Am I Crazy?

I am completely serious now—I am really doubting my sanity.  And if you ask me later, I may say that I am feeling better, and I might be telling the truth—I might feel better.  But I will still not be completely sure I’m not crazy.  The idea is too firmly ingrained in my mind now.  I know I’ve said it before, but I’ve been looking at the evidence, and there’s so much of it that says that I might be.

I know I bring this up all the time, but…the damned Bisquick incident.  Look at the details.  There are only two people who could possibly, physically have moved that damned box.  Brother is not one of them, because he never moved from the television.  There are two possibilities if the house is not haunted (which I tend to doubt):  Either I did it without realizing it, or my dad did it when he came home.  He was the first one into the kitchen, and he started yelling at me, knowing that I had used the box that morning.  Either I am crazy, or he is trying to make me think that I am.  It is one or the other.  Can somebody please give me some sort of response to this besides laughing at me, or saying, “That’s really weird” or “I don’t know”?  Does anybody have an opinion?  Do you all think I’m crazy?  Is it possible that he is, or that he wants me to be?

I don’t know what his motive would be—or Sister’s, for that matter.  I know that she hates me.  And I mean, hate, in the literal sense of the word.  Not that she just gets pissed off at me a lot.  She hates me, as well as the rest of my family…except, mysteriously, for my dad.

She has always been his favorite.  Always.  I have always known this, and recently, in the past couple of years, I came to terms with it and just accepted it for what it was.  My mom has concurred—he definitely favors her.  I don’t know…maybe he hates me, too.  He tells her that I (and apparently Brother, too, as I just learned today) have mental problems.  They talk about this constantly.  And she likes reminding me of the fact.  Are they in this together?  Trying to make me think I’m crazy—trying to make me crazy?  Or is it only one or the other of them, and they just complement each other so well that it seems as though they are conspiring?

You all know that my dad has a hideous temper.  Some of you may have been witness to it in small doses (it’s always worse when no non-family members are around).  You might think that I am exaggerating when I say such things, but he gets pissed off at the smallest things.  And he yells about them.  Very loudly.  To whomever is in sight.  It is not possible to argue with him.  No one except family members has ever witnessed this, but he argues with this almost ridiculously circular logic which really doesn’t make a lot of sense.  But it doesn’t matter what you say—he will have an answer for it, sensible or not, and he will always have the last word.  He is never wrong in his mind.  He brings up the past and throws it in your face.  He puts you down.  He doesn’t let you win.  You cannot win an argument.  That is very important!

For this reason, I don’t argue anymore.  I haven’t for a very long time.  It makes me look worse to do so, because anything that could have been a very good defense for me is shot down with the same pointless arguments over and over again.  I can never remember specific instances or lines to share with people, and I finally realized why they don’t stick in my mind word for word—it’s like waking up from a dream that did not make logical sense.  Those sorts of dreams, that don’t follow a sensible plot, don’t stick in your mind because your conscious mind can’t handle something like that.  Your conscious mind rejects illogical things like that.  It can’t comprehend them.  That is what an argument with my dad is like.  That’s why I don’t remember them verbatim.

But as I was saying, you can’t win with him.  So I’ve stopped trying.  I feel like I don’t look like as bad of a person if I just let him say what he wants about me and let whomever is listening believe it, because I don’t answer, than to try and defend myself to him and have him kill all of my defenses.  When he thinks things are not going his way, he will break down and sob, with the appearance of being very hurt or frustrated, with the intention of drawing pity.  That could almost be called manipulative, but he doesn’t have to be manipulative to win, because he is already an authority figure.

Sister is manipulative.  She is very manipulative.  Her temper is like my dad’s.  And she cries when she thinks people are not believing her, to lend credibility to things, to make it appear that she really cares and is affected by the situation.  And she argues exactly the same way as my dad.  So I’ve stopped trying to argue with her, too.  At least when Milo is around.  I don’t want him to think I’m less of a person than she makes me out to be, but if I argue, and she shoots down my defenses, then I become so.  So I just sit there, wordlessly, letting her say things about me and hoping he doesn’t believe them.  Maybe later I will have a chance to defend myself to him by saying what I wanted to say to her, when she is not around.  I can explain my side of it without being silenced.

