Not so much! Do you know the Mayhem guy from the Allstate commercials? Well he seems to have taken up residence around me, and a few friends have pointed it out. Many have asked exactly why I am not sitting in a corner crying or banging my head against a wall, and I answer, “I don’t do crazy in public. Unless I’m holding a conversation with my characters, and that’s the exception.”
The past three years of my life have been filled with crazy, moronic, moral breaking things: divorce, child custody, troubled youth, watching our justice system epicly fail, rain coming from the ceiling of our 1st story bedroom in a two story house, a car accident, and now a burst pool pipe.
“Well hello Mayhem! Please be sure to pay first and last month’s rent. Oh, and can you please put the toilet seat down? There are women living in the house who don’t like their butt drowning in subfreezing toilet water.”
But do I cry about it? Do I raise my fist to the heavens and yell, “WHY? why? Why?” Nope! I write about it. While these stories rarely make it into novels, they do make it into journals or onto brown napkins from the hospital I work at. No,not a psychiatric hospital–though listening to the stories of those patients are sometimes inspiring and thought provoking–my true job lies in making sure people wake up from their surgery, and I’m thankful Mayhem is stopped at the door by security.
Where so many people have asked, why haven’t you just broken down? I answer, “Because it won’t stop the voices in my head.” I have more to deal with than late bills, the rising cost of electricity, and an increase in my car insurance because someone else had an accident; I have voices that talk all day and they don’t stop for my little crises. They seem to really care less.
My outlet to life are my words. Some write poetry, some draw, some garden, some drink. I write. I can escape by putting it down on paper, though I have chosen time and time again to never write it out as some Shakesperean tragedy, instead it is written in third person limited as a comedy. Because when I look back at the dismal year of 2011, all I see is a black veil over my life … but I laugh at it because I am still here.
Mayhem may try to be my foe, but all he has done is given me reason to write. My words for the day are: Don’t let life get in your way. Get in life’s way and say, “nani nani nani boo boo.”
Tania L Ramos, Author
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