Ain't it Great?

There's this song my mom used to sing that often runs through my head, "Boom, Boom! Ain't it great to be crazy? Boom, boom! Ain't it great to be nuts?" Turns out, not so much. When I was a kid, I imagined insanity as sort of throwing aside all of the acceptable behavior and doing whatever the heck you want. Seemed almost like the ultimate freedom. But my experience is that the opposite is true. Crazy is like living in a box that just keeps getting smaller. Sometimes it feels suffocating or like I'm treading water, trying not to drown. Or maybe I just got the wrong kind of crazy. It's a strange thing, having your whole world view take a dramatic shift. And not in a good way. I can't tell you how much I miss me and the way I used to live. It's the freedom that I miss. It's the looking at the world without thinking about all the germs. It's the not having to spend hours of my day disinfecting things. It's the not feeling like I need to monitor everyone and everything that comes into my home. It's like "germ" is always shoving aside everything else in my head. If you find yourself looking for a phobia, don't choose germs. They're everywhere, you can't see them, and they're on people. And you like people, right? No, go for a phobia of elevators or something that doesn't inhibit and bleed into everything all the time because it's everywhere. But, heck, maybe the elevatorphobes feel differently. My 2nd therapist was mentioning some kind of exposure therapy she used on a snake-o-phobe (herpetophobe, if you want to be fancy), and I expressed the opinion that it would be so much easier to be afraid of snakes than germs. She said, "Tell that to the snake people." So I don't know, any elevatorphobes out there, feel free to dispute me, but can't you just take the stairs? I mean, for me, it's sixes. There are the buttons on the elevator and the the dreaded handrails on the stairs. Boom, boom.