after the last post, which was a dense, downer buzz – I’d imagine kind of like the feeling when you sit down on the toilet and realise there’s no paper left – I feel like I need to lighten the mood a bit. to let you all in on a little secret.
yes, mental illness is a very serious and very real problem (I do not in – any way – want to belittle people’s experiences) but it’s not all totally bad… here are some reasons why

1. it filters out the d#cks in your life
losing your shit and having a very realistic-pretend meltdown is a great (and clearly extremely mature) method of getting out of long-telephone-lectures from your mother and getting rid of unwanted boyfriends, one-night stands who just won’t leave, or skinny girlfriends who won’t stop talking about how fat they are.

2. crazy people are sexy
if you look through history you will find that the majority of famous artists, musicians and other creatives have some serious mental shit going down. they create to feed their deep longing to ‘understand’ their dark thoughts or twisted experiences of the world. they are tortured and mysterious and in most people’s books that equals total babe. they are generally the most appealing because you are always trying to get your head around the enigma-wrapped-in-a-puzzle-hidden-in-a-maze-behind-their-eyes. it’s human nature to want what you can’t have, and by extension, what you don’t entirely understand… and even when you finally get there, they cut their ear off, or shoot themselves or something else equally brutal just to prove a point that you’ll never understand how ‘tortured’ and ‘jaded’ they are. my conclusion? they win at life, and you go home crying into a bathtub filled with ben-and-jerry’s because that guitarist you met doesn’t find you ‘complex’ enough.

3. normal people are boring
eg.

friend: “hey man, what did you do today?”
crazy person: “nothing much, had a meltdown while manically cleaning the kitchen and organising all of my pantry by frequency of usage and food type, then smashed my entire dinner set into tiny pieces because it didn’t match the colour scheme I’d put together and then came full circle and had a life revelation that I’d never end up working in an office…you?” 
friend: “oh you know, just had some beers and watched Seinfeld.”

4. you find an extreme appreciation for cats
and perhaps accumulate quite a collection which you keep in your house, because people just don’t cut it

5. …particularly this one

6. you perceive, appreciate and value things differently
…like valium. you also learn to cherish and enjoy the times when things are good, you ponder how good the sun feels and really let that feeling of contentment sink in… because you are used to the bad times and well aware that in any given moment the complete brute force of an episode can hit you, or a bird can take a massive dump on your fresh baguette.

7. you see things differently and get more incidental exercise
you learn to assess everything as a risk to your fragile mindset and go to extreme lengths to avoid an episode – eg. a packed tram in peak hour could trigger an anxiety attack so you walk the 40 minutes home instead…which is tiring, but hey, your butt looks great because of it. not to mention, a manic episode can burn up to 500 calories*

*not a valid exercise regime