There is a well established literature of mental illness. Some examples that spring immediately to mind are William Styron’s Darkness Visible, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings. These works
describe far better than I could the experience of mental failings and the subjective effort to understand them. The past week’s onslaught of grief and depression has brought on a
feeling of confusion and an awareness that my brain is really not working as it normally would or should.
Words spoken to me circulate in my head for an hour or two gathering moss or lint until later when they are coughed out, and I realize “oh, that’s what she meant.” Other things spoken
to me trigger an immediate vocal response, and elicit a torrent of verbal diarrhea that I realize as I listen to myself that I am talking jibberish. It is then that I think to myself, “I am truly broken.”
Worse yet, my significant other, while understanding that my verbalizing and obsessively
analyzing is my way of coping, wishes that I would stop talking, while when she talks to me, I find it exhausting to follow her train of thought, and so I
zone out. I know I need to talk with a “professional.” I am desperately looking forward to doing so. I have several people on standby who have extended their invitations to open arms. I fear, though, to call, because I fear all they will hear is confusion, and they might not understand what I am trying to say.
I have called this my open door to an endless future. I know for a certainty I will step through or will be shoved through this open door. The only thing I fear is that I will carry my confusion along with me, being forever broken.