Mental Issues
I'm having a busy day. I worked on the newsletter for a really long time. I hope everyoen likes it. I'm sort of torn between feeling happy and sad. My niece has been diagnosed with schitzophrenia (which I can't even spell). I remember when I was young, and we used to play together.. I always thought she had it more together than I did. I don't know.. she never was a sad child or anything. But her life has been one misery after another really, when I think about it. And I think about my father, with his manic depression, and my brother Ron who had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for it, and my brother Joe who's just well, sort of an ass sometimes.. .and I just wonder. Why is it that I've escaped this legacy of madness that seems to haunt my family? Or have I? Perhaps I'm more insane than the lot of them, and just better at hiding it, or haven't sought help for it. I'd ask Aus is I was insane, but that's not exactly something you usually ask your husband in causual conversation. "Hey.. how was dinner? Good. By the way, am I insane?" Doesn't cut it. I worry about what legacy I have left for my children, whether I have unknowingly passed along to them the traits that will cause this terrible madness that seems to have afflicted the majority of my family. I wonder if any of them will be like I am, and consider themselves too strong of will to let it touch them, to feel the icy claws of madness try to wrap around their souls, and fight them off just one more time. I wonder if someday I will just slip into the blackness that threatens to engulf me at my saddest, most desolate moments, and know nothing again. Will there be one among them that will be sane, or two, or all three? Would I have had children if I knew... I can't honestly say whether I would have or not. Why didn't my mother ever tell my that my father had his first nervous breakdown in the navy, and had continued the spiral of madness ever since? Why didn't someone explain to me that my brother's hospitalization hadn't been just nerves, but the same disease my father suffered from, manifested in the next genertion? Where does it end? What will I say to my own children, when they tell me that they want to have children.. .do I just stay silent, as my parents did, and let the sorrow spread to a future generation? Is the risk of having such a terrible, emotionally crippiling fate, worth it? I don't know the answers to this.. right now, I know nothing.