirits there with her. I accepted this, including the spirits.

I didn't want her to feel abandoned by me, by people.

My flowers included a pink rose for friendship and an iris for hope. It was a simple gesture. When I got to her house, cars in the driveway, I rang the bell and could hear whispers inside, but no one came to the door. It was early in the evening but I assumed it was a bad time. I left the flowers and note on her doorstep.

Her response was exaggerated. She took it all wrong. She sent me a thank you note. She defended her marriage.

The year came and went. I made no further contact with her though I felt sad when I thought of her. Sometimes I would try to imagine what she was going through. Had her mother finally realized her daughter was dying and helped her around the house? As I had offered to. Who took her to appointments for radiation and chemo?

I wondered. 

I told myself I probably couldn't imagine what she must be going through. 

I told myself she didn't want me to know. 

I told myself she didn't care if I was worried.

I got a call from an old member of our extinguished writing group. Would I be interested in a screen writing roundtable? I said no. No interest. He said he'd called her and she hadn't had much to say.

It was uncanny I know, because I rarely bought the paper or read obits, my eyes caught a notice. She'd died a few months before.

I decided I'd been guided to buy that paper, to see that notice.  Maybe even by her. The notice guided me to more realizations such as that I'd had an exaggerated notion of what good friends we were.

Maybe that's because when I went over to help her stencil the room that has been intended as a nursery she said, "You are my best friend. None of our other friends would ever come over and do this."

C 2021

THE SCRATCH THAT WASN'T AN ITCH

From the first that I knew him, I knew he had a skin condition. 

I brought him special soaps to try. 

I called him when I heard a man on a Saturday radio program promoting his miracle water that healed skin.

I said a week long novena, with his permission, though he was confused about God, to be guided to the answer - the cure. 

I was guided. 

On the last day of the novena I suddenly had the urge to turn on my television. On the channel that was previously set, was a special about allergies and skin conditions and it seemed apt. I suggested he send away for the show transcript.

I didn't tell him that I also had a tarot reading asking for the underlying cause, for my friend was always itching, tearing his skin up so that it never fully healed, even at night, even as he slept. He was tortured. 

The tarot reading brought forth a card depicting a youth looking at his reflection in a pond which substitutes as a mirror.

This was more telling than I understood at the time. It suggests an obsession with one's appearance. I didn't know until years later that he was spending increasingly long periods of time in a mirror in skin clearing rituals. The depiction also suggested a person who is trying to figure out who he is, as we all do in moving towards maturity. 

Another interpretation is a fellow in love with himself. I recently heard that Narcissistic people actually hate themselves.

Over time, because of small comments that some of his long time friends from his high school said to me, such as that he was "stuck" in high school, that he "always had to have his way," or that he was showing up for work so late that employees sat around waiting for him because of his skin rituals, I began to think.

I understood that he had not left his high school girlfriend behind, though she was long partnered and the mother of two in a distant city. She was an obsession and an excuse for why he just wasn't attracted enough or interested enough in other women.

As an employer he was quite liberal about letting employees take time off - even weeks. They got the work done. I had a boss who spent his afternoons partying when he was supposed to be out visiting good customers so I wasn't sure an absent boss was a problem. We were glad when this moody man wasn't in the office. I thought that for his employees his not being there could be a good thing.

My friend had a good sense of humor too. I wasn't prepared to call it a "compensation."

Some of his friends accepted he had a condition.

Absolutely no one called it a disability.

They were all entitled to their opinion, their own experience, but years later I didn't know if they had been honorable in saying so little and not telling me more sooner. Why hadn't they? My guess is a mix of pity, respect for privacy, ignorance, and a competitive attitude towards me - for some time the new best friend.

I thought of him as good and true. It takes time to know someone you thought so well of isn't.

Slowly, by incident, his illness began to hurt our friendship. I wanted him to get well, if that was possible, and the real medical issues that were present made it difficult to know how much was psychological.

He went to a medical doctor who basically was in business to give out prescriptions including psychotropics. He got a common antidepressant from him which he said did not help. Not a referral to a therapist. No.

Actually, my scratchy friend said, the meds made things worse because now he had no libido. I noticed that while he was on them he turned into a snotty person, arrogant and pompous. I was glad when he talked back to the meds, quite popular at the time, and threw the pills away.

Then, one day on the phone he said he was in pain from a physical issue not related to the skin condition. It sounded like a pulled muscle. He was at his wit's end. There was a hint of suicidal thoughts. I called one of his other women friends who I liked. I said I was really worried. Did she know of a good medical doctor because I didn't.

She seemed to think it was all in his head. 

Years went by during which we saw much less of each other. 

One day in a college computer lab, in walked a man who needed to use the computer I was on. He explained he was earning a doctorate in psychology and urgently needed to use a computer. Though working on my thesis for graduation, I readily agreed to get off the computer so he could get on. I had been thinking of my friend with the skin condition, who never called me long distance to see how I was doing or showed support, but who I visited on breaks. I said to the man, "Briefly, if you don't mind me asking," and I quickly told him the story.

"We find with such people that they build themselves a House of Cards and about the time they hit 40, it all falls down," said the proto-psychologist.

So the next time I was on break I went to visit my friend at his office. He was running frantic. This was what he did these days. Hours in the mirror, late to the office, running frantic. 

I went to visit his mother, a woman I always liked. I hadn't planned to bring it up but she did. She began crying. "I hope it's not psychological," she said, tears smarting her eyes. 

Somberly I said, "I think it is."

If anyone had been aware of all the desperation, the antics, the seeking, and the trying this and that - perhaps not one thing long enough, it had to be his parents.

Denial that their son was mentally ill. 

Codependency. 

I knew now that he had prevailed to get his way with them time and time again. If his business went poof, they were there with the mortgage payment till it picked up. No one seemed to think he couldn't possibly keep a job working for someone else. 

Ultimately, what ended our friendship was my refusal to make excuses for behaviors of his caused by his mentally ill lifestyle.

He broke a promise to me at a very bad time, I caught him running away rather than face me about it, and I looked him square in the face and directly in the eyes.

I said not a word but I projected a message. "This is shit."

He ran to his car and pulled away.

// 

Over Covid-19 time, I found a YouTube video put up by a woman who reminded me of this man. She admitted her skin condition was psychological. I think her diagnosis fits him. Self Harming. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Then I found another: Doctor Lee, otherwise known as Doctor Pimple Popper, who was a scarred woman's last hope. Applying medical tests, Doctor Lee pointed out that the scars and open lesions this woman had were the result of this woman's failure to stop picking at herself because they only appeared where she could reach and other tests revealed she didn't have cancer or a fungal infection. The doctor avoided suggesting she see a psychiatrist and sent this patient away with medicine patches to stop her fingers from touching sores as much as to apply medicine. The woman said she didn't agree with Doctor Lee that this was not a skin disease. Actually, this woman was in better condition than my old friend. 

