Part 2
A recap of part one of this column: I have an imaginary friendship with deceased writer Franz Kafka.
Because of him, I understood that many things are not designed to be understood - though we must withstand them - and any attempt to make sense of the various adhocracies with which we live is pointless.
I find him comforting. It is ridiculous, but I do.
Not understanding things is my nemesis. I don't mean impossible things like time-travel or long division. Or why cats only break the nice things and never the things you wish they would break. Or how come more people don't have eraserophagia.
Kafka offers me solace because he understood the horror of not understanding and feeling like you were never meant to. Feeling like there's a room in which people are making plans and decisions that affect you, but you're always locked out of it.
You go around telling people that's how you feel, and they start avoiding you. Or worse, they decide you're not well. Or worser, you're a conspiracy theorist.
The thing is that's how a lot of people with a wide range of mental illnesses feel. And sometimes there's a really good reason for that feeling - to wit, it's actually happening. Families, friends and people who make up the support mechanisms in our lives (if we are lucky enough to have them), with the best intentions in the world, do this to mental health patients all the time.
This closed-room treatment rankles. It feels like…wrongness. Consider: someone is depressed or exhibiting signs of some mental disturbance.
Why is the go-to response to huddle up away from the person and map out a course of how to treat what you think is wrong with them? Why are they not in the room? Why can they not be trusted with the plans for their care?
They may be unwell; that does not make them dim. Knowing that there is a plan for them, knowing what steps are to be taken, knowing someone is trying to help - these are not bad things for the patient to understand.
I know this is an oversimplification. Some of us will reject help. Some of us will make it hard for you to help. Some of us will outright sabotage help efforts.
But the swathe of people who would benefit from knowing how others see them - and maybe offer some insight as to why they are behaving or apprehending things in a certain way - that number of people is not to be scoffed at.
Kafka was himself not a terribly well person. Apart from the small matter of his ultimately fatal tuberculosis, his mental health was not great. He was depressed more often than not. It is possible there was some hypochondria. His issues with intimacy are well known. He fretted, fussed, and alternately demanded much and pushed away the people he most loved.
What Kafka did not suffer from was a lack of thinking and introspection. His creative output is by far exceeded by his journals and letters. Many people who try to read him now find it more rewarding to get into those - the design of his reasoning, as it were. The meanderings of how he tried to explain what he thou
