Ralph & Edna

Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.

Ralph and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital.

One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool, Ralph suddenly jumped into the deep end. He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there. Edna promptly jumped in to save him. She swam to the bottom and pulled him out.

When the Head Nurse Director became aware of Edna’s heroic act she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she now considered her to be mentally stable. When she went to tell Edna the news she said, “Edna, I have good news and bad news.”

“The good news is you’re being discharged, since you were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of the person you love. I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness. The bad news is, Ralph hung himself in the bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him. I am so sorry, but he’s dead.”

Edna replied, “He didn’t hang himself. I put him there to dry! How soon can I go home?”

Happy Mental Health Day!

You can do your bit by remembering to send an email to an unstable friend…

I want ice water.

Assertiveness… What’s That?

A recent email from MyDepressionConnection included a link, Depression Question of the Week, where the moderator, Merely Me, asked the following:

Let’s talk about the topic of assertiveness. When was the last time you asked directly for what you wanted or needed? When was the last time you said no to a request made of you? How did it work out? Was it hard to do?

After skimming through the various responses (without adding any of my own), I was about to add it to my ever-growing list of things to post about later when it occurred that this issue has much too great a significance to my own situation to put off writing about it. You see, my answers to each of the first 3 questions is the same: “It’s been so long that I’m not really sure.” And my answer to last question is: “Extremely!”

Before I continue, I need to say that this is a very difficult issue for me to write about. I’ve never been able to talk about it! For a man, having such a problem means that you’re weak – especially in the culture that I grew up in. But, since I can’t think of a single part of my life that hasn’t been damaged by it, calling this blog a form of self-therapy would be just a big lie if I didn’t write about it. But where to begin…?

Amongst the many personal revelations I’ve made on this blog, I’ve included a little about how “advantaged” I seemed to be relative to many of the other people around me when I was a kid. I’ve even written that I believed that those other people also felt that I had it a lot easier than they did. And it’s always been in the back of my mind that they thought that I would someday use my “advantages” against them.

Because of these things, it’s always been important to me to show that I was sensitive to other people’s feelings and needs. Besides the fact that it just seems the right way to be, I also hoped that this would eventually ease the fears I thought they had of me as well. But rather than filling me with a sense of community and of being loved by my fellows, this has instead evolved into an obsessive need to please others and a deeply rooted fear of rejection.

I guess you can say that the fact that this “strategy” has never worked has been the driving force behind all those years of “seeking” to understand myself and my fellow man. But nothing I’ve ever read or heard has helped. The fact that no one else in my life has ever seemed to care about my feelings and needs as much as I did about theirs, in combination with their being all too willing to take whatever they could get from me, has left me with a resentment towards other people that is almost as strong as my fear of rejection. Almost…

When it comes right down to it, the primary reason that I hide myself away from other people as what I jokingly refer to as “an urban hermit” is because I know just how vulnerable I am to being taken advantage of, and I really don’t need to add any more to the resentments and self loathing that I already feel. But, even here, I can’t seem to escape from the trap, because there is simply no way to avoid having to at least deal with the people I care about and the people I depend on.

As an example involving people I care about, I’ve been having some issues lately regarding my youngest son living with me. Our agreement was that his stay would be a short one, and that his presence wouldn’t cause my work load, stress levels, or costs, to go up. He hasn’t lived up to any of that. He gets unemployment yet barely contributes enough to cover his food, and I’m still left to do 95% of the cooking and cleaning while my water, gas and electric bills go up! As a result, my depression symptoms have begun to get worse. But knowing how hot-headed and irrational he can be, I’m afraid that a confrontation with him will only ruin the relationship that we’d made so much progress in rebuilding. I’m simply at a loss to decide what to do.

At some point, I’d love to have a “special someone” in my life again. But people seem so alien to me any more that I just can’t dredge up the effort required to search for her amidst all the madness! Even when I just need to go out to get groceries, or to see one of my doctors, I have to contend with any number of rude and inconsiderate assholes in the process. Hell, half the time even the professionals seem to have forgotten how civilized beings are supposed to behave. I swear that sometimes it feels like the only way for me to co-exist with people, and also maintain a little self respect, is to start demanding that others show me some respect or else! But only a fool would choose to live in constant conflict with everyone, right?

You know, considering the responses that the Depression Question of the Week got, along with what I’ve written here about my own case, I would expect that helping me to become more assertive would be a big part of my psychiatric treatment. But it’s not, and convincing my doctors that it should be would require assertiveness that I don’t possess. Hell, it took years for me to convince them that my need for stimulants was more than just “drug seeking behavior.”

I want ice water.

Funny Follow Ups

In my Well, So Much For Change post, I mentioned how the election of Scott Brown to take up the late Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat has actually only managed to prove that nothing ever really changes in American politics at all. I didn’t see the need to be all dramatic about it since it is, after all, just another example of the huge, never ending, circle jerk of American politics.

But if you if you happen to like dramatics and circle jerks, then you’ll really get your rocks off watching Keith Olbermann’s response to The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart getting on him about his dramatic pronouncements about Massachusetts’ new US Senator:

And I wish that my Free At Last? post had been half as funny as what John Oliver had to say in this piece from The Daily Show:

The Daily Show's John Oliver celebrates the Supreme Court decision to finally award corporations their long-denied rights.

Thank goodness there are professionals out there who’re so eager to help a struggling blogger out.

I want ice water.

You Just Can’t Make This Stuff Up

You’ve got to love newspaper reporting and ads.
There are some real gems in this bunch.
(Click to enlarge)

I want ice water.

We Never Stop Thinking Of You!

You’ll never be alone again!

I want ice water.