Foolish Wisdom

“I swear half our class came back medicated.” Probably an over-exaggeration but you get the idea. Let’s be honest for a moment, freshman year of college is a bitch-whether you love it or hate it, it’s always a bitch. If for no other reason than it makes you confront all the emotions and feelings you didn’t want to or weren’t ready to before.
I go to a small liberal arts college that my mother describes as being in the middle of “bum-fuck nowhere.” Personally, for a small Midwestern farming town, this place isn’t so bad. Anyways, back to the point. If you know anything about liberal arts colleges then you know that they have a tendency to attract the artsy-creative people. Now imagine that times about fifty and you’ll get my school. Choir geeks, band geeks, orchestra geeks (yes they are two different things), art geeks, theater geeks-you name it we’ve got it. Combine all of that with ridiculously high levels of intelligence and voila, that’s my college. 
People have  tendency to over emphasize  that aspect of liberal arts colleges-the wacky creativity-and under emphasize the not so pretty side of the student body: we’re all insane. I don’t mean the “you-have-to-be-some-kind-of-crazy-to-go-to-a-liberal-arts-school” crazy (even if you do have to be some kind of crazy). I mean the fact that somewhere from 50-80% (at least at my college) of us are some kind of unstable. Depression, bipolar disorder, autism, asperger’s, dissociative identity disorder, schizophrenia, the list goes on and on. Throw in various combinations of ADHD and dyslexia and you’ve got the mental make-up of a liberal arts college student body. 
Now, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. While we’d never readily admit to the general public that our mental instability makes us as crazy as McMurphey or Chief Bromden, the truth is that we are mad. We’re not stable, we’ll never be stable, and most of us wouldn’t ever want to be. Because being stable would mean losing that insane creativity that brought us to the Liberal Arts in the first place. Being unstable does not mean we’re dangerous, it doesn’t mean we’re harmful to society, quite the opposite really. Look at some the great artistic minds that you admire: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Rossetti, Picasso, Wilde, Hemingway, Swift (no, not Taylor), Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great), Cleopatra, Bly, Hedges, Elizabeth I, Dean, Monroe. If you think any of them were stable, you’re crazier than I am.  So let me pose this question: what exactly is mentally stable, what exactly is sane? Do you know, because I don’t. All I know is this, I’m mad, I live, work, and breathe with a wonderfully, enticingly creative group of people who are just as gone in the head as I am, and the only thing we pose a danger to is our GPA. 
My name is Logan Sage Quinn, and I have Clinical Depression. Do you think I’m mad?

Go n-eírí an bóthar leat,
  Logan

  “The question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or the others crazy?” —Albert Einstein