(no subject)
"I'd always been her best friend - and it seemed that by cracking up I was letting her down. Failing her. I always felt a sense of responsibility towards her - I often felt like the oldest son of a recently widowed woman who is incapable of, say, programming her VCR by herself - and it made me feel extremely restricted in the range of negative emotions I was able to express. I could never lose my mind to the point where they'd have to send me away to the loony bin or some place for juvenile defectives because my mother would not be able to survive such a personal debacle. She barely wanted to know about the extent of the despair I was able to experience. It's not that she was insensitive - sometimes she actually would try to talk to me about why I was like I was - but she couldn't stand it when I'd explain that nothing at all was wrong, that it was just a matter of everything. She'd want me to be specific. She'd want me to toss her some solution-oriented problem. She seemed to think I was like a quadratic equation, but the lack of a clear, discerible task to work with made her crazy.
She started screaming at me, telling me she couldn't stand any more of this craziness, demanding that I explain to her right now what exactly was wrong. What what what? I just sat there, cryig, blank, nothing to say, and she just kept demanding I tell her something, and I think in frustration I might have just said, Oh, Ma, you're looking at all the trees and I'm not even in the forest."
-- Prozac Nation