Mental Age, very silly

Do you remember way way back during the Ashley X posts I said how mental age was a really stupid thing? Well, I still think it is, but I was shocked to find out that they apply mental age to gifted people as well. I checked mine out according to the oh so scientific calculations. They tell me my mental age is 50!! What? I am like a 50 year old? That doesn’t make any sense, I know some fifty year olds and they can be really silly odd people. And then I think, well of course, I am also silly and odd. But really, I don’t think it means anything. Does it tell the general public more about me? “Yes, Thirza Cuthand is a 50 year old in the body of a 28 year old.” Pshaw!

I think that asynchronous development, whether that is people like my sister or people like me, takes you out of this mental age bullshit. We’re different, we are unmeasurable. I don’t think you can try to squish either my sister or I into these silly categories of mental age. I was really sad the other day and spent an hour getting hugged and tickled by my sister until she was sure I was okay, that’s a really wise thing to do. She has this incredible light about her, it transcends such a limited view as mental age. Her worker told us that she was in the Mendel Art Gallery and pointed out my video to the worker, she recognized I made it. This particular video doesn’t have my voice, or any images of me in it. But she knew I made it. She can also recognize our Dad’s artwork, and our Mom’s artwork. I know there’s something incredible going on in her head, something maybe so profound none of us can understand it. And I love her for that. She’s the coolest person I know.

It’s probably funny thinking both my sister and I ended up on far ends of the bell curve and still really care for each other and maybe even understand each other better because of it. I don’t know how it affected my mom’s parenting, I mean neither of us fit the developmental models of childhood at all so pretty much all the child rearing books were useless. The only thing Sky got on time for her age was her period, and I remember she was so proud of it, like finally she could look at me and say “Ha! Little smarty pants, I finally beat you to something!” I remember I learned to walk not long after she finally learned and she was so pissed off about it she kept pushing me over. Obviously we worked things out. And I was the one who spent two years advocating for her to have a pet cat, which she loved to pieces. I knew she loved cats, I didn’t understand cats much myself, but I knew she needed to have one. And he was her best friend for a long time, he died this past fall at the ripe age of eighteen.

I’ve decided to release my new video, Madness in Four Actions, on Youtube, hopefully tonight but maybe just sometime this weekend, I have to tweak a couple of things. It’s the first video I’ve made that has used mostly other people’s thoughts all collaged together. I did that for a reason, people often try to make my experience in the psych system an anomaly, or else just don’t believe me because I’m “crazy.” So I realized I had to tell my experience by using other people’s words for a change, so that people realize this is a larger issue than just me. I use my life experiences a lot, but I’ve always thought about them in the larger context, but sometimes people don’t see that and assume I’m being narccistic or something. Anyway, I am also going to be submitting that video to the usual distributors, but I think it’s important for me that it’s seen by a wider audience than just the people who go to festivals. And trust me, the screener copy will be of a way better quality than the Youtube version, it’s still worth it to see the original. I also used psychiatrists words a few times, contrarians like R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, yes, but they have some insight AND the professional cred, and as horrid as it is to depend on professional cred, sometimes that’s the only way people recognize something as being valid. I personally think survivors stories are important, more important than psychiatrists assumptions about us, but there are a few folks in the system who actually know what they are talking about.

I’m thinking about something else too, and excuse the following run on sentence structure. Since this is a Level 1 society, since Primary Integration is highest in psychopaths and moderate in average people, since advanced development involves personal crisis which eventually leads to Level 5, and since that means divergent and original thinking which threatens the status quo and thus level 1 and thus psychopaths who have a good thing going . . . does that mean that mental health is being largely determined by psychopaths?

Chew on that!