Old times

Once in the late 19th century Europe there lived a woman named Sheila.

For quite some time, Sheila had suspected that her abilities were not adequate enough for performing her work duties honorably. She had noticed some changes in herself as early as last summer when she had become more reactive, cringed even for very distant sounds, and performed reactive, panic like body movements. Her handwriting, especially her signature, had changed closer to rigid rectilinear, squarish, and flashy, rather than exhibiting her usual uniform writing style. She woke up to reality around her only very occasionally, and during those brief sane moments, she was able to wonder that perhaps there was something in wrong with her, but to her own misfortune lacked the required insight to seek professional help to her illness.

The aforementioned matters were exacerbated after the fact when the doctor had diagnosed her with a mental illness, and which then later turned out to be the severest of the kind in the spectrum of psychotic disorders. In the brief moment of clarity Sheila ventured to discontinue the long break she had had off taking her medication after a new employee had entered her workplace from a maternity leave where she worked as a superior. Taking break from her medication was something that she never should have kept in the first place, but had not dared to obey the doctor's prescription, of course, because based on the good doctor's supposed way of looking at her she just could not quite trust him...

Sheila’s behavior became known later on to her good meaning co-workers as well after she started projecting the symptoms of her weak ego-strength that were set off by her nearly non-existent self-esteem, making her an inferior and a bully, as she put words to other persons mouth she had herself invented in order to make it alright to unrightfully dismiss the other person. During these psychotic periods she used to stare the other persons throat in face-to-face communication because she believed possessing a “sixth sense” for detecting the “real message” out of a fake one by “hearing” what the other person actually “said”. In a milder stage her loose grip that was out of touch with reality manifested with “feeling”, which she got when she interpreted feedback that she had received from “customers”, as she was in a “customer service” profession, and those interpretations of her’s were made through the mammalian psychotic spectacles that kept her away from the truth and real world.

In a parallel with these symptoms which fitted to a bad and inferior person (putting self-invented words to other persons mouth to justify own psychopathic manipulation caused by paranoid personality disorder), she was also inclined to involuntarily loose her sense of self when a person whom she incorrectly believed having arbitrary power over to her turned back on her, and because of this effect similar to a reptilian took effect in her less than high quality brain, she started to get rid of those persons unconsciously and slowly by using emotional manipulation, which unfortunately had effect on those poor individuals, who she had found enough suggestible and vulnerable.

In the active state of her paranoia her mind sought unconsciously ways how to act in ways to give the people impression as if it were someone else than her to blame of her own maladaptive behavior. Fortunately her modus operandi had been all too clear to her co-workers who saw her grotesque behavior as a reflection of human wickedness. Sheila woke up to reality very rarely and by accident, just to realize that she should no longer hold her current position in the workplace, as her modus operandi had changed her from decent citizen to a malicious bitch. Anyhow she had decided that she will dare to start on the prescribed medication again, because after having smelled the somewhat redundant air which came along with a new entrant her nose had recognized the all too familiar smell for her, the smell, which she was very violently tried to hide even when she had eaten the medicine at home. Mildly intoxicating, thick scent, the kind that springs from human exhalation after drug tablet has begun to melt down in the stomach, but has not yet been completely dissolved by the body. That smell, she had experienced, was so tormented open, making it known for all the public which terrible disease she was having, that she tried with every effort to hide it from becoming exposed. She tried to tuck it in many ways, by boiling freshly cooked coffee, which was intended to occupy the air space and by scratching a match stick in the oven to take away the medicinal odors and to replace it with smell of sulfur, knowing that the ventilation operated in her apartment in-through that old oven through the chimney, where room air was also spread to adjacent homes.

One of Sheila’s co-workers Gallaghan Gradestock, happened to be an acquaintance of Sheila’s husband John, and during them buddies occasional sauna evenings got to hear John’s view of his and Sheila’s relationship:

“I tell you man, Sheila has a personality of a wicked slut. She does tricks with guys she lies to be in love with. Even when I walk together with her, and heck, even if I walk with her and her grandfather, she picks a random guy from the distant, the best man, or actually a second best man, as this one always seeks the for the next best thing residing next to her mate, no matter the appearance of the guy, whether he is actually attractive or not, she in a few minutes after seeing that guy turns face towards him, as if just innocently starting to gaze the landslide view. Then she takes me to kiss her so that my back faces towards the guy, and when I am actually kissing her tenderly, that woman fixes her gaze to the guy, and when I notice that, and am trying to put my head between the eye contact, and when that doesn’t do my hand, she fiercely tries to hold that eye contact with the guy tackling me like professional wrestler, and ignoring the stone cold fact that she has noticed that I have noticed what she tries to do, and am trying to prevent her from doing the awkward thing that she does keenly. After this type of behavior the woman even advertised to me that she has never made mistakes in her relationships. Hah. On the opposite. She keeps making basic mistakes, and “do-nots” listed in every woman’s gossip magazine in our relationship over and over again, and every time refuses taking any responsibility of her actions.”