One time I saw him go into a zone where his eyes became transfixed on something far away or maybe something deep inside. Then he rhythmically began to scratch his legs.

We are not able to force an adult into psychiatric care or to take their meds. 

I realize this is a complicated and confusing issue. I know there are health issues associated with any long term daily medication. Yet, combined with other forms of therapy, some people are able to achieve a better life.

There's help worth trying if you're a picker. Or maybe you pull your hair or eyebrows out. 

It's OCD.

Being firm and not accepting him back into my life until he was being seen by a psychiatrist was not an easy thing for me. I hope his House of Cards didn't bury him.

Over the years he had tried everything but a psychiatrist.

C 2021

OCD is known for repetitive and ritualistic behaviors as well as obsessive thoughts. Hand washing, door checking - these are well known. OCD can also be hang up calling or repetitive message leaving.

INANIMATE OBJECTS MOVE AND MATE

She was the new girl in high school, burdened with going to the school where a parent had been hired in administration. An introverted genius who was always so serious. She was most likely depressed, depressed in that slunking slithering teenage way. 

That didn't stop Patricia and me from befriending her. We were open minded!

One day she said, "Jesus and Satan were friends. God made them both!"

Ok.

To show you just how open minded we were, when she, one day, furthered the theory that inanimate objects move and mate, even reproduce, we entertained this theory.

Delivered without a smile, without the slightest indication of a sense of humor, but looking into my eyes deeply, she said, "Wire hangers mate in closets. If you look in your closet you'll see more of them in there. Every time you look!"

"Ooohh. Wow! You're right!"

"And yarn. When you're not looking it moves to touch the other yarns and gets itself all tangled up."

"Oooooh!"

As the new girl walked the halls to change classes, she clutched her notebooks and purse to her chest and refused to look at anyone. She hated being there. She was going to bear it without grinning. High school was such shit. When would it all be over?

Patricia and I, still silly and innocent enough to think that the first girl to claim a crush on a boy could expect all other girls to give up, did dump the new girl when she dared express her crush on Smiling Sam. This we were not open minded about. Sam had the most brilliant perfect toothy smile that went on forever. God knows why he was so happy all the time but he was lit from within. Maybe his parents were uncharacteristically unconditionally loving. Maybe he had a bright future in accounting or management. His overall attitude and composure was open and friendly, just the opposite of the new girl who wanted him. Patricia had claimed Sam first and we two were horrified that the new girl wanted him and we had bonded over her dibs on the boy. So we stopped speaking to the new girl and didn't look at her to see her ignoring us when we passed her in the hall.

Sam married a girl from his church not long after high school, a girl no one had ever heard about. He must have been aware that Patricia had an obsessive crush on him. They had talked. She reported to me that he had said to her, "If I hadn't married my wife, it would've been you!" How diplomatic!  How impossible!

What made me recall this story?

I have yarn. This morning I wondered how it could've gotten entwined with the electrical wires of my clock radio and cell phone. To detangle, I had to unplug.

Fortunately, all is well in my closet.

C 2021

Seriously, April Fools.

TROUBLE WAS EXCITING

The phone rang.

"Christine, could you put my wife on," he demanded, not wasting words.

"She's not here," I said, not wasting any either.

"She said she was."

"She's not here. I don't know where she is."

We hung up. He had misunderstood. So I thought.

They were boy and girl next door and married young. 

I wasn't the last to know. He was. She wanted out. She was having an affair.

Immature. Badly Raised. Gossip. Trouble Maker. Missing Something. User. 

These were terms used to explain Doreen to me by others.

I don't know what I would've said if she'd asked me to cover for her. She hadn't.

She was drinking after work and with the other man. Coming home to her clean living LDS husband late and with boozey breath, claiming she was out with me while I was at home alone, eating my chili and grilled cheese and reading a book. 

Shit.

She bought her new man gifts on their charge cards. She said they were for me. Was she kidding? Macy's men's wallets?

She took the flowers he brought her home from work and said they were part of a display struck on Friday. 

She wanted to get caught. Trouble was exciting.

Her never married lover asked her to marry him. She had her out. If only he could get a better job, she said. So he got one, risking the loss of tried but true. He was heartbroken when she broke with him and kept the little diamond - his life savings. He went back to another state from where he'd been raised, nothing left for him in California.

How shocked she must have been when her quick acting husband sold their house sans profit, paid off her charges, gave her the car and a couple thousand cash, removed her name from his life and medical insurance, dropped her possessions off at her mother's, signed the divorce, moved to Orange, started his own business, and married someone he just met - in mere months. Wasn't he supposed to beg her back, buy her presents, prove he loved her?

She was terrified of living alone in an apartment she could afford.

Of course she remarried. Was he the man who won the fist fight over her that she managed to produce at a party in the Hollywood Hills?

ASAP.

C 2021

READING BETWEEN THE LIES

Imagine my surprise when one day I was browsing the stacks at a LAPL and found a book that had been written by an ex friend of mine and learned she was publicly speaking to other women on how to follow in her footsteps and grow their own businesses. She traveled afar to inspire and encourage. She sold this book at seminars.

That this book was on the shelf of even one LAPL meant that someone in her family had prevailed with a librarian downtown. You didn't just send books out to branches and expect them to get on shelves. Downtown had to approve. 

I had trusted this woman and her partner. I had become a friend of her family. I was well aware of their prosperity. Her parents were world travelers. Their living room was the size of some people's houses. Their sofa cost as much as a car. When someone had a birthday they went to a five star restaurant and booked a private dining room.

They'd paid out thousands in college tuition. And in front of me they said they wanted to buy her a condo as part of her eventual inheritance and to save her from throwing money away on rent. Someday she would inherit millions. 

She went out to eat most nights because she never learned to cook. When the doggy bags in the fridge started to mold her mom sent over her maid.

Her parents had earned a fortune honestly coming from humble beginnings. But her dad didn't want to invest in what he considered to be an unworkable business idea-hers. She had emotionally blackmailed him/them for not giving her start up capital. She cut them off and I was expected to support that effort by shunning the invitations that kept coming. I complied.

She, her partner, and her partner's parents had then pulled what we used to call "a rash of shit" on me.

I checked out the book.

There are books that you savor, a plate of wine and cheese aside. Then there are books that, if you're a drinker, drive you to it. Too bad I barely drink. 

I cracked open the book and almost immediately read between the lies.

//

I had met characters like this before in business. They so greatly exaggerated their youthful hardship and hard work to improve their improbable rags to riches story.

