Sometimes...

losing your mind is a choice. I remember a friend, K. M., who had bouts of insanity. She would hallucinate and do strange things. She had kids, a husband, and a fairly nice house. All the trappings of life. But, every once in a while, she would just check out. I asked her about it once. She said that she did it so she could get away from her responsibilities. She didn’t seem to like “all the trappings” of the life she had. She said it was a choice she made. She could stick it out, or check out. So, she would decide to get crazy and get herself checked into an asylum. She’d go there and get medicated to the gills, stay there for a while, then come home again. She said she did it on purpose, and that it was a cheap vacation, but the food was lousy. A paid vacation of sorts. But, the food was tolerable because of the meds. Seems like a sad thing to do, leaving everyone behind while you have a vacation from your reality. Thinking about it, it seems to me that she had to have been a bit crazy to make a choice like that. If life got so tough that she needed to check out, then there must have been underlying mental instability to begin with? This is not a judgment. I never understood her reasoning—though I do know how it feels to want to take a vacation from the every-day realities of life. I just don’t think I’d want to go to those places in order to get away.