innerviews_blown_cherry frAnk i have a lot of respect for your writing and find myself often lingering at your posts for they leave lasting impressions. especially today's bohemian story. i love when skites draw us into their intimate worlds. your blathe about the film, "iris," (iris_the_film) was very interesting and pregnant with reflection. the whole idea of words and their meanings and values and use. you asked questions that nobody responded to so i was wondering if you could? descent? but what is madness to those of us who live in our minds? have you read much of iris murdoch's works? 020324 ... . you probably want to stay away from that one. 020325 ... blown cherry given the passings of the past few days, and the past few hours, I actually am going to take the advice given by the above coward who won't put down their real sn. However I do promise to come back here, and hopefully when I do I will have a more thoughtful answer to give because I will be in a clearer frame of mind and will have had more time to contemplate the concept of maddness, it's realities and deceptions, and its relation to sanity and perhaps even me. 020325 ... blown cherry I may not be answering the question here, but I needed to blathe about madness, and this seemed the right place to do it. Is it ok to just be a little bit mad? I don't mean eccentric, I mean actually insane? To be such that others around you can see that there is something amiss within the reasoning processes inside your head? I mean, it's ok to be a little bit sick right? I've had a sore throat for 3 weeks, and I'm not doing anything about it besides taking a panadol every now and again. But maybe it's different, because I'm confident my sore throat will eventually get better. Mental illness doesn't quite work like that. I can see that she's just to the edge of normal, or at least, what has been normal for the past decade or more that she's been drugged up (see self_asphyxiation). I'm guessing that she's building up a tolerance or some such thing. Maybe the drugs are just old. There are newer medications on the market these days, but it's impossible to persuade her to change, we'd have to force it on her, which would require her being sectioned first. Now is that stubborness a consequence of her insanity, or simply a remnant of the personality she once had. It's been so long there is no way I can tell. You don't get to know your mum very well when you're so young, and by the time I was old enough to start to know her as a person, and not just 'mum', she was gone. Time and time again we watched her decend into maddness. We knew it was coming, but we would always wait it out until we felt we could no longer cope with her and she had to be dealt with by professionals again. And even that time when perhaps we could have coped for, maybe another two weeks, or maybe even a month, but we put her away for our own convenience, I've never felt so guilty. I still feel it. So now, I watch and listen to her, and I don't know who it is I'm listening to. I was barely here for four years, and still I'm barely around, so I don't know how to appropriately judge what is before my eyes, but I feel that things are not right. If this is what I think it is, it seems to be coming on slower than it ever did before, but she is on her medication. I guess we'll see how she goes when she's in the Philippines, last time she spent most of the entire 3 weeks in churches. Sometimes evil spirits aren't metaphors. And so the Romper Room mirror turns to me. I haven't taken any anti depressants since I said I stopped (messing_with_blown_cherry's_head). I've thought about going on them again since, but really, that would be the end for me. Admitting defeat, no longer able to control my mind within the confines of my own brain, my own body. I thought you would have realised that, but I guess I was wrong. And so I walk around and continue to live, am I walking around just a little bit mad? A little bit towards the edge of normal? Or am I just eccentric? Recreational drugs I can justify, but something that changes who I am everyday, every minute, and in all the ways I would normally live my life is out of the question. Even if it kills me, at least I will die as me. I think it would be fair to say that today I have felt largely depressed, more so than any other emotion, I was a bit yesterday too, but not for long. I'm still trying to figure out if it has anything to do with those girly hormonal cycle things, but I'm so bad at keeping track of weeks let along days that it could take me years to draw any conclusion. Being depressed, as I was today, means feeling the burning on the inside of my chest when some unwanted thought slips into my brain. A burning, searing pain that shoots out my eyes. Am I nuts or just emotional? How could anyone else answer that besides me? If I am the only one who can make that call about myself, what makes me able to say anyting different of my mum? No one else can see the insides of my head (though fellow blatherskites come close), so I dare anyone to tell me I am functioning improperly, out of order of who I am. Afterall, what is maddness to those of us who live in our minds? 020729 what's it to you? who go blather from