Fxck up v.s. normal: Quotes from Madness

Some quotes from Madness by Marya Hornbacher.

"My new therapist tells me that I don't know how to live without crisis. "  P. 249

"I've been a total fuckup.  I couldn't do a single basic thing that normal people do every day without falling apart or having a nervous breakdown.  Normal people just do things.  It's not a big deal."  P. 250

Who and what are normal people?

The therapist...

"See, the thing is, you've got this idea of normal that's not normal.  Normal people don't do everything  perfectly.  You don't have to do everything perfectly to be normal. "  P. 251

Then, what does it mean to be normal?

 "Your problem is that you're so used to being in crisis that your whole perception of yourself is as a fuckup, a permanent fuckup, never someone who gets to not be a fuckup, so you have to torture yourself and hate yourself just to be as good as everyone else.  You're having a hard time realizing that you're not a fuckup anymore."  P. 251

"But if you're not trying to be perfect, then how do you know if you're doing things right?"

"The best I can do is sometimes completely fail,"  I say...... "The rest of us do it all the time."

Bewildered, I wonder out to my car.

Functional

Just when I was taking down the following passage from the book "Madness"...

"I sit down at my desk to work. I'm not writing well, but I'm only writing for myself. This is to make me feel functional, a feeling I lost during those years of total disability, so that at the end of the day I can feel good about the fact that the day did not pass me by." P. 243

No better way to put it... the pursuit of functionality...

This voice rose from sort of the center of my head...

"I envy you. You feel so settled." 8-O

So... my delusional and hallucinational self/selves are envious of this useless me? 8-O lol oops...