“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes
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There are times in life when being out of your mind is exactly where you need to be.
Get out of the box (which is what those teenagers in Wiltshire needed to happen when chasing a possible Pokemon got the lost in the cave system known locally as The Box).
It’s in theory a bad place to be,
‘out of your mind’
but in practice…
that kind of practice which isn’t trying to make things perfect (which is a folly of another kind) by repeating the same thing over and over expecting different results…
being out of your mind may be a haven rather than a hell.
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“When the head aches, all the members partake of the pain.”
― Miguel de Cervantes
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I grew up with narcissists
(according to me)
– yes, I’m going to keep adding that bracketed proviso/disclaimer/whatnot as long as I remember to do so because…
if there is one thing I’ve learned from the narcissists in my life it’s that pre-empting in this manner is worth doing to avoid wasting your own (life) time discussing (otherwise known as arguing) minor details with people,
often random strangers,
who take issue with them and make what is minor a major because your minor is a major to them…
they are nitpicking souls who have found power in being that way…
one tiny error can control you and if they can find your tiny error they own you (pawn you) and become your puppet master…
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“She wanted, with her fickleness, to make my destruction constant; I want, by trying to destroy myself, to satisfy her desire.”
― Miguel de Cervantes
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and so on amongst other lessons learned from narcissists about the dark side of human nature which isn’t exclusive to narcissists, sociopaths and Bond villains.
What does – I grew up with narcissists – mean?
In this particular instance,
if I can recall wtf my original point or idea was,
it means that going insane may actually be the only way to be as sane as a human is ever going to be.
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“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes
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The narcissists in my life were big readers
(they read Don Quixote… amongst other classics and expected others to have read these classics too… beware if you didn’t and hadn’t because your status depended upon it as their status did and one small lack on your part and they’d never let you forget it even if you made up for it later… later is too late)
– read everything and you will know everything – could have been their motto,
although the way that narcissists read things isn’t the way that non-narcissists read things.
(Narcissist read info online about narcissists – they use it differently than non-narcissists).
A narcissist not only reads
but reads into…
which means that whatever they read has so many layers available to be read into… opportunities for an opportunist to make life so much more complex for everyone.
They do this with what people say,
they read the words that you speak…
when they replay them in their mind over and over and over again… (it will be edited for purpose)… perhaps to then throw what you have said back in your face with a whole new meaning from what you originally meant when you said it… and they can make your head spin so much you’ll end up believing that you meant what you never even considered by what you said.
Doctors of spin are narcissists,
and since you’re so caught up in being in the sane zone, you’re totally vulnerable when hit with the insane zone.
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“Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.”
― Miguel de Cervantes
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Perhaps the best example for what it’s like to have your reality dictated to you and created by narcissists from the get-go is…
Pokemon Go…
the strange stories in the news about the often weird results of people playing this game… remind me of what it’s like to be living under the influence of narcissists
you’re always jousting at windmills, trying to defeat imaginary beasties, tame them, own them, kill them…
you feel like a master in search of mastery but… someone else holds the reins (in the case of Pokemon Go it’s the creators behind it) but you may think it’s you… because if you do then when the shit hits the fan (a fan of such a game like you) you’ll blame yourself even if you blame someone else (every time you blame someone else you’ll feel a twinge of personal guilt)…
and those dragons you’re fighting… so important to fight them, no one understands what you’re doing except others caught up in the craze and… those others caught up in the craze are as much your enemies liable to turn on you as they might be your allies there to support you when… people not playing look at you and decide you belong in a nuthouse (or whatever the politically correct term for that is… frankly PC-ness is sometimes a Pokemon style game).
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“The reason for the unreason with which you treat my reason , so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.”
― Miguel de Cervantes
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Sometimes I think about everything I experienced as reality as a child…
which I have now abandoned as being ‘not reality’ because it makes more sense labeled as unreality, fantasy, radical idealism… the delusions of the distorted minds who thought they were straight and thought everyone else was crooked, but… they were wrong (or at least their straight didn’t win so now it is crooked)…
I get these bizarre moments of wondering if perhaps they weren’t more real than what is now viewed as being real.
Pokemon Go is the sort of thing which prompts that kind of thought.
On the one hand we have a coup in Turkey… can those who are now under arrest for that attempted coup perhaps say they were playing Pokemon Go?
On the other hand we have a bunch of people descending on Central Park because a rare Pokemon has been spotted there…
Or a group of teenagers lost in a cave system because maybe there was a Pokemon there – there wasn’t (the rescue services confirmed this in an effort to avoid any more people descending into this cave system to find Pokemons).
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“In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.”
