die Merkwürdiggehirne

Stanley Kubrick gives Dr. Strangelove's original name as Merkwürdigliebe, which is, for all of you who have never studied German, the verbatim translation of the English. The remaining title of the movie that the good doctor features in is Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. It's apropos because this entry today is about my brain and her inability to stop worrying and love poison.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa -- poison?"

Yeah. Poison.

For two, maybe even three years when I was in elementary school, I was completely convinced that toothpaste was poisonous. I read the warning on the back of the tube and a series of glowing, supervillain-green gears starting turning in my head. Poison. Fatal, terrible poison. If I used toothpaste, my brain informed me with the echoing otherworldly voice of a sci-fi god out to fuck with the human race, I would die. Boom. Bye-bye, little Katie.

It didn't matter that everyone else used toothpaste. It didn't matter that I had used it in the past and lived to tell the tale. It didn't matter. I was absolutely 100% convinced that I was going to die every time toothpaste touched my mouth. I would brush my teeth, go to bed terrified, barely sleep, wake up in the morning and cry with relief that I had miraculously not died during the night. Every time I survived it felt like the universe was giving me a second chance not to mess with toothpaste. And every time I went to brush my teeth it felt like I was spitting in the face of the generous Fates.

Eventually, I cut out of the source of the panic and fear. I stopped brushing my teeth.

And, yes, it sucked. I'm sure you can imagine the taste. I picked up a number of habits to compensate for the mossy feeling on my teeth: scraping them with my nails, flossing like crazy (an adjective I've chosen quite deliberately here), rubbing them with a rough cloth, licking them hard with my tongue, etc. I even bought a series of clean, untainted, less-likely-to-kill-me toothbrushes and scrubbed away with those. Ironically, I started to wear away at my gums by brushing too much and too hard.

Life is funny sometimes.

I felt filthy and sad and deeply, fundamentally confused.

And no, no one tried to talk me out of it. Not really. How does a grade schooler sit down with her parents and say, "Listen, I know you're a part of a silent conspiracy to poison me. Now convince me that's not real. Please." I tried saying "I don't want to use toothpaste" and was met with a predictable reaction: that special blend of annoyance, exasperation, and personal inconvenience adults reserve for young and stupid children.

Some of you might be feeling sad by now. Here's a picture of a koala in a tree for you.

And If you're wondering, why would there be a warning label on the murder weapon if there was a conspiracy to poison you, Kathryn? then I've got to break it to you that rational thinking was not any part of this little horror show.

Yes, I brush my teeth now. A dentist struck me over the head with a heavy folder and shouted at me to stop being negligent and lazy. I had a great number of small cavities dotting my teeth, because, unlike other people I know who brag about not brushing and never having cavities, my mouth is apparently slightly more acidic than the human norm, making for a lot of quality time with novocaine and needles altogether. Between the public shaming, the physical pain, and the needles that haunted my nightmares I was able to find some balance for the fear of being poisoned. I started brushing.

That fear didn't fade for a very, very long time. There were bouts where I stopped brushing again just to give myself a break from it. But as I racked up an impressive list of times I had brushed my teeth and not died horribly I slowly began to find some peace. Peace that begins to feel uneasy once I compromise it by discussing it, but hey. I'll take it.

It's just one example. I have others. My mother teasingly told me that there were poisonous plants in our garden and yard capable of killing human beings. I had to go find the far corner of the women's rest room in the Home Depot we were at and curl up there, headphones in, eyes closed, trying to deal with the fact that suddenly the home I had lived in for almost twenty years felt unsafe. To any of you who came into that bathroom and heard a young woman whispering "Don't think, don't think, don't think, don't think," be advised that it wasn't the ghost of an alternate totalitarian universe who slipped into ours via a crack in the night-o-sphere.

It was just me.

Today I'm dealing with it by watching How I Met Your Mother and holding a guinea pig. Jack has made lemon and ginger tea. Most of my lights are off. My guinea pig wants up on my shoulder.

Life goes on.

#StanleyKubrick #mentalhealth