Dark Night of the Spirit

Whenever someone says that in a movie, you just know this is going to end badly. I’m not trying to claim that I don’t have mental illness. Unfortunately, I do. However, I am rephrasing it slightly to focus on the person rather than the illness.

I recently discovered free software on my laptop that would allow me to create music, videos, and images. I was excitedly telling a friend about it, explaining how I could record from a keyboard, add instruments, compose melodies, etc. As I waxed poetic, she said, “Or you could just get a CD.”

I feel as though I’m on a death march – a long, grueling, weary march to an unknown destination, with no idea whether I can make it. In a death march, if you stop marching, you die. That’s what it feels like.

How’s that for a conversation stopper? The only way to top that is to announce that you have worms. People often get very nervous about mental illness. They think it means that a person is “crazy.”

Imagine that someone has received a blow to the head somehow – an accident at work, a fall at home, perhaps – somehow the person’s head was struck hard enough to injure the brain. Now consider what would happen if this injury affected the person’s behavior, causing him to act in a bizarre or irrational manner. Those who knew of the injury would feel compassion. Poor guy, he can’t help it, he has an injury to his brain that causes him to act that way.