Perceptions

I was talking to ChaosKitty online a couple of days ago, and the conversation turned to the time when she, Kitty, and I all lived in the house together. We were trying to recall some of the things that happened during the spring and early summer of 2010. Turns out neither of us have very good memories of the time. Whether it's due to our blocking it out or our brains being fried from being so crazy (or both), I don't know.

We were both at pretty shitty points in our lives then. She was manic/mixed, doing quite a few drugs--some prescription, some not--and getting totally plastered every night. I was manic, flying into rages, and randomly binge drinking at times myself. There are very big chunks of memory that are just...gone. For both of us.  (And, really, it's probably for the best, given the circumstances.)

Anyway, we were discussing the fact that, while we'd managed to make everyone around us hate us, we'd hadn't managed to alienate one another. Neither of us could figure how we'd pulled that one off. We still haven't, really.

ChaosKitty did pull out an interesting theory, though, which was that perhaps we appear completely different to others than we appear to ourselves. I knew she was having a hard time, and she knew I was having a hard time, despite the fact that neither of us had a whole hell of a lot of insight at the time. (She may or may not have been hallucinating people walking across our backyard--that may never be conclusively determined--and I was convinced that the second I closed my eyes at night, demons or something equally terrible were going to jump out of the walls and attack us.)

I think she's right. I believe that the truly batshit recognize it in others and are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Other people, however, just think we're assholes and treat us as such.

I'm not saying we *weren't* assholes. We may have been. I'm just saying that we probably didn't *mean* to be assholes and that we recognized that in one another, though no one else around us realized it.

Ok, I was going to try to end this with something poignant, but, honestly, it's 5 am, and I'm tired. I'll just leave you with a little MB20, since this is Down The Rabbit Hole With Bunny, and "we're all mad here."