Brian Stableford by Man In A Cage

Author:Man In A Cage
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-21T21:51:09+00:00

between as well.

It’s never easy.

And another thing you have to be careful about in yielding to these obsessions is the old saw about better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. The very fact of not knowing how nasty, how silly, how futile, how utterly mad the next short-circuit thought is going to be is an added pressure on your mind. There’s no crummy joke that fortune can play on you funnier than the obsession to do the thing you just can’t do. That’s a real bastard—the one you have to outlast because you’ve no damn choice. That’s a real triple bind. You don’t do it, you suffer it all times, all ways. You do it, or try, and they commit you, imprison you, kill you, or it kills you. Funny, hey? Or, of course, you kill yourself. But don’t. You lose.

So what do you do?

How do you begin to come back again?

Yes, I mean back again, because now, believe it or not, you are well and truly and wholly there.

Well, again believe it or not, the first time you’re there almost anything can bring you back.

The first time.

Just realizing how badly off you are, realizing it, admitting it, and analyzing it (the last two are difficult and near-miraculous, in that order) can be enough. Ought to be enough. Just knowing things are wrong and having an idea about the pattern of wrongness and the logic of wrongness can make it easy to come back. Score one for psychiatry, self-administered or paid for. But score one and only one. The one thing you mustn’t do is think you’ve won. You have to keep winning. Not once, twice, or three times, but forever.

You have got to take the warning.

You have got to let your first time arm you—to some extent—against your second time.

A matter of days might pass. Good days. Happy days, even, filled with blessed relief. Don’t ever waste those days! Once you’re in the grip of the syndrome the quality of operations within the human sphere of existence goes down about 80 percent. Your work suffers. Your play suffers. You suffer. So when you’ve got those days when you can do something, do. Set yourself up a hole to run to when the next crisis comes. You tell somebody. You ask for help. You make damn sure that the next time the obsessions get you in their claws there’s somebody who can make ready with the tea and sympathy.

Especially the sympathy. Paid shrinks are one answer to the need; it’s better if you can find an answer without resorting to that.

While you can, you set yourself up a position in the human race that you can manage to hold. Only a fool thinks he’s clear after one fall. Only a fool doesn’t provide against the chance that he may fall again. If you’re a fool, you lose. In the days between attack one and attack two it is not enough to sit still, hold tight, stand fast. You get few enough opportunities to move forward, you have got to take them.

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