One multimillionaire I met at an event spun the web that he had started in Philadelphia selling pencils from a tin cup while riding around on a bicycle. 

Hey. I'll tell you why I'm not rich. One year I was expected to sell chocolate mint candy, the next light bulbs, in order to remain in good standing at my high school. Then I sold yearbook patronages door to door.

Another man I worked with would put on a sad smile for himself and tell how he grew up living over a chicken shack. The way he described it, you could hear clucking and see feathers flying around in the air. People would wait till he left and then another man would shake his head no and say,  "I grew up near him and there were no chickens. He was middle class."

But those men, who believed their own PR, hadn't been using their fiction to sell empowerment workshops.

My ex-friend had been unfairly fired from a job by a woman who fired a series of women because they were too smart and she feared they'd steal her business just as she had stolen the business from her employer. 

Out of work, she started attending seminars on how to buy and turn over real estate and considered walking the hot coals to overcome fear with Tony Robbins. Many women are motivated to have their own businesses by dastardly employers.

But when I read, to paraphrase, "I never thought I could overcome my poverty and ever be a homeowner," yes I thought I'd start with Bacardi Rum and Coke.

Then there was the Hollywood Women PR. More like Hancock Park and Fairfax District, but OK, people in other countries think anyone living in Los Angeles County is from Hollywood. Worth the sugar shock of a Jim Beam Whiskey Sour.

They had found an investor. I can't say for sure why they were so secretive about who. They said, "We're like the Chinese. We don't tell our business secrets." So I thought The investor is Chinese. But it was someone found on muscle beach who wanted to be kept secret.

I decided to drop in on them. They were visibly alarmed to see my face. It was clear to me that they had little to no inventory, there were no customers there, and the phone wasn't ringing. So why were they sitting there all day doing nothing behind desks waiting? Why wasn't one of them trying to cold call? Oh yea, it was a start up, but they didn't follow through on the leads I brought them in good faith. So, what was really going on? Maybe loosing money was a tax advantage for the investor?

Smirnoff Vodka Screwdriver anyone?

//

I think my ex-friend made more money promoting herself as a woman business owner who could lead the way than in that business. In fact the networking at these workshops is probably what brought in business.

Have you ever drunk through the layers of a Subterranean Bombshell?

C 2021

INSIDEOUS PERSISTANTLY : A CONFUSING DIAGNOSIS

By now you know that I've had a number of friends through the years that were or became mentally ill. These people challenged my notions of what friendship should be and how much to tolerate. I, as a person in a culture that has become more sophisticated (and for better and worse, labeling) about mental illness, have tried to both understand them and avoid being too hard on them. I realize I have taken compassion and loyalty too far in some cases.

However, in recent months I was reminded of something my mother advised when similar words came out of the mouth of Nancy Pelosi. Accused of hating President Donald Trump, she said in so many words that she was a Catholic and didn't hate him, she just hated what he did.

It's not always so easy.

//

The long unintended months of Covid-19 plague lock downs have given me more time to think about these subjects, to recall various personalities. Here is the story of someone whose personality disorder sent me into research mode. 

Let's call him Willy since there are no Willy's presently in my life.

Not long before we met, Willy had suffered a terrible and sudden unexpected financial blow through no fault of his own which threatened to demolish his livelihood and throw him into the street. He was even ripped off by a liquidator he hired to recoup what he could. 

He had a great number of friends he'd known for years longer than me to contact and reach out to, people I didn't know. Most proved to be Fair Weather friends. Therefore he accepted the offer of friends out of state to come live with them in exchange for work that had value around their property. He was in shock and grief for loss and naturally afraid but seemed to be carrying on the best he could. Our last meeting was tearful though not huggy. He said he was afraid to go but also afraid of what might happen to him if he didn't. 

I understood.

//

There's something uncanny the way Synchronicity or Coincidence or Fate or Something has informed me through the years. Though it wasn't always an instant understanding. Numerous times I've been in the right place at the right time to witness or hear a bit of information I didn't necessarily want to know but should know. 

This was the case with Willy. 

We met at a restaurant before he left. He said he'd call before he hit the road. He did not. He had called me briefly from a noisy gathering to wish me a Merry Christmas - I didn't know where from. I thought he had left, just gotten on the road unable to take more goodbyes and drove east.

Weeks later, when he should've been gone, I saw him outside his vehicle near a college campus not far from where I lived. He was talking to a young woman, much younger - no doubt a student. She had a very unique look and long blond hair. I was just passing in another vehicle. So for all I knew she was just passing by him on the sidewalk and said hello. So. He had not left after all. Ahmmm.

Eventually Willy did leave town. He sent a message from the other state. Everything was to his liking. It sounded like he'd made a good decision and had made a mutually beneficial barter. 

Then one day I met a friend for coffee. Her sister was there too. This coffee meeting at once had a serious tone to it. My friend said, "We were in a grocery store and we saw your friend with this blond woman and it was obvious they were - you know - canoodling. We should have told you weeks ago but were afraid to upset you." 

I had a few Platonic male friends and I first thought they meant a different new friend, a man who had inherited a house and a million and sometimes took me to lunch - not too much going on there. I shrugged. So?

No. They assured me it was Willy. The store was near the college campus. Although Willy and I were not a couple, my friend's concern for me had a strange effect on me. I went to the bathroom, a wave of nausea hit me, and I threw up.

//

My sense that Willy could not be trusted grew. But was I being fair?

For about a year I continued my long distance contact with Willy. I admit I was making a bit more effort than he was. I cared about him and I knew he had no family and had to make a go of it. I was curious to know what it was like to adjust to a different culture after decades in Southern California. I called him.

He seemed to be content, healing, busy, even happy. He sat in their garden and hummingbirds flew around him - a good omen. He said his friends had tried to matchmake him. He never mentioned having left a girlfriend behind. But one day on the phone he made light of a problem that was weighing me down. I felt it was my turn to be cared about. Was he oblivious? High on life? I got frustrated with him. I thought our friendship had run its course. I wished him well. I /we stopped communicating.

//

Several years passed and then one day there he was, back in town, he said for a few months already. He was looking to reconnect with his old friends and looking for work. I was one of the old friends now.

I felt more wary this time around. I wasn't sure how much information he owed me but I wondered if he had a secret life. Ok. Everyone (probably) has a secret internal life but I mean involvements I might not be comfortable with. Such as, I didn't want any psycho (ex?) girlfriends of his having an issue with me. He had mentioned once being stalked by such a person who had even broken his windshield. 

What about that blond? 

Especially because one day as I was walking in a park, I saw his vehicle parked and I saw the much younger woman with a very unique look and long blond hair. She turned around, looking exasperated. She walked away and I saw it was from him. I thought, "She cares about him. She's trying to help him. He's just rejected some suggestion." I thought that he had probably looked her up too when he got back. Or maybe they'd been in contact all the years gone by. Was she perhaps the mysterious "friend" of his from Santa Clarita he had once mentioned? Would he ever tell me about her? Was it any of my business?

