Insanity: One Way Ticket Out of Reality?

I just watched Silver Linings Playbook, starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. While this isn't a review on the movie, it was a very sweet, emotional, chaotic movie and well worth the $7.50 a ticket to see it.

In the movie, Cooper plays a man that has just gotten out of 8 months rehab, and follows him as he tries to better himself while attempting to do whatever it takes to win her wife's trust and heart back, despite the restraining order she has against him. Oddly enough, he instead falls in love with Lawrence,  who plays a formerly-slutty and now widowed young woman much like himself, and the two work together to perform in a dance tournament for the climax of the movie.

The thing that always gets me with movies like this, is the part where you see the character living in a psychiatric facility. Girl, Interrupted, It's A Funny Kind of Story, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and other movies involving mental hospitals, both intrigue and frighten me. They portray a very small part of what it's really like being institutionalized in a mental facility, and although I've never been in one, I often wonder how much it takes to actually be put into one.

Does it help? Are the people inducted into the hospitals truly insane? How do you know you need to be put in one? Or does someone else decide that for you?

Often times, throughout the day, while doing my rather mundane chores life hands me, I always have this sinking feeling that I'm somehow just waiting for the moment to break. Completely apart. To lose it in the most flourished, crazed way. To scream at the top of my lungs and cry and throw things and break plates and glasses and walls. To let myself be completely unhinged.

But do you know why I let myself just keep waiting for the perfect moment?

Because I think if I ever did truly break down,  it would be a long and very hard process for me to truly get back to reality. I wouldn't want to leave. The stress of my former life would will me into continuing into insanity, and I'd be constantly lying to myself if I didn't believe it. I'd be stuck there, until I got sick of it, and then somehow I fear it'd be too late. I'd have no sense of who I am; I would never want to look in the mirror. I'd be some crazy cat owning lady that rides the subway everyday and talks to herself. I would be insane forever, if I were to break apart to my very inner core.

There was only one time that I can remember where I feel like I almost reached that point. And it took me two years to get past even that. I don't know if you truly ever heal from it; or if it just stays like a quiet shadow with you for the rest of your life. Is it a ticking time bomb able to reset again and again? Or it is a one way train ticket?

The thing that's so ironic about life is we are expected to be good, upright, sane citizens that are selfless and motivated, loyal, trustworthy, and loving. At least that's the general idea. Most people have hard childhoods and get the tough end of the deal, but me, despite my circumstances that branched out over most of my early childhood and teenage years, I have no true reason to let myself be anything but sane and stable. I could have a thousand things go wrong in my life, and while it would be nearly impossible to cope with it, what we make of a situation is entirely up to us. Not because of our parents, or what someone did or said to us, it is our choice alone to decide whether or not to let fate destroy our lives. Those that are selfless are looked up to, and yet we are taught from the first day we are put in this planet, to be selfish. We cry when we want something. We get angry when things don't work out. We lose hope, we expect the impossible, we hate responsibility no matter what the rewards are, we would prefer to be lazy, and eat what we want and do what we want, and never be told what we should or should not do. Deep down, no matter how good of a person you think you are, we are bad. Some have that potential more than others, others try to never display it, some spend half their lives living in it, and the other half trying to repair and rebuild.

So if we, being little selfish humans constantly striving for perfection (or having given up on that notion), are somehow expected to endure everything life gives us, and to somehow break free from the adversity and trials that never stop, how on earth can we be expected to remain completely in reality at all times? Is there ever an escape?

I haven't quite figured that out yet. Maybe one day I will, or maybe I will never.

I guess I'm just waiting for the right moment.