The only problem is, because she is manipulative, she can make people believe whatever she wants when she wants.  Remember the butcher knife incident?  Our neighbor honestly believed I had attacked her with a butcher knife.  Recently, I’m beginning to wonder if I didn’t do it.  Maybe the reason my dad says I have mental problems, and the reason only one of the two possible solutions to the Bisquick thing is that I am insane, is because I truly am.  Maybe the reason why my parents just laughed it off when I told them about the Bisquick and about the butcher knife is because they truly know that I am insane.  What if I am living in my own self-devised Matrix, without even knowing it?  What if everything around me is only an illusion?

If Sister and my dad are trying to make me think I am crazy, then it would have been he who placed the Bisquick on the floor.  She would have made up the butcher knife story.  They plan to drop hints or say flat-out that he believes I am crazy.

Or maybe the fact that I am considering this conspiracy theory at all actually makes me crazy.  Maybe I am crazy.  Maybe I put the Bisquick on the floor without realizing it.  Maybe I attacked Sister with a butcher knife and don’t remember it.  Does considering these possibilities make me paranoid-delusional?  That makes me crazy.  So even if I’m not crazy, I am becoming so by examining these things.  What other solutions are there!?

This morning, Sister walked into my room without knocking and said, “You need to move your car so the mail will be delivered.”  I looked at her (I am still pissed off at her for the things she has yelled to Milo about me in the past few days) and put my head back down and went to sleep.

A couple of hours later, when I got up, I told Milo what she had done, and he said, “You shouldn’t have to move your car.  The postman is supposed to deliver the mail no matter what.  They have a creed.  If they can’t get to the mailbox, they’re supposed to bring it to the door or something.”

I still intended to move my car, because if the mail didn’t get delivered, she would start yelling about me again.  But because I believed the mail didn’t get delivered until around 3:30, I decided to wait until my clothes were washed and I had gotten a shower and gotten dressed in something warmer than pajamas.  So at about 2:20, when my clothes are done and I’m about to get in the shower, Sister comes home and starts screeching at the top of her lungs about how inconsiderate I am, because I didn’t do what she asked, and I don’t respect her.

Milo started yelling at her, saying not to say things like that about me and not to bother us, and even suggesting she and her boyfriend just leave again.

Sister continued to screech things about how I never respect her, and how she is the only person around the house who ever cleans anything, and Brother and I don’t help her, and we don’t respect her because we never do what she asks, and we’re slobs because we don’t mind living the way we do, and my dad says we have mental problems (Brother and I, that is) because we never clean up anything around the house, and all this complete bullshit.  (She is not the only one who ever cleans anything, but she’s never around when I clean up.  Whenever the dog makes a mess that I have to clean up, I’m the only one around to do it, so nobody else ever sees it.  It may as well have never happened.  The proverbial tree falling in the forest when no one is around.  I do not like living in filth, whatever she and my dad might think.)

I sat wordlessly in the rocker as she and Milo carried on a loud shouting match behind me.  He kept trying to defend me, and she kept shooting back more bullshit and getting the last word.  I know he meant well, but it only succeeded in making me look so much worse than I am.

And now I wonder…does he actually believe the things she says?  Is he only obligated to argue for me because I am his friend?  Does he really, truly believe her because her evidence seems so true?  If you hear the sorts of things that she says about me all the time, and you have no evidence otherwise, wouldn’t you eventually have to start believing it?

I believe that she is trying to make him think I am crazy, as well.  I believe that she would love that.  She would know that that would truly make me crazy.  For him to think the worst of me…that would be hell.  That would truly be hell.

[I just had a panic attack.  Just now, after I wrote that last line.  My mom heard me hyperventilating and rushed out of the kitchen, telling me to take slow, deep breaths, and I started trying, and I was blacking out, and shaking hard, and my hands and tongue went numb, and my stomach was hurting, and I asked her between quick breaths to please read everything I had just written because I really wanted her to understand….  So she sat and read it as I sat in the rocking chair, wrapped in the blanket, actually growing hot, but still shaking violently…and when she finished she told me she does not believe I am crazy, and rubbed my back until my shaking subsided and I was breathing normally again and all feeling came back.  And now I am back.]