Willy was around.

Eventually we exchanged phone numbers. One day he asked me if I could stow a couple of beautiful chairs at my place "for a couple weeks" until he sold them. He was downsizing. He needed an expensive repair on that vehicle.

I agreed. 

Unfortunately, I came to feel that this was a manipulative move on his part. Until he brought the chairs over, he didn't know where I had moved. He wanted to hang out at my place. He came over to share a meal and watch a film on Sunday night.

This became a routine. I had the money to buy food while he went without work. He seemed to be wasting away on a plant based diet but ate chicken when I cooked it. I served heaping portions of food. I send him home with leftovers. I liked to cook.

I enjoy working alone and without interruption for hours but am not a true loner. On Sunday evenings I just wanted to relax before the week began again. I was open to company.

But came the day when I asked him if he would help me clean up. I did shopping and cooking and clean up. He brought groceries once in a while but had never offered to cook or clean. His response, "I couldn't possibly clean a kitchen that's not immaculate," was just the beginning of his increasingly notable resistance to show appreciation by doing a little something to help me when I needed help. He wasn't offering so I started to ask. He claimed a bad back when I needed to get an old television and sofa out to the street for pick up. I'd never heard of this bad back before. Did he not swim laps at the gym most days? But OK. Maybe he'd recently had back pain.

When I asked him to help me rearrange some things in the spare room where his chairs sat, he managed to break a large casserole dish that should have been almost indestructible in a room with a thick padded carpet! I didn't see it happen but this casserole was precious to me and there it was in half.

Another time he came over sick. He was pale white. I wondered if I might have to call an ambulance. Was he going to die on my sofa? Whatever it was, I didn't catch it. I thought an infection was raging in him.

When he felt better he got snarky. I watched him break the thermometer I'd brought out so he could check his temperature. It was quick and deliberate. I thought, "So he breaks things."

He started claiming he would rather "just talk" instead of watching the DVDs I'd brought home but over time I realized he didn't mean to learn more about me. He talked about himself. He dismissed any talk about the past, saying "the past is over and doesn't matter any more." This blocked conversations we probably should've had. At the time I didn't realize that blocking conversation can sometimes be a form of verbal abuse. And he did select stories about his past to tell me. A youthful marriage. A father who stole a girlfriend. A stepmother his own age who wouldn't let him in the house. His mother dying alone thousands of miles away. He'd had a lot of woman. He was catching up with them, one by one. He found them on social media. They were mostly divorced. They mostly got the houses.

The past he dismissed was our past relationship. We'd pretend to be Existential.

//

He ridiculed my dog simply because she liked to circle three times before she sat. He had to know, as someone who had dogs, this was a natural dog behavior and is what dogs do in the wild to tamper down grass to create a bed. I shrugged and said. "She's a dog." (If I had to choose I'd select that dog over him.) Why did we spend no time at his place? Because he had a cat my dog wanted to eat. He switched to disliking her grooming. He knew I groomed her. 

Pick. Pick. Pick.

//

One day he mentioned that my complexion "used to be pink." It was a put down, a commentary.

Dig. Dig. Dig.

//

One Sunday night after listening to him talk about how years before he had ridden his motorcycle miles every night to see a girlfriend, I said the obvious. "It's always all about you!"

He blurted "No. It's all about you!" 

His voice echoed. I thought my neighbors had gone silent. I had.

I knew this was false. I couldn't recall when he'd asked me about me. I contemplated how reflexive his retort. 

The next time he called to see about dinner, I asserted myself. "I picked up a film I really want to see, so as long as you want to see it, you can come over."

He agreed, came over, and then vetoed the film, saying he had already seen it. 

//

"I know what I do," he snapped one time when I casually mentioned a habit he had that cost him money. He wasn't going to apologize or change.

//

An outside salesman, a man of good character who worked aside another salesman with a bad character (but who knew how to turn on the charm for clients) once explained people to me.

"People don't change much unless they want to. Once they get into their forties - fifties I find all that's left to do is love them as they are."

// 

Had Willy been so contradictory and obnoxious before he'd left town years before?

//

My complexion had never been pink. I tan. I'm yellow.

//

What the hell was wrong with Willy?

I suspected Willy did want to be loved, if not personally by me, then in general. He might have thought that if he showed Warts and All and was still welcome to share Sunday night dinner, then I loved him.

But I think Unconditional Love is for innocent babies.

Forget it.

There had been years before a moment in time where I thought that if he were not leaving town maybe "more" could happen between us and that I could love him as a man but now he wasn't likeable as a human. And we were not companionable.

He wished to dominate our hours together. I wasn't waiting on him hand and foot but he clearly wanted to be served as a guest rather than show he could be a partner.

//

I have a philosophy. 

We sometimes take more from someone than we can give  -  without intending to never pay back. Sometimes it's our turn to give without expectation of pay back. Sometimes it's not me or you keeping accounts, it's God. Who else sees every side to a situation? There are times when I give senselessly and it's not just about helping a particular person. It's because there's someone else I owe who has senselessly given to me. You can't always pay back the exact person you owe but you can Play It Forward, moving the favors, spreading them around, making the world a better place.

//

Just when I thought it was enough time already to put into a friendship that wasn't feeling friendly, Willy surprised me. He said he thought it was time that he came over twice a week.

I said I did not want to commit to being home.

I had just gone through several weeks of Willy breaking a promise to me. He had said that, because of all those dinners I'd made, he was going to take me to any restaurant I wanted - all I had to do was choose. I chose a restaurant and, just like with the DVDs, he managed to veto one restaurant idea after another. Was I supposed to guess his preference and choose it?

I began to think back to other things he'd said he'd do or we would do - the list is longer than what I've mentioned here. Did he like to disappoint? Was he always waiting for someone else or a better offer to come along? Was he leading me on? Why? Was it inability or insincerity to follow through?

Did he not realize his own behavior?

Was he really just too screwed up?

You read the title of this post.

More than once we had gone somewhere and seemed to have a good time but at the end of our time together he'd shifted mood, was grumpy or inappropriate, said something to end on a sour note. So I'd stopped making plans to go places with him.

One time he got upset when I ran into a public bathroom and took too long. He accused me of "abandoning" him.

Perhaps it was his insinuating that I shouldn't trust my writing partner (for no good reason) or that he heard I was into Black guys (with all the stereotypical implications), or that he "wondered" where I went every day (Was he showing up during the day without calling ahead?) or made some other comment that wasn't a question but provocation, that made me feel increasingly uncomfortable. 

