Though I have never been a guest at a proper prison, I have always shared a fascination with penal institutions. Like Johnny Cash, who never spent a day in a corrections facility but romanticized the idea, I’ve often felt that I really deserved to be judged and locked up for everything. Many years ago, as I stood in court for a summary traffic offense, I channelled this feeling quite well; the magistrate almost certainly felt sorry for that pathetic motorist, whose behavior spoke to grief and regret more indicative of capital murder than speeding.
I carried, and still carry, an inner backing track of “guilty, guilty, guilty.”
And when you adopt this kind of thought pattern over the years? You really start to believe that you deserve your imagined punishment. In this area, the line between what I did wrong and I what I think I did wrong can get handsomely blurry. After while it doesn’t even matter if I’ve committed an offense.
I just need to commit to the idea that I have committed an offense. It’s that easy!
Plus, it’s not like my brain can’t find authentic examples of me trying to send myself to the adult timeout corner. The thing that sucks about doing bad things is that everyone does them. When I imagine myself to have done a bad thing, I think I go through my brain with memories of myself behaving badly, pressing them into neurons like spackle into a wall.
I make sure that I remember the confirmed cases of awful; that makes it much easier for me to believe that if I didn’t do a bad thing, I may as well have.
Think of it like an honorary degree, but for borderlines. If you didn’t do the crime, you can still opt to do the time, and more!
Which brings us back to prison.
I think, after having watched years of prison movies, shows, and documentaries, the biggest lesson that I learned was from the Shawshank Redemption. In this now classic slice of Stephen King inspired Oscar bait, one of the themes that runs in the mind of each and every prisoner is this: If I get out, how will I adapt to the outside?
At a certain point, and without giving away much plot, each prisoner slowly realizes that time spent on the inside makes the inside paradoxically preferable to freedom. Someone who spends 3 to 4 decades in a concrete, iron-barred cell can (and often does) forget how to function on the outside. Here, the word Morgan Freeman’s character uses is “Institutionalized.”
The prisoners acclimate to the environment, and they don’t want to leave it. Over time, there is a strange comfort in the patently uncomfortable.
This certainly sounds familiar to you, Nathan, now doesn’t it?
While I won’t call mental illness a prison, at least by way of full analogy, I will say that maladaptive patterns become a prison of behavior and action. They are not optimal behaviors, just in the same way that a cell is really not the nicest place to sleep. I don’t want to go into rages, throw things, break things, scream at the top of my lungs, and collapse into spirals that literally send those around me fleeing. After while, these things became a concrete bed for me.
I became accustomed to maladaptive expressions and tricks. I hated them each and every time I used them, and I still hate them now. The problem is that there is a perverse comfort in returning to them. They aren’t good for me, or for anyone around me, but I know them. That is space that I can, unfortunately, use to its full purpose.
I want to be well. I know that. I never want to go back to the psychiatric hospital. I know that quite well. But, I also know that it does not take much to send me into a spiral. However much I hate periodic spirals, the immediate desire for one, especially in a moment of crisis, is insanely attractive. That’s bananas in some ways, but otherwise it makes perfect sense. In the 2017 Linkin Park song “Heavy” the late Chester Bennington laments, “I want to let go, but there’s comfort in the panic.” And is there EVER comfort in the panic. When I am threatening to turn bad and quickly so, the desire for calamity feels downright magnetic. I feel the pull and I don’t think I can resist.
It’s time to defy the laws of physics, I think. It’s been long enough.
Yours Mentally,
Nathan
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