Do You Want the Bad News or the Good News First?

I’ll give you the bad news first.

I’ve lost my mind. 

Let’s face it, that trumps pretty much any good news ever (excepting, of course, my meeting any or all of the Followills. but these kinds of things are implied.) So I’ll spare you the good news.

I still have hope that I will be able to lead a fairly normal life.  In the first place, it’s a good sign that I’ve realized that I’ve lost my mind. I heard somewhere once that you’re alright as long as you’re worried that you’re crazy, because crazy people think they’re sane. 

In the second place, we’re all crazy.  Which makes this entire post completely pointless.

Like it wasn’t already.

(took a small break to dance around in my room to the Led Zeppelin song that came on. this has nothing to do with being crazy, it’s just fun.)

I began to realize my downward spiral into lunacy over the course of the last week by way of several phone calls with close friends.  I realized that time and time again I was telling people about things I’d been doing and having them exclaim in surprise at my deviation from my normal craziness. 

In short, I appear to have undergone some sort of personality shock. 

I kind of like it.

Speculation as to the causes or effects of these changes aside, I present the following reasons as evidence of my having obviously lost my mind:

1- I’m a neat freak now.  I don’t know what happened. All of the sudden, I need my space/things to be completely organized. All the time.  I got home from work last night at 1.15am and proceeded to spend about 20 minutes getting my sheets out of the dryer and making my bed perfectly before going to sleep. 

2- I have a job.  As someone who was heretofore extremely dedicated to wasting space,  I am now a productive member of society who has places to be and gets a paycheck. 

3- I learned how to cry.  I cried three times in the past two years until recently. It just turned on.  I can cry over absolutely nothing.  A song I love, seeing my favorite flowers, a dream, being in my car too long, anything.  I am the quintessential crazy woman.

4- I’ve started telling people how I feel about them.  This may sound like something that’s not a really big deal, but I have until this point in my life been a fairly emotionally reserved person (See: No. 3 on this list).  My little sister recently called my lack of emotional expression “Stalin-esque.” (the real question: how does she know who Stalin is?! she’s 12! incidentally, I recently found out that she is actually 14) I used to have this habit of writing letters to people and then burning them.  I think that sounds way crazier than it actually was, but there it is. It helped me vent.  Recently, I read over one of these letters and decided to just send it. It felt really good. I sent four more, to other people.  They were all nice (no hate mail, don’t worry), and it just seemed like the right thing to do.  It can’t hurt for people to know that you care, or that you’re thinking of them, right? As it turns out, that is right.  By and large, I have experienced really positive reactions.  People just appreciate hearing that you care, even if they already know it, and especially if they don’t.

Which they sometimes don’t, specifically if you have a tendency to remind relatives of Joseph Stalin.

5- I like all of these changes.  It gets a little messier once you factor in the causes and effects (which is why I’m skipping that, thank me later), but overall, I feel good. I like who I was and who I am and where I’m headed, and I’m confident that this thing (my life) will turn out well. 

I’m just that kind of girl. 

So maybe losing my mind is not a bad thing. Maybe the bad news is the good news too.  Maybe it needs to happen every once in a while so that I don’t get stuck in whatever it is that I inevitably get stuck in.

Alternatively, it’s possible that I’m actually losing my mind and that this is just the beginning of the downward spiral. 

That’s an entirely possible hypothesis.