Fine Lines are Not to be Avoided.

Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.

~ Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of, 1965
English biographer, critic, novelist, & poet (1887 – 1964)

Where precisely should we draw the line between quirky and crazy? Personally, it seems pretty thin and almost universally arbitrary to me. I think though, in my case, I may have driven over that particular line with a Mac truck one too many times. Sure, my quirks make me interesting, even complicated at times though my tastes are pretty simple at the end of the day. I like to think I’m about passion meeting playfulness much of the time so that’s bound to result in some unusual qualities to my personality (occasionally even distractingly so).

I’ve always liked the notion of eccentricity. It’s vibrant, alive and present. It sparks something in me. My ‘heroes’ are all particularly zany and off-beat — say, Winona Ryder pre-random shoplifting convictions. You know, Beetlejuice and Heathers Winona. Or Emma Thompson who epitomises eccentric at its most captivating in movies like Carrington and Wit, and even in the Harry Potter series.

I like e. e. cummings less for captured meaning than for having the ability to blow my mind with a single, carefully placed letter.

I’ve always equated normal with rather boring, which is a prejudice I try not to inflict on the unsuspecting. There are times when boring is useful but I get sick of being ‘functional’ at a certain point. I think what started me down this track was partly Clinically Clueless’ and Svasti’s comments that the trouble they have with their mental health issues is that their appearance is often deceptive: their daily emotional experience is not captured well by the face the world sees because they ‘present well’. I must admit I present well too these days. It can be a little trying, especially because I combine it with a penchant for understatement so it distorts the impact my ’symptoms’ and eccentricities might otherwise enjoy.

I don’t mind that so much most of the time because it grants me a certain level of privilege or at least freedom from stigma that I might otherwise have to deal with on top of the mood issues. It really only becomes a problem when I’m actively falling apart, and have to work up the nerve to explicitly spell it out for my nearest and dearest because otherwise they’d be unlikely to notice until it was much too late. I don’t mean because I’d have done something irreversible but rather that I’d be stuck so deep in the pit of depression that it’d take me at least twice as long to climb out again as if it had been caught earlier. There’s no need to let it get to that stage, and I know that but still sometimes I don’t have the strength to face the music. Part of me feels rebellious, and part of me feels as though it simply isn’t worth it.

I’m so used to solving my own problems, independently, with my slightly infamous knack for research that often it doesn’t even occur to me to ask for help until it is well passed time. Nor does it occur to other people that I might not be able to solve the problems on my own given enough time.

My ‘hour of need’ isn’t even obvious to me, and that’s a little strange in and of itself, no? I think it’s a sign of crazy, actually. A psychiatric nurse once said to me that if I was still able to ask her if I was crazy, if that fear still wriggled in my gut, then it was a fair sign I wasn’t totally nuts.

Sometimes I think if I could just pin down the qualities that make me myself then I could see more clearly what is quirk and what is crazy but that’s not so easy to do. It’s not as though I live in a musical, and some random nuns will start singing ‘How do you solve a problem like CK?’ on cue. No, instead you must contend with seeing the world through your own distorted lens, and cross all available appendages and knock on whatever is handy to try and ensure that you are as you suspect you are.

My mirror may be a little cracked but I can always move the mirror, which is a fact that has only fairly recently hit home for me. I don’t need to accommodate the cracks as much as they need to accommodate me. And I think that’s what Edith was getting at.