Anyway, so while Sister and Milo are yelling at each other about me, the phone rings, she retreats into her room, Milo says, “Ginny, it’s for you,” and I head for the phone, shouting, “Fucking bitch!” at the top of my lungs.  I pick it up, and it’s John, who knows nothing about my family problems.  I was so embarrassed.  When he said, “Hello?” I said, “I am so sorry,” and kept apologizing throughout the conversation.

When I got off the phone a couple minutes later, I retreated into my own room, locked the door, and sat on the floor, listening to Milo defend my honor to Sister.  She kept yelling how I don’t respect her or any of the rest of my family, and he was saying that just wasn’t true, but she kept retorting with worse and worse things, and finally their voices dropped, and after a few moments it was over.

I continued to sit in my room, sobbing silently to myself, almost having a panic attack then, when my cell phone rang…it was Milo on the home phone.  I pressed the hang-up button without answering.  Then there was a knock on my door.  I didn’t answer.  Milo was saying, “Ginny?  Ginny?”  I didn’t answer.  And he called my cell phone again.  I again pressed the button to hang it up.  He returned to the door; I again ignored him, and after a couple more rounds of this, he apparently gave up, and a few minutes later, wiping my face several times (I so fortunately had Kleenex in my room) I came out to the computer where he was sitting.

“Are you all right?” he said.  I shook my head to say no.  He pulled up the stool next to the computer and motioned for me to sit down, and I sat and stared straight ahead, and he asked if I wanted to talk about it, and I didn’t move, because I thought I would start crying.  I didn’t want to do that.

I started crying.  He said, “It’s okay…I took care of it.  It’s okay.”

I said, “I hate my sister.”

He said, “I know…I know.”

I said, “I hate my dad, too.”

He was quiet for a moment, and asked again if I was okay, and I just shook my head again, and he said, “You didn’t do anything wrong.  It’s okay.”

I threw my arms around him and just sobbed onto his shoulder, and said, “Thank you….”  (I half meant it.  The other half of me was saying “I love you.”)

He said, “You’re welcome…” and just held me quietly for a few moments, until I broke away and said, “I have to get dressed.”

He asked if I was going out somewhere, and I said yes, and he asked, “With who/what are you doing?”

I said I was going to see Rogue One, and he said, “Who with?” and I said, giving a small, sheepish smile, “That guy I just yelled at on the phone.”

He laughed, and I did too, and he said, “Who was that?” and I said, “This guy I met at UNF….”

And then I walked away wordlessly to get a shower and get dressed.

Afterward, I said, “I’m going to Nicole’s—he’s picking me up at 4:30, so if I’m not home by 4:15, will you please call my cell and remind me to leave?”

He agreed, and I left, (I was so out of it, I actually got lost on the 5-minute trip to Nicole’s house that I take all the time) but then I left Nicole’s at 4, and when I reached our neighborhood, my cell phone rang, and Milo said, “He’s here” and I said, “He’s there!? Now!?” and he said, “Yeah,” so I got there, and we left.

We had a good time…after the movie we went to Barnes and Noble and got drinks.

Okay, as this is the longest entry I’ve ever written, I’m going to stop now and anything I have left out, I’ll add in a later one.  I’m tired of writing this thing.

No, wait!  I left out something really important and really great.  The other day, I was telling Milo how much I wanted to watch Garfield’s Christmas, because I’ve always loved it, and for the last several years I have tried to record it, and it didn’t work, so I haven’t actually seen it in about 6 years.

This morning, he went to Movie Stop and came home with 2 DVDs, and I said, “What’d you get?” (this is before Sister was home), and he gave a small smile and said, “Garfield’s Christmas.”  I got all excited and said, “Yay, I can’t wait to watch it!” and he said, “And The Christmas Story” (because we were talking about that one the other day, too).

And then, even though Brother wanted to watch Garfield, Milo told him they couldn’t until I was home.  But then his sister called when I got home, and he’s with her now, so I told Brother we have to wait for him to come back.

Oh…and John thought Milo was my dad.  (Awkward….)  I explained that he is not related to me at all.  Just to clear that up right away.

And now for something completely different…I found this quote by Walt Disney that made me feel happy, so I’ll share it here:

“Fantasy, if it’s really convincing, can’t become dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.  In this new dimension, whatever it is, nothing corrodes or gets run down at the heel, or gets to look ridiculous like, say, the celluloid collar or the bustle.  And nobody gets any older.”