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"'If I wasn't real,' Alice said-half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous-'I shouldn't be able to cry.'
'I hope you don't think those are real tears?'  Tweedledee interrupted in a tone of great contempt."

The mind of someone who has never experienced childhood, or at least not in the little memory they have left, can be very...chaotic and psychotic?  Very confusing and unreal.  Very nonsensical.  When you skip adolescence and go straight into adulthood, it's like skipping dating and going straight into marriage.  You don't know how you ended up there, and you have no foundation to give you the least bit of sanity or consistency.  At times, you feel very much like a child, you may even act like a child, or what you believe a child should be.  One may hide their very real and adult-like fears, just to show they are normal.  To fit in.  Because, what adult really wants to befriend a 5 year old, no matter how old they are inside.

Now, when you are someone who missed out on childhood, and than became corrupted with disorders, anxieties, and phobias, your mind becomes even more offset.

Most people, in reality, want to boast of a disorder.  They will go as far as to self-diagnose themselves, and give silly excuses for how they just know the mental illness is real and alive in them.  You've heard them: "Oh, I'm just so overly organized, I seriously think I have OCD."  Than, there are those of us who need disorders to survive.  We cannot function with out them.  We thirst and hunger for them.  With out them, we wouldn't know who we are.

Yet, we are with out them.  So we make our way into them.  This need doesn't always come in the form, necessarily, of a literal disorder, but sometimes, disorderly behavior.  One may read a book on anorexia and bulimia, and with each turn of the page a thought haunts us.  Those sound nice, maybe I'll try them on.  At school you see a kid all cut up from razor blades and you unwillingly think...Looks interesting, maybe I'll give it a go later.  You watch the news and hear of the latest rape case and your mind blunders on...That could've been me.  Darn. Usually though, it is with disorders.  You watch Monk in the afternoon, and for the rest of the night you look up OCD online, and by the time you turn off the computer or close the book, you have pinned down exactly how you will live the rest of your life.  Okay, so I need to do this so many times, and I need to group those items together, and I need to count steps, of course avoiding cracks in the cement, oh and don't forget, wet-naps, lots of wet-naps.  A usual favorite is ADHD.  You force yourself to lose focus, which really isn't very hard.  The second a teacher starts talking, you immediately think she is droning on and decided to space out, searching the room for something interesting enough to look at for the remainder of class.

In the end, sometimes you actually adapt the disorder, just by sheer will, with no mental chemical make-up attached.  You dive in full force, and you hit the bottom of a waterless pool.  But, in the end, you can never fulfill your wishes.  You want to grab the blade, you want to slice away, but you can't.  You can't force yourself to give up food.  You can't really care about how many blue and green and red M&M's are lying perfectly stacked in front of you.  You just can't outwit your brain and emotions and hormones.  They beat you.  You failed.  You are normal [enough].

This thought, is crushing.  So you, of course, throw yourself into a panic attack, the one thing you can achieve.  Unrelentingly, you force yourself to breath heavy until you hyperventilate.  You make your whole body convulse, you rock back and forth like you once saw a girl do in some movie from your "childhood".  Looking around, you try to find something to be afraid of.  The dark, yes the chilling dark.  Or even better, the light...the light that brings happiness.  Must not be happy.  Not now.

"In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again."

Yes, it is strange.  No, we can't help it.  Call it mania, call it craziness, call it obsession, call it lies, and call it self-pity.  The truth of the matter is, none of us could imagine our life with out it.  Life with out fear hardly seems like a life.  We cling to fear, just like we cling to being screwed up.  To not fear would be to trust, and to trust would mean to let go.  Not having control.  Control is the issue at hand.  We want to control our minds, our emotions.  We don't want them to control us.  So we force them into something they are not, or maybe even something they are but to a far worse degree, because we need some sort of handle on our lives.  Putting your life in another's hand, walking around carefree.  That is death to us.  Sadly, we pray to God that we will be screwed up in every and any way possible.

Why, I don't know.  Something about being screwed up makes us feel sane.  Maybe we need something to blame our actions on.  "Well, I cry randomly in class because I have Depression, PTSD, AAD, and I'm just plain screwed up."  Usually, part of our attempts to be insane is because we in some way really are.  I really do have PTSD.  It's a daily struggle.  Yet I make it worse, because I feel like I need to for it to be real.  It's not nearly strong enough, in my mind, to be believable, it doesn't fit enough of the criteria, and so I must make it worse.  When it does hit, and inevitably, it does [daily], I need something else to blame it on.  Maybe so I don't have to tell the truth of why I'm freaking out.  "I'm shaking?  Oh, don't worry, I'm ADHD."

There is no fight or flight.  There is no do or die.  Sometimes there is a, I'm going to hurt you before you kill me.  Most times, there is merely a feeling of: "Fine, kill me.  It would make a great epic story of my messed up life.  What a romantically tragic ending to my self-induced misery.  I hope someone writes a story about this."

You sit and wait to get hit.  You wait to be hurt.  And when it doesn't happen [enough], you try to be more vulnerable to it.  Date a guy you know to be abusive, stand on a dangerous street where a man may come snatch you away, end a friendship you know you need to survive.  Anything, something, to keep you going.   You go to the doctor for Bronchitis, praying the whole time "Cancer, please God, let it be cancer."  The doctor gives you codeine, and your initial reaction to the warning labels is "Addictive?  Good."

It's like, being a junkie towards pain.  Because in the end.  Pain is feeling.  And to feel.  You must be alive.  You must be something human.  You must be.  People are diagnosed with disorders, people mutilate themselves, people starve, people have anxiety, people have emotions that pain them terribly.  So, you see.  You depend on being psychotic to breath.  You are addicted to feeling.  Most wonderfully, and scarily...you are.

Again, you never actually go through with it.  You can never fully take on all the mania you wish to.  Maybe that's by God's grace and will, maybe it's by your own fear, and maybe it's the sense you are trying to suppress.  Unfortunately, when you realize you can't go through with it, you are in a nightmare.  Wishing you could put yourself through Hell, but finding yourselves in front of Heaven's gates.

In the end.  You live a normal life.  You go about a normal day.  You laugh a normal laugh.  In the end.  You really are happy.  Joy is the one emotion you can't fake or hide very well.  It bubbles up from within and there's nothing you can do to stop it.  This gift of God is more powerful than your will to destroy.  Love too.  You can't get enough of it.  Despite your tries, love will eventually beckon to you, and you have to answer.  You just have to.  And, in the end, your answer is the one thread that will keep you sane.  Keep you together.  Keep you alive.  It will come to define your breaths, and it will come with out notice.  And when it comes, all the multiple personalities you've made up in yourself, all the passionate anxiety, all the pains you wish you had, the hysteria you lean on, the tears you push out, and the eccentricities you experience, get washed away.  My whole life has been revolved around having control and keeping everything in its tidy little box throughout my PTSD mania.  My whole life before love.  Love opens each neatly wrapped box of distress, and lets it free.  All you can do is look on, and laugh at how silly you've been.

"'Who are you?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation.  Alice replied, rather shyly, 'I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present-at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'
'What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar, sternly.  'Explain yourself!'
'I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir,' said Alice, 'because I'm not myself, you see.'
'I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.
'I'm afraid I can't put it any more clearly,' Alice replied, very politely, 'for I can't understand it myself, to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'
'It isn't,' said the Caterpillar...
'Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice: 'all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.'
'You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously.  'Who are you?'...