“But it wasn’t all, damn you. There is much more I tell you. So much more. She claims that when she walks on the public place like in the street, every guy watches her. Hey! Perhaps you have not noticed that every guy recognizes a slut, which means a woman is attracted to everyone else except the one she is dating with at the moment, and openly wants to have sex with that type of woman, and the woman’s physical appearance doesn’t actually matter even a tiniest bit in this market where the cheapest price attracts the most.

Galaghan was about to interrupt John to declare his own opinion that guys tend to watch women during their active menstrual period, and also if they smell that guy has ejaculated to woman’s vagina making semen odor available for smelly nose.

“The fact that she has weak ego-strength plays a significant part in her behavior too you know, because her brain is so undeveloped that she does not possess a mind of her own, but assumes that what she does is only a manifestation of the thoughts and desires of the person who’s body language she interprets, and then says: oh, they were not my thoughts, they were the guy’s thoughts who was sitting next to us. That psychotic witch. She is living way too much out of touch with reality for my taste.”

“Hell, my girl even thought I had an access to her mind, and that I had an opportunity to examine her thoughts, and accused me of intruding her mind and invading her personal privacy. She even said: hey John, won’t you please cut me a freaking slack here, I mean c’mon, d’ya have to read my thoughts now, don’t I have even a tiniest privacy here!? And no, that was not all. The double-time sore loser was so narrow in her associative horizon and weak with her ego-strength that she gave her son a power of suggestion that for example by sensing the atmosphere let herself to believe that her son sent her messages of his wishes which she then conveniently interpreted usually for the worst of me, unfortunately. Once she even dumped me to the street in the middle of the night because she acted once again on false belief on suggestion, believing that someone wanted her to throw me out of the apartment, and it was no matter who the person would have been because her weakness was so deep that she unconsciously believed anyone was in commanding position over her.”

“Also the diagnosed depression caused her to give way too significant meaning for a self-picked very small events which as a rule involved every time perceptions of another person’s actions, and usually there was a one event in any situation which she magnified in her mind so large that occupied her mind almost completely, and distorted her world view to make it look worse than it in reality was.”

Sheila’ s side persona Mary, made her to believe that she could do anything and everything. Her father, still alive and approaching to his mid-seventies, knew this but he was also aware of that her daughter’s grandiose delusion was completely out of touch with reality. After all, he had once accidently seen her daughter’s standardized intelligence test score report, which she had left on the kitchen table on the time he paid one of his frequent visits to check whether her daughter would have gotten any better. Anyway, he was calm because he was somewhat confident that with her intelligence quotient combined with the diagnoses she had, his daughter was many miles away of successfully handling three, let alone four variables even in the tasks she was familiar with. It was, however, this particular delusional way of thinking that could actually make her potentially dangerous to society, he thought. In fact her father once witnessed, during a five person dinner, how her daughter had seen a poster on their kitchen wall containing two lines of readable text. After seeing those two lines, his poor daughter’s mind, functioning fluently like a dried raisin sucked out of all the fluid, decoded the information incorrectly by interpreting the posters text as a command for her to pork her step brother with a kitchen fork which she then robotically did. There was naturally a lot of yelling and crying and need for a band aid. Fortunately for most of them, and because they all loved each other very much, they found afterwards a reason they could laugh at, which was of course found out afterwards her hospitalization to the most well-known psychiatric clinic in the world. Her daughter’s already low self-confidence sneakily diminished close to a non-existent and she was afraid. Afraid, that she had been blundered so badly that no time would past until someone would write an entire book of her foolish things.