Bait. Bait. Bait.

//

I hit the books, so to speak, trying to figure him out. Sure he was self centered and domineering. Was this his version of "masculinity?" Or was it Narcissistic?

But that was not all. He was on automatic to go against just about anything. If I said a Yes, he had No. If he said a Yes, he himself changed to a No. We were going to go. We didn't go. We had a good time. No we didn't. I want to spend less time. We should spend more.

I settled on OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANT PERSONALITY DISORDER, ODD, described as usually a phase of some adolescents, usually boys. It could be not macho but a defense of ego. Whatever, he had been stuck in early adolescence for decades. His parents were long gone. 

//

One weekend I was especially tired.  He called me on a Saturday night when I'd gone to bed early. I'm sure he could hear it in the sound of my voice. When I was hanging up without a mention of Sunday night dinner, he demanded, "You're not having me over for dinner tomorrow?" I said no. I said I thought I might spend all Sunday in my pj's. He wasn't cool about it.

Months after the two weeks the chairs were still there. I needed to make room. I had to ask him to find another place for them. He came to get them and cursed and raged at me. He had never before. It was the beginning of the final end of any friendship between us. 

Now I actually began to feel afraid of him. Thoughts started going through my head like, "How do I end this friendship and not make him mad?" Not good.

He did find another friend to take the chairs to. A psychiatrist who told him he needed to see someone but it couldn't be him!

//

I came out of a store to see him playing with my dog who I'd tied up outside so I could dash in. He used the moment to tell me old friends of his were coming into town for Thanksgiving dinner and I was not invited.

He never called me again.

//

A friend of mine suggested that Willy was actually quite physically ill, that he might be going without medical treatment for prostate cancer. She said "Cranky Old Man Syndrome" was part of that. He did seem to be loosing weight and muscle tone. He was about half the size he'd been a few years earlier. He had some other symptoms of that disease as well. He'd warned me not to bring it up so I knew he'd considered it. I knew he had become Vegan and an anti-vaxer. He didn't go to the doctor. He had wondered aloud about who might bury him. Perhaps in contacting women from his past what he was doing was saying goodbyes. 

He'd been desperate.

I understood.

//

One day months after our Sunday dinners had ceased, I stepped up to the check out desk at the library when suddenly there were two men next to me. Willy, rather than perhaps wait until I was done with my transaction with the clerk and follow me out and say a few words, had run over and lunged towards me on the right, interrupting. On the left side of me stood a security guard, an off duty police officer making extra to guard the library, glaring at Willy. Seeing me surprised, Willy immediately asked me if I was going back to my house, letting the officer know he was quite familiar with me. So the man backed off. That was street smart. I felt upset when I realized this officer had been watching and thought I was in danger. That day I finished with the clerk and left, leaving Willy behind. 

Come What May. 

C 2021

July 2021  I learned, as I seem to, that he died about this time in July 2018.  Unfortunately as a victim of violence.

HEY YOU, GET OFF OF MY CLOUD

Earning wisdom. Sharing it - should anyone be interested.

//

She was the Princess in the workplace and I was most certainly not. The Princess, a Prince lined up, regaled everyone with the flotsam and jetsam of her courtship, Country Club wedding, honeymoon. We listened. And listened.

She barely worked at all. And this was allowed. Because. She got the job because she really was a Princess, a Mafia Princess. Every workplace had one.

The city bar with bouncers. He saw her across the room and knew he wanted to marry her instantly. How he treated her mother with respect. That he cried when he saw her in her wedding dress for the first time, walking up the isle. A bad boy. He wanted it all and fast.

Before they went to lay on the beach, he got out the nail clippers and clipped away her toe nails. 

Spare me.

Him driving her to the hospital to give birth, the baby crowning in the back seat. The honorific Natural Breeder.

He was ambitious. He always wanted more. He got arrested and went to prison.

//

She was pretty. Demure. Attached and ironed. Finally, someone, perhaps tired of doing their own job and whatever she'd been hired for, gave her a warning. Dee Dee could you open that box of dresses, hang them and steam them?

She tilted her head towards her shoulder, just a moment shrug, and with a faraway look in her eyes said, "Hey you, get off of my cloud."

C 2021

ALWAYS RUNNING LATE

There have been two people in my lifetime who would run late when they were angry, in general angry, or at me - though it was never expressed to me WHY the person might be angry with me and I couldn't think of any reason.

The person angry in general who was always running late would show up to get to a movie theatre late, drive too fast, expect a parking space to appear by miracle, have us physically running to buy tickets, and get us there just past the hypnotic induction to buy tubs of greasy popcorn, Milk Duds, Good N Plenty, and jiggly iced Cokes (which might have been a good thing). Still, it was not exciting. It was nervous. 

The other was usually on time. So when he'd not call to say he was running late, I'd wait, going through the stages of Concern, Worry, Upset, Anger, Confusion. (Did I get the time wrong? Should I call?).  More Worry (is he dead in a car accident?) and finally Relief. I wasn't sure what the protocol was when someone was teasing a no show. Why ask me to go somewhere?

Running late is being passive aggressive. 

A friend of mine once told me about the husband she was divorcing. "He'll say it's up to me but in the end he always has to have his way, whatever it is." She gave the example of selecting wall covering. Basically he had veto power. She ran around to stores, brought wallpaper books home and showed him what patterns she liked, whole color schemes for rooms running through her head, and his reasons why not ranged from dunno to full arguments. 

Really he wanted the house.

And got it.

//

I was subject to other forms of passive aggressive behavior. Like other psychobabble terms used in this mini series about crazy, I didn't know what the term meant for some time though I was experiencing it.

//

One person I knew would go into the one toilet bathroom at his business if someone came in that he didn't want to talk to. He hid. At some point the person waiting would go through the steps of realization that he was in there waiting them out. Maybe he'd even gone out the window.

Step one: No big deal. Everyone has to poop sometime.

Step two: Lord, I hope he isn't in there sick.

Step three: Is he in there cause I got other places to go and people to see.

Step four: Oh, I get it. He's not coming out because I'm here. He can call me, he has my number.

I saw this person make people Wonder. Worry. Get Mad. Feel Foolish. And Feel Confused - a few times, not knowing why he wasn't coming out.

Came the day when I was the one waiting for him to complete an enormous poop.

He never did call.

He let me wonder.

And go unpaid.

//

Perhaps the worst case of passive aggression (because of the ongoing insufferability of it) perpetrated upon me and another friend involves two sisters we first became friends with in high school. These two have lively personalities and seem happy in life. You'd never suspect the joy they must get from annoying and upsetting us for years on end. How? By sending very late birthday cards year after year, some which even say belated, as if despite the years of friendship they just couldn't get the date right, as if we were to be impressed with how busy they must be that they're running late in life. But really there's this test. Is this the year the friendship will be declared over?

