Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Too terrible

Several years ago I had to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test as part of a job application. I'd never heard of it before, and most of the true-false statements had me saying "What the hell...?"

The one I really remember still is I sometimes have thoughts too terrible to tell.

As soon as I read it, twenty untellable thoughts came to mind, but I wasn't sure if I should admit that, and also, who was the judge of too terrible? I'm pretty sure I said false, and I got the job, so I suppose I passed the test. Years later I met a psych major who told me that the point of the MMPI wasn't to see if you answered correctly, it was to see if you answered sanely.

Anyway, this song isn't really about Alice or her restaurant.

The phrase thoughts too terrible to tell has stuck with me, and I have this mental image of a big metal box with clasps and a padlock, and that's where those thoughts get filed. And really, what's in there aren't necessarily my independent thoughts, but rather things I've seen and heard that I wish had never crossed the threshold of my brain.

And sometimes the terror is only in the context. If I'd read about severely emotionally disturbed kids and what their families go through a few years ago, I'd have thought, gee, that sucks, and moved along without considering the terrible thought file.

The last few weeks, I've been doing a lot of reading about mental illness in children, particularly bipolar disorder, and I'm not even bothering to close up the lid on the terrible thought files because I'm in there too often.

So my nephew, the eight-year-old second grader, the Wii master, hockey fan, math whiz who finds great humor in Spongebob Squarepants, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital last night.

My sister sounds less freaked than I do.

Now the longer I leave my box open and the more I dig through the files, I realize that we did not reach too terrible...but terrible enