WE'RE ALL MAD HERE

I cannot remember a time when I wasn't interested in mental illness, whether that meant birth defects, emotional instability, or outrageous prodigies. Of course, I do not mean to demean these people by saying that they fascinate me - that would be hypocritical.

Minds interest me because most people have different ones - and most people are trained to think a certain way, therefore effectively squashing the uniqueness of their own brain while parroting the words of a culture that celebrates the very meaning of "unique", simultaneously twisting the true definition of the word.

I write about what I like to call, "the Different." I include myself among them. Many people, secretly, would include themselves as well. These are the thinkers, the dreamers, the lonely, the artists, the depressed, the intellectual, the autistic, the introverted, the free spirits, the social butterflies who don't care what others think about them - and I group all of these together not because I mean to make fun of who they are but because they have the "Different" capability of seeing beyond our culture. The autistic boy who, the minute he steps into a pool, becomes a mermaid. The emo guitarist who sits on a park bench and waits for an epiphany, clean for all of a week but forever, someday. The aging woman who expresses herself through dance because she believes in something that society would not approve of - something she can't even talk about in her workplace. She knows she will be bullied. She has been before. They all have.

Society.

And Society would say that we are all the same. Society, in it's effort to celebrate the "uniqueness" of humanity, has turned the young men and women of this generation into robots with very strong beliefs and very weak morals, very high tolerance and very low compassion. Teens will picket about anything but when one Christian stands up for what he believes on Facebook, a volley of Society's arrows condemn his "intolerance". Millennials march in parades but these same ones will be ignoring the drunks who stumble out of McHearney's Irish Pub at midnight - or maybe they will be counted among them, bleary eyed - and Society says that twenty-somethings are just acting like twenty-somethings.

"The Different" are the ones who can see past this veil - or who see straight through it.

A year ago I wrote a short story about one of "the Different" and it was published in an Oxford journal called the Paper Punt. I entitled it WE'RE ALL MAD HERE, a reference to Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND (which was largely commercialized in Oxford due to the fact that Carroll lived there when he wrote it, but that had nothing to do with my inspiration.) The work follows a young man who suffers from a schizoid personality disorder with obsessive tendencies, and actually took a fair amount of research for only 2014 words. The piece actually won an award because it was so different from the others that were published - and this is because it is a first person account from the point of view of someone special. Someone "Different". (FOR YOUR BENEFIT, I HAVE INCLUDED THIS SHORT STORY IN THE EXTRAS TAB).

“Martin.” She said. It was his name. He couldn’t remember hers, even though he knew she had told him the last time she had seen him. “I’m Alice.” She said, as if in answer to his question, as if she’d said the same thing a hundred times.

I believe that the "Different" view the world through lenses that are clean from the filth of Society. Whether they were born that way or become that way, they can see clearly. But I'll go even further than that. I think that everyone can be "Different": if they choose. One must only take a step back and look at our culture, our Society, and attempt to see it objectively. And that is why I write on the mentally "Different" - not only to share their viewpoint, but to share their clarity.

SINCERELY,