The brain committee

This week’s ‘A-ha!’ moment is brought to you by my Psychologist.  Duh.

I have multiple personalities.  Not a multiple personality disorder, just multiple personalities that set up camp in my brain.  No, I’m not like Tara from “The United States of Tara,” yes, I realize how these statements can be construed as bat shit crazy.  Just hold on to your horses while I explain.

All of my major emotions are governed by separate personalities.  These individual personalities form my brain committee (I gave it that name…just in case anyone was scoffing at my therapist…I will cut you!).  Just like any committee, some of the members are crooked.  These bastards (mainly one bastard of a personality) cry out for attention while I generally proceed to stick my fingers in my ears and go “la, la, la, la!”, while simultaneously sticking my head in the sand.  Only during times of extreme emotional upset does this bastard get my attention.  When that happens, clear the fucking area!  I should have one those awful air raid sirens synced up to my cortisol levels so that when they reach the point of no return, people will know to run.  Duck and cover!  Just like The Cuban Missile Crisis.

I have taken to calling this bastard my “dark passenger” (thank you, Dexter!  Don’t worry, my dark passenger doesn’t give me serial killer tendencies like Dexter).  I figure that this freeloading son of a motherless goat is like a neglected horse.  He anxiously paces around the pastures of my brain grinding his teeth in a most stomach curdling way.  When the other ponies of the personality committee go out and play, he pins his ears at them and then charges forward, teeth rearing and ready to dig into anything fleshy  He exudes anger and anxiety.  This anger and anxiety leeches out of him and into my brain and seeps into my very core.  The cortisol levels start to rise with every little annoyance until my tears are saturated in the hormone.  If anyone ingested one my tears, they would be acting like Scarface when he took a nose dive into a giant pile of blow.

I will skip all the really heavy and depressing shit that happens when the dark passenger takes control and just summarize with: Carry + years of repressed rage + prom + pig blood + certain doom = what happens to me, only I am both Carry and all of her poor classmates.  Can of whoop ass is opened and then promptly poured all over myself.  What this bastard needs is work.  He needs to get out of the pits of my mind where I can ignore him so easily by sticking my fingers in my ears and my head in the sand.  Oddly enough, he enjoys writing.  He is a tormented genius…both crazy and brilliant.  Like that one guy in that one movie that I think is called “A Beautiful Mind.”  Yeah, just like that.

The moral of my weekly session with the Doc is that I need to keep my passenger busy so that he can be a relatively healthy contributing member of the committee.  When it is his time to perform, he will be able to avoid get Sissy Spacek eyes and hearing his mother’s voice crowing “they’re all going to laugh at you!  They’re all going to laugh at you!” (as well as “I can see your dirty pillows!”), and then lose his shit.  Instead, he will be able to accept the crown as prom queen, dodge the pig’s blood and walk away anger and anxiety free.  I guess my dark passenger is a male teenage prom queen with telekinetic powers.  Meh. Que ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”

Now that that song is stuck in your head…remember folks, listen to your brain committee.  Yes, even the crooked ones.  They’re personalities, too!  I realize that this concept seems simple enough but for someone like me with a mood disorder, it is a big fucking deal.