― Miguel de Cervantes
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Reading the news at the moment is a bit like playing some utterly ridiculous and unpredictable game of – Who’s the craziest person alive atm!?! – which leaves me thinking that I’m so much saner than I ever gave myself credit for being
(to be fair to myself for always thinking I was a wickedly loony villain – that was the role given to me by the narcissists in my life and I kind of didn’t know I had other roles available until later on and by the time later on came later on… I was a bit attached to being the loony of the family even though… I never did it as well as I could have done it had I actually embraced it the way that… Pokemon Go players seem to be embracing such a thing.
Ah… regrets, hindsight, details, human… reading… too much into what has passed and can be re-read and rewritten over and over and over again, but never re-lived…
unless you’re The Doctor…
stripping the paint off the door of your Tardis because you always wondered what lay beneath what was on top.
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“… truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.”
― Miguel de Cervante
An Upturned Soul 
What caught my attention in this post is that your story with books is the very opposite of mine. When I’m feeling down I usually stop by your blog in search for some comfort. I don’t know why, but your words and way to deal with crisis put order in my mind when it is at disorder. And I’ve been dealing for a long time with identity crisis regarding books.
The pride your parents have in reading books are the same as my parents in not reading them, and even mocking those who read.
I always find myself trying to talk to people who have the same vision as mine, it’s a comfort zone. But I think is better when you find someone with a different point of view on the same matter, even so when there’s no disrespect.
Pokemon go and books are both a escape from reality. They both could be dangerous if used/read in unhealthy ways. A person’s life could be the same with or without them, as it’s their lifes choices, and if they can live just fine with or without, I think that is what matters.
I like the parallel you made with the game and people who have to live under the influence of narcissists.
“so important to fight them, no one understands what you’re doing except others caught up in the craze and… those others caught up in the craze are as much your enemies liable to turn on you as they might be your allies there to support you when… people not playing look at you and decide you belong in a nuthouse”
This really hit me. I replace the game with books, and it’s exactly what happens.
But what I like the most about this post is that all the quotes are from Don Quixote. The avid reader, out of reality, delusional, the most selfless human being in the story, the lunatic Don Quixote de La mancha.
It really really moves me.
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Thank you for sharing 🙂
I think both being with people who share your view and being with those who have an alternative perspective is comforting and nurturing. It depends on the moment and what we need in that moment. Our comfort zone can change based on where we’re at.
It also depends, as you wisely pointed out on, on whether respect is part of the equation. Disrespect is the kind of friction with tends to begin and end with discomfort – people are most often disrespectful of others when they feel disrespected and are trying to get respect the wrong way.
I actually love the idea of Pokemon Go, it’s a bit like a treasure hunt, and I always love those. It’s a fun way to get to know a place too as it may take you to where you’ve never been or bothered going. I often get annoyed with myself for not exploring the areas in which I live more than I do. ANd I do love games, both as an escape and as a way to see things from a different perspective. Video games in particular have helped me to understand myself and others better – it’s sometimes an intriguing way to get to know someone else because gameplay often brings out in people what you don’t see in other social interactions.
Books used to be one of my escape pods – as well as where I learned a lot about things I might have never learned otherwise. It’s a wonderful way to travel the world, in time, through the psyche of consciousness, collective and personal. Some of my most profound relationships have been with books. However I didn’t see reading as the way to gain superiority over others like my parents did, for me it showed me how much knowledge others have and share freely (okay, you have to buy books but the price of a book is always small compared with how much a book gives you), and how much more I needed to learn to know.
Many years ago I took a ‘personality test’ for a ‘cult’ of sorts which I tried out during a very confused and curious time in my life which left me knowing that belonging to a cult or any kind of group like that was the last thing I needed or wanted to do. One thing question in that test asked – Do you like reading encyclopedias – to which I answered yes (my parents had the Encyclopedia Britannica which I used enjoy reading from cover to cover. Apparently my ‘yes’ to that question = that I was ‘anxious/of a nervous disposition’ and ‘easily influenced’. That equation bothered me and is something which made me suspicious of everything that ‘cult’ said because to me someone who reads encyclopedias is the sort of person who likes to investigate things, is curious and asks questions/seeks answers to questions and will question everything/research it. Surely answering yes to that question should have warned that ‘cult’ that I would question their teachings and decide for myself whether they were valid or not, rather than being ‘easily influenced’. I suppose they figured (wrongly) that someone who spent their spare time reading encyclopedias was a weirdo loner who was desperate to belong to a group who accepted them even with their weirdo loner ways (but weirdo loners are sometimes loners because they don’t really want to belong to a group they just sometimes think they should).
We live and learn and one of the things we learn is people don’t always look at the same thing the same way, but differences are sometimes more similar than similarities 🙂
Don Quixote is the sort of story which expresses so much – a beautiful allegory about what it is to be oh so very human in an oh so very human world 🙂
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