Sheila learned already at the age of four, that when her mother taught him to do something, and she happily tried, but obviously a child could not yet do it exactly like the mother wants to, her mother, instead of paying thanks to her child, as a habit punished her sharply by shouting, "nooo!!" and "not like that!". "We thought that this nurturing method would not backfire later on her life", his father muttered to himself, and continued as if speaking with one voice with his former wife, Sheila's mother: "but now, at the age of 54 the nurturing methods effects begin to appear.". When she is warming up the sauna, when she has set the wooden kindling neatly into the firebox suitably loosely, so that oxygen can pass through the grate to feed the burning sore fire, then, in the moment when she is scratching a matchstick on a matchbox surface, her subconscious blames her angrily, urging her to fail, shouting "hey, what are you doing", "not that way around girl", "I do not think the girl knows how!", and in whisper: "you’re a ho’". For this, so agonizingly simple reason, she often broke off the first two matches, of course, because her attention shattered to pieces as her unconscious mind got supremacy over her conscious mind, and so when her consciousness returned to the state of somewhat what could be considered as being awake, she smashed that first broken match instinctively against the sauna floor crying, “you piece of shit”.

His father had been in the old Russia, working as an elite soldier. Walked to the death spine stick straight, and at the end of the stick his head, rock hard as his mind, nose pointing straight, and an ice cold gaze parallel to asphaltic pavement he walked on. This style of walking appealed to a wide range of women. He was seen a man of law and justice. He was irritated with Sheila’s ear achingly weak verbal powers. Not that the daughter would not have been talkative, on the contrary. Speech came like fire and the fire that was so vivid it almost did not seem to have an end at all. But the content of the speech lacked common sense, intelligence, purpose, clarity, and most destructive, it lacked comprehensibility. Father thought her daughter’s language impairment was a side product of her paranoid personality. When she instructed the friends to do something, like, say, to get a towel from the cabinet before going to the sauna, she lacked the ability to say the case explaining it to the core. Instead, she would be nicely describing the towels appearance, and where they are in the closet, and where to bring the towel, but to the misfortune for some of her friends who were not at all as knowledgeable of the architectural and interior design of sauna facilities as she, all they managed to find out was that they were ended up clueless, and even after that, she went on with that beautiful elaboration, carefully avoiding the disclosure of those words which usage would have made the case even for minor children clear to understand. This particular core avoidance of reality was so daily for her, and so staggeringly annoyingly true and distorted, that it was precisely why her father would have been more than willingly to at least once a week hammer a 5-inch nail in one swell swoop through his daughter’s skull, deep in to the brain, until to the flattened head. Only then will she be healed, his father thought. If only he could have created a survey at those moments, a true Gallup poll of Tahiti, it would show that hundreds of others would have had a similar wish, this would have been for sure, and the result would have been devastatingly and overwhelmingly for his interest.

Next match lighted. Sheila held it tightly between her thumb and index finger and led the lighting head carefully to a pile of dry and hard bark and wooden sticks, stacked on a grate which slowly started given rise to a fire, making a quiet crisp sound as the wood slowly burnt off. Soon, her mind settled to her comfort zone, and she returned to her memories to time when she was much younger, and her son still a baby. She vaguely remembered a moment when she played with her baby boy on a beach, the sand of the beach, wading in deep water to their ankles. She remembered that for some reason she had, despite of seemingly joyful moment that pursued togetherness, she felt exasperated. Further afield the coastline father tried to console his crying child who could not stop weeping. Sheila remembered that few minutes after that event, which she had distantly perceived, she had angrily and reactively kicked a dose of sea water to her son's face, so that it was in turn he who now burst into tears, eyes startled and stinging salt water in his eyes. Had she accepted in her teenage years her psychiatrist Dr. Schnabel’s theory she would have realized that she had thrown the water in her child's face causing him to cry for the share sake that she only carried out her own deep-seated authority obedience which her father had inscribed to her behavior with his upbringing methods and which made her easily suggestible, as long as the authority was far enough distance, with one leg on the side of conscious perception and the other on the unconscious perception. In this case, therefore, the target of her perception, the father and his child, were in ideal distance for her sight and hearing to let the afore described event to manifest, as Sheila was barely able to consciously press the annoying feeling to the unconscious, and when done so the result was the immediate effect of mimicking the perceived authority, so in this case to mimic the father whom Sheila’s unconscious had reasoned to have caused the child to cry. As described, in these type of cases Sheila was able to push the conscious to unconscious, but the repercussions of her success resulted to the events as on the beach, Dr. Schnabel concluded the last paragraph of Sheila’s psychiatric report, and lit his pipe.