I was the one to give up, but not without trying to keep in touch. The sister I was friends with first, ever since we agreed she had rights on a certain boy when we were too innocent to realize nobody owns anybody, would never get around to writing back when I sent her a (snailmail) letter.

Passive Aggressive people always seem to be gaming in some way. I think in some relationships the passive aggressive person is trying to make you jealous. Because then if you definitely give up they feel it and they come around again.

I gave up and she called me long distance to say she wanted to come visit me on her vacation. I said, "You can stay here but I have to work and use my car. We can do some things in the evenings. You'll need a car to get around so you can rent one. It's about an hour in traffic to the beach."

And then she never called back. Or wrote back. Did she come out, stay at a hotel, and not bother to get together with me for lunch?

This is a test. It is just a test. For the next 60 seconds...

C 2021 Christine Trzyna

HOW CAN YOU MEND A BROKEN HEART?

Is this heart just starting to break or just starting to mend?
 

A SPARE PERSONALITY SELF REVEALS

He was a good friend to me for several years. Platonic. Like a brother, I thought, or better than one. So I knew about his search for a female partner in life. Over time my opinion about it changed. I saw a pattern of him rejecting good women before giving them a chance. He wasn't a womanizer. He put an extreme emphasis on attraction though. So if he wasn't real excited and feeling over the moon about a person after three dates well maybe he'd give it six. Meeting women and asking them out on dates wasn't the problem.

Meanwhile his criteria when it came to a woman's looks became more detailed. A certain kind of eye. A certain kind of smile. He had male friends who were womanizers. They were bad influencers. They would talk about various women - their looks - and brag to him about the women they claimed. This shrunk his confidence. 

One of these men was cruelly beautiful and comported himself around the music clubs on Sunset. He wasn't just cool. He was cold. He was a Brain Fucker that left women damaged. His arrogance was that he'd offer my friend his "leftovers."

I wished my friend would step away from this person or people like this but I had friends he didn't like too.

What was happening to the nice guy I once knew?

One day at a party my friend's latest date and I met. I liked her. So when he said, "I just get this feeling - I don't know - like I'm not getting to know her," I said, "You need to start giving women more time. At least a few more weeks."

How or why people fall in love is a mystery. Told repeatedly that for men it's visual at first, I often wonder What about Charisma and Chemistry? Have you ever people-watched and realized you'll never understand what couples see in each other and you don't have to? I have. In my very brief and long ago incarnation as a mall rat I'd sit resting my heels and watch the parade go by, wondering as couples walked by "what does she see in him?" Point being, there were plenty of couples who seemed to be into each other, even all over each other, who were visually not suitably matched. Something else was happening.

The woman, let's call her Bonnie since there are no Bonnie's in my life presently, had earned a Master's Degree in Psychology but said she didn't want to become a therapist. She worked at a retailer and was living in her parents sizeable home. She was intelligent. Slim and naturally pretty. No makeup. She seemed nice. If you made a list of the things these two people had in common, you would suspect compatibility. 

She walked around his house and told him she loved it. She said she wanted children. She said, when he said he was unsure, that she was a Big Girl and could have sex without expectation.

So they had sex. 

This was not a When Harry Met Sally moment. It made no difference in his desire to keep dating her and so at that point he told her "Let's be friends." (Ok. I know that line is usually B.S.)

She was furious. She wrote him a scathing letter. I had told her I was all for people honestly expressing themselves but this letter was a chakra killer. Most people who got such a letter would probably be horribly wounded and throw the person out of their lives and the hell with friendship. It was clear to me that she had lied about being a Big Girl. However, he and she persisted, he took blame despite her unfairness, bought her an expensive I'm Sorry gift, and, well, I left town.

When I got back to town, they were still friends and he suggested that she and I get better acquainted. At this point she was out of work and available. I started picking her up in my car and we went here, there, everywhere. Her parents were delighted. Apparently, she rarely left the house now, except when she borrowed their car and took off to meet someone for "coffee." My friend was aware of all this activity. He thought I was doing her some good. 

But one day while we sat next to each other at an outstanding concert, I looked over to her and said, enthusiastically, "Isn't this great!"

A male voice came out of her, surly and sarcastic. "Yea, it's great." I wasn't shocked. I was quite surprised.

On another trip, with me doing all the driving, I made a rest stop at a Mission. It was open so I decided to go in. Not raised in any religion, she didn't want to go in. "Look at the architecture and art," I suggested. While I lit a candle in honor of a deceased relative, she sat in a pew with big earphones on that protected her from God with blaring punk music.

Then there was the afternoon we went to an independent coffee house and when a woman with two sweet children sat across from her, she growled "I can't sit here, I hate children," I got home and called him.

She said what?

My friend was right about not getting to know her. She told people what she thought they wanted to hear, to please people and remain unknown. Under all that accommodation someone was absent.

She liked to listen but you couldn't turn the conversation around to her and get an answer from her about what she thought on the same subject you went on about. Tell me she didn't learn to do that without doing clinical hours.

Now the question was, what was her diagnosis? Multiple Personality Disorder or Possessed?  

One night at another coffee house, she awaited a call from a new man. He called and she ran out the door and down the block to meet him. Leaving me to sit there wondering if I should wait for her return or go.

Later, at a book fair, she told me, "I'm like a man about sex." She was answering ads and hooking up in search of a husband who would support her. This was pre hook ups, pre friends with benefits.

She had a collection of ex's. I realized my friend was just part of the collection. That she was back in the personality she'd worn when she first met him.

Bonnie was not the first person I met who had a degree in psychology and was "crazy" or the last person I'd meet who had more than one personality voice, but I think she was the best at hiding that she was sick and the most reluctant to be in therapy to deal with it. A friend tells me these disorders are biological but I tend to think there's a spiritual aspect. The friend tells me there is no Satan, no Devil, that Evil is in people. I think there are many evil entities, embodied and not, just looking to possess, if not possess, confuse.

I recommend M. Scott Peck's book People Of The Lie.

C 2021

A LIFE OF MOURNING

She was so heartbroken when her college fiancée broke off with her and moved on to another woman, who she called a whore, that she became a case of arrested development.

I've come to think of a first heartbreak as a rite of passage. Except when a person doesn't get past it.

She was a sweet, feminine woman. The type who wore soft pink angora and pearls, a Viking blond, lively blue eyes, fine pink skin, and a pretty smile. 

He had given her a dainty pearl ring. 

Memory can be flawed. I saw the pearl ring. But - a fraternity pin too?

She never dated again. 

Not once.

She became massively and morbidly, overweight. If you are what you eat, a potato chip.

