Reasons. Excuses. Interesting Testimony.

The transcripts from my competency hearing should make for some lively reading.  I'm sure that there will be any number of topics to engage the reader.  Sure, there will be times when the text will seem a bit "rambly."  And I'm certain that the shifts in topic will be a little confusing.  But there will be something for everyone.  Just stick with it.  I'm sure you'll find a little tid-bit to keep you entertained.

Somewhere in the middle of the questioning, I anticipate being asked about the events immediately preceding my screaming, hair-pulling mental collapse.  It'll be tricky to remember everything, I suppose.  There will, no doubt, be a number of medications involved at that point and I'll probably be a bit fuzzy.  But, I'm pretty sure that I will be able to come up with the two words that, having been heard forty-six bazillion times on that fateful Tuesday, put me on the path to madness:

I'm tired.

It wasn't so much the actual words.  I've heard them before.  Heck, I've said them myself six or seven times per day since I mastered the English language.  It was more the way the words were lengthened, broadened...stretched out in an endless wave of sound.  That alone would have been bad enough.  But, when you add the high-pitched, keening sort of quality with which those words were uttered (coming from both males and females), you can see how I might just go a bit loopy.  I was tired too, you know.

But there was not a single solitary child who, upon entering my Happy House Of Learning today, didn't feel the need to share with me how utterly spent they were.  They were collapsed on tables and desks, looking for all the world like they'd climbed the highest mountains shod only in ragged flip flops and bearing large sacks of boulders in order to reach my classroom.  They flopped bonelessly upon any available piece of furniture and, in one case, slithered to the floor in response to my requests that they inscribe their names on their worksheets.  They questioned my very humanity and how one could be so cruel as to expect that they might force their weary heads into an upright position so they could see the workbooks over which they were waving their pencils.  

Several simply played dead.  Any and all requests for school-related activity were met with stony silence and refusals to move.  The theory here seemed to be that if they stayed very, very still, I might just forget about them and move on to fresher prey.  

By the afternoon, even I was starting to consider the possibility that I was being unreasonable.  It is, after all, the week after a vacation.  Perhaps it is too much to ask that they lift something as heavy as a number two pencil.  Maybe I should be simply easing them back into the routine and allowing a nap or two.  

I was almost on their side.  But, then one of them had to go and tell me again how tired they were and how utterly horrible I am for not understanding this.  

And that was it for me.  I am tired, too.  I am also just back from vacation.  I would rather be home with the kitties and my yarn.  I miss my afternoon naps.  I miss eating stuffing all week.  I miss eating leftover pie.

My pants are very, very tight and uncomfortable.

And that, my dear members of the Board of Mental Health, is when it all went wrong.  This is the moment where I first felt the stirrings of madness in the mush that is my mind.  I can only give thanks to some higher power that no one was hurt when I turned that corner.  I throw myself on your mercy.  I beg you not for a verdict of sanity.  No...I ask that you find me utterly nutso.  Whacky as a windmill.  Silly as a sandwich.  Whatever.  Just make sure that you put me away for good.  Someplace nice and quiet.  

Where I can nap.

I'm sure that there will be more testimony given.  There will probably be some mention of my wanting to legally marry the leftover stuffing from Thanksgiving and my weekly zombie-related prognostications.  And no psychiatrist in his right mind would be able to resist mentioning my Underpants Acquisition Issues.  That alone will probably require that we recess for the day to give the court stenographer time to compose himself.  

But, we'll all know just when it all went so horribly wrong for me.  It was the day I got tired of all the tired.

SA