Mental -- the deuce

I had seen about a dozen therapists in twice as many years. They all knew what was wrong with me, and it was different every time. I guess that's what people mean when they say people change. Of course, people usually said that about someone else, not me. I would be wondering why a boy did not want to go out with me anymore? People change. Or why my best friend stopped talking to me when she went off to college, and I was still working graveyard at the White Hen? People change.

So maybe those boys and my best friend were just mental like I was. That's what I liked to tell myself. When I dissociated, I made up all sorts of personalities to keep the rumours alive. The dominatrix would reassure me she had been routinely light spanking my best friend over the holidays, because my best friend was submissive. People change. The angry feminist would tell me how my best friend got married, and that she may as well have had a lobotomy. People change. The priest who took confession from the first guy I fell in love with me, confided in me what he heard in the confessional; the guy was into guys. People change. 

Honestly, I am not sure I believed that people change. I had only to consider myself. My diagnosis always changed, but I stayed that same. So you could argue it was not really me who was changing. Just the labels. A label is stuck to the outside of something, like a nametag, but it does not alter the underlying chemistry of the thing labelled. The mad scientist told me so. And he's never wrong. He performs all sorts of important experiments all the time, just to know stuff.

He spends half the night with me at White Hen, draining whipped cream gas into my lungs. He calls them whippets. Apparently they kill brain cells that should have been dead a long time ago. The kind of cells that made me think the bad thoughts, the same kind of thinking all sorts of minimum wage workers who are mental start to have, when they are working dead end jobs going mental. I'm not even going mental. I already am.

I think I am living proof that people never change. Tonight there's only one can of whipped cream left untapped, in the White Hen. The mad scientist prescribed it to me, to get well. To kill off all those thoughts of what I wanna do to those boys and my best friend, now that they no longer have an excuse for having ditched me the way they did.