I didn't recognize her.

She barely fit in my car.

She had crushes on soap opera stars. Fantasies. A lifetime of keeping men away with an armor of fat.

She went home from work and ate. Not just potato chips. Meals for two. 

C 2021

Notes: I'm aware that fat is attractive to a subculture. Mostly it's illness.

More Notes: This Isn't a Fat Shaming post. However, if the Shame Game need be applied, let's start with her family who apparently had/have so much phony "unconditional love" that they never staged an intervention to get her into a diet camp or foodie rehab or psychotherapy. It's easy to gain 20 pounds in lockdown. It's not easy to bloom to 300 pounds.

NORMAN VINCENT NOT SO APPEALING

It started with Norman Vincent Peale and his Power of Positive Thinking book, which came out in 1952 and was a precursor to the Positive Affirmation Movement. My relative bought it and believed. In doing so, at first, she was just ignoring the bad and promoting the good. Seeing the glass half full.

She had made it through the Great Depression as a teenager who had to quit school and went to work cleaning houses. No shame in that. Now, distanced, she stood high on a pedestal, a Greek Goddess. Hera. Enthroned in her kitchen where she gave dollops of wise advice the same way she plopped buttery mashed potatoes on my plate, next to the stuffed cabbage, when I visited.

I ate.

But moving forward, like President Donald Trump, she had taken to talking in the present about things as if they were true. She took to condemning those, including me, for living outside her philosophy of life, for questioning, and for discerning the truth. The real truth. 

My relative became more dramatic as she aged. She told her stories, in which she starred, over and over again. The stories co-starred her husband and children who worshipped her.

I was so sure she had more stories that one day I called her and mentioned my father told me they'd gone hungry during the Great Depression.

"It never happened!" She yelled into the phone. She went on, going opposite of everything he said. I believed him. Not her.

My father had so many stories about things he'd done for food.

I used to believe everything she said.

One lie after another.

They piled up like rocks on a corpse.

Once she lied to others long enough, she believed her lies to be truth.

C 2021

THE DIRT ON THE BASEMENT STAIRS

She was my favorite friend. There is no one else on earth I wish more to talk to about what happened with Trixie. Trixie and her unenviable marriage that broke her spirit might even be an awful welcome tale to her. She's one of several of my friends who are serial monogamists but into their third marriage or long term relationship. Trixie stayed in rather than have the stigma of divorce. These others never have the stigma of affairs because their affairs lead to marriages and long term relationships.

But the dirt on her basement stairs was the end of a conversation and a friendship. It was the point where the thought that my friend was actually mentally ill and that her marriage had broken because it was the both of them.  

Then I thought they had been on best behavior during my visits, which I'd cherished. The thought that she was Hysterical, Obsessive-Compulsive, and had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, set into my Knowing like a heads-up penny in just poured cement. That notion set and I can't seem to back up into my previous notion that what was happening was all her husband's fault.

Time honored wisdom is that one never makes a commentary on someone else's marriage. You stay out. It's none of your business. That no one really understands what makes people attract. That marriage is a mystery. That people must "settle." That all couples argue.

Oh, and one other mythology: that there's something wrong with you if you aren't coupled at any cost.

I was eager to like husband number one. Number one turned out to be a wife beater whose surprise attacks grew more frequent and vicious the closer she got to college graduation.

Hadn't she learned from her mistakes and waited a long time before remarrying? Hadn't she lived with husband number two first? Hadn't they planned their children? Wasn't he supportive of her career, willing to transfer wherever she was sent as she climbed the corporate ladder? Wasn't he always sweet to me when I visited, making me welcome, calling me an honorary auntie? 

And now he was doing no shows when it was his weekend to have the children? And dragging her into financial ruin? And he'd been cheating?

I started to have dreams about them. In one she was crying in desperation and I woke deeply worried, not knowing what I could say or do, feeling her pain in my chest. In another he convinced me that I believed her marketing, her PR. That she was a bull-shitter. I believed him.

She told me he called her "crazy."

Oh, the old "crazy woman" defense men use, I thought.

She said he was crazy.

But then I remembered the time I sent her a photocopy and she was a bit indignant that it had dusted off, that the copy wasn't pristine. It seemed she was affronted.

The time we were out shopping and she assured me that it wasn't that she couldn't afford a pair of distressed jeans, she just saw no point in clothing that didn't look new. 

The way she pointed when I finished a fast food soda and set the empty drink cup with plastic cap and straw down into the immaculate SUV cup holder and she said "Get that out of here!" She meant open the window and throw it out as we sped down the road. I did it.

When her sister moved in, she said she'd have to move out because she kept spilling things.

Her sister said, "She always has to have her way."

Her brother liked him.

The nanny quit.

I called on a Wednesday night and the children were screaming in the background. She said it was a bad time.

I called on a Saturday. As if I should have known, she said, a hairdresser was on the way over and would be there all afternoon, cutting everyone's hair. It sounded like luxury. "I'll call next Saturday," I offered. 

"No. We get our hair done every Saturday!"

I imagined the hair trimmed a sixteenth of an inch each week, no split ends, to never grow out of a style.

Her heels, reheeled every week.

I was calling with a three hour time difference to consider. Did she think I was a psychic who knew when to call and when not to?

She said she didn't want to email because she had too much of that at work. A letter, she said, was too much to read. 

Then I called once more. She answered her land line. She was hysterical. She started screaming at the children. To me she said, "They got dirt on the basement steps and I just scrubbed them."

C 2021

Notes: The same perfectionism that was a characteristic of her relationship with her secretary and clients had served her well for the first twenty years of her career. I always thought that after she had children her sexist bosses no longer saw her as career driven while they had wives who were stay at home mothers. I had also felt that her husband was unwilling to be a stay at home dad but I also knew she had pushed him to make more money. She had decided that her next husband would have to make more money than she and that she would only "deal" with people who had earned Master's Degrees. I see this as rigidity and snobbery. A person who is out of control inside sometimes tries to micromanage their environment and relationships.

Extra Note: March 30th. A sign that someone has NPD is that they think the world revolves around them and others should have an intuitive understanding of their needs and wants and serve to fulfill them. 

 

DENIAL IS A BIG ONE

 

TRIXIE OUT OF HER BIND

Mum, Catholic, said, "You should never hate a person. Hate what they do."

I failed. 

//

It never occurred to Trixie that her friendship to me was lousy. That she expected beyond reason. That I was exhausted with caring and that my exhaustion was contagious. 

She had the escape route few women had. An excellent job. You might even use the term career. Luck and and talent. Not education. She went through her life proclaiming, "You don't need to go to college to do that." It was her brag. Her conceit. 

Most people do.

In my innocent loyalty, I did not realize she was jealous. That she thought all women were competitive with each other. That nothing mattered more to her than the admiration of men. That she saw other women as enemies more so than friends. That she was a Lady Against Women. And that as Lady Boss she was despised.

Teenage Trixie told our young artist crowd, "Those feminists are crazy." Her eyes flashed at the eyes of the most macho, sexist man among us, a man seething with masculinity, dark and handsome as a matinee idol. A flirt. His ego burnished.

Walking along the streets in a university town with just one other man, a plain one, who'd been there, he said, "So you're a feminist. You're feminine though."

//

The literature teacher asked, "In this poem when you read "the fog came in on cats feet" what does he mean?

//

Trixie and me on a single girls beach vacation. "Next summer I hope I'll be here with my husband," she said even though she wasn't dating anyone.

But then, in those years when post college people with a couple years of job started finding The Right One, when Right Ones were everywhere, she did too. He asked her to marry him on their sixth date. And she dropped out of my life as suddenly, too busy in her year long engagement to care about our friendship. Only to call me crying - long distance - that her mum was against the marriage and trying to stop the wedding.

Angrily her mum said to me, "I wasn't born yesterday." 

//

How many fingers have I raised?

 //

The wedding was just family. I wasn't invited.

I sent a gift.

//

Her husband was uncommonly timelessly handsome from every angle. She was healthy like a horse. He made good money. She made good money. He invested hers. He made purchases without her knowledge or permission. He took off on weekends that didn't include her. He left her alone and vulnerable. He accused her of giving him a rash.

Her calls to me became more frequent. We stayed on longer. I never avoided her calls. But I began to realize that each call was her reportage of an affair she was having or, I should say, an affair she imagined she was having. A man at her job was the recipient of her flashing eyes. Everyone at the office could see. And some of them admired the man for, well, getting into Lady Boss's pants. That was his brag. His conceit.

Every call was her begging me to give her small hope by seeing small details with an optimism I was not feeling. I rewrote and retold her story to her several times.

Another friend told me I shouldn't take her calls. That I was an enabler. A what?

Long-distance, I realized. Her husband wasn't just using her for her money. He was using her for cover. He had thrown her to another man while he lived a secret life. She kept saying her husband was "perfectly good" but he needed - I wasn't there - to be with another man. Married, he passed.

I hated him.

//

She became Obsessed with the man at work. Whatever had happened once, they weren't dating. It was as simple as that. Bad boy of the office. Recipient of flash.

He smiled because he was the type of person who did, especially when it came to his Lady Boss. Some of the women there laughed at her behind her back when they thought of the way she comported herself around the office, imagining him - a lump - on top of Mrs. Smarty Pants.

Was I an enabler? 

One day she introduced me to the lump. Unsightly.

He made a pass at me.

He was disgusting.

She hated me for that.

//

Note: Trixie never got out of the bind she was in - her marriage - while she was alive. She continued to live a lie because she didn't want her mother to say, "I Told You So." Before she died, she told people she was a writer and a blogger. Just like me.

MARAUDING MENTALLY ILL

Back in the day.

Before diagnostic psychobabble became part of talk. Before you became wary of saying you were feeling "blue." When the blues were best treated by listening to the blues.

Before consciousness included realization that your best friend suffered their thinking.

A delight with morning dew and sunlight spun in the rose bush between thorns and bud.

Me - the fly who realized and wiggled loose.

That day when his friend who knew him since high school dismissed your concerns about his pain by saying, "But - don't you know?! He's just really really really neurotic!" 

That day you just got a clue. 

She had a decade on you. 

Sentimental with childhood, no one told you.

Where exactly is that point where really really really neurotic and mentally ill meet? When the day you realized you lost a friend along the way?

When saying someone was "crazy" was said with a smile, a laugh, even a hold-your-belly because it was meant as a compliment. When "crazy" was "genius" and innovation. When you respected unique individuals. No one was on trial for "culture appropriation" either. So what if they wanted to do something with their hair?! It was their hair. Crazy, man!

But, now you know more. Too much. Some would say better. Now you can use words like narcissistic personality disorder, self-harming, or clinically depressed with knowing and sadly, abandon. 

He lived all those labels and more. As the years went by he got really really really really really neurotic.

He tore himself up on a nightly basis. He spent hours looking in mirrors. He went into a zone while stretching his legs before a run. Where are you? Come back! Come back!

He was always running late and drove like a hellion, even the blind curves through the canyon. Scared the hell out of you a few times. 

Had to chase young girls. Really young girls. Really really young girls... Sunset Strip. Told them he was a music producer. Leaned into his dream of being a Rock Star. He passed on first and second look. Told too young girls who could believe their eyes... Went home alone to dismantle.

Did not see his aging.

Women as props.

Women as compensation.

//

Being around these people makes you sick too, so you make your escape. That's what you do. You're afraid their mental illness is a contamination. Cooties. Associating with that person means something about you - you mean girl.

How did you acquire all the clutter of mentally ill friends? Do you hoard mentally ill friends? Remember when you thought you were loyal and faithful rather than an enabler? 

//

Went to visit his parents. His mother you always liked. Tears springing from her eyes as she said, "I hope it's not mental illness." 

"I think it is," you said, quietly but sure.

Obsessive-Compulsive. Self hater. Something at the core.

C 2021 Christine Trzyna

Note: The last couple days living through history; The siege of the United States Capitol to disrupt the political process of confirming Joseph Biden as the next President, the fervent discussion of President Donald Trump's mental health, and the effect of the Covid-19 plague and economic disrepair, has me thinking about mental illness. In discussion with a friend, we agreed that we don't think of depression as mental illness. It is most often common and appropriate. There is a great deal of pain to process and a Dark Night of the Soul can be Spirituality Enlightening. We don't think a mere six weeks of feeling blue should lead to medication. We do think self harm and suicidal thoughts should require a psychiatric consultation. In this series of free writing I'm exploring mental illness and friendship.

SYLVIA PLATH and TED HUGHES son - Another Suicide

Just reading DIVINE MADNESS which profiles Sylvia Plath among many other creative geniuses and their struggle with mental illness...

OR is mental illness and creative genius linked? Sylvia and Ted's son, who also struggled with depression... and I dare say, notoriety.  (Link to Yahoo article may be live if you click on the title!)

"It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska," his sister Frieda Hughes said in a statement published by The Times of London.

There is one comment I have to make... If you get seasonal depression don't live in Alaska or anywhere where the sun doesn't shine almost everyday. Get yourself into the sun belt!

IS THERE A LINK BETWEEN CREATIVE GENIUS AND BIPOLAR (MANIC DEPRESSION?)

Click on the link above to be taken to the latest news of this theory and the evidence for it. (Of course your list of geniuses may not be their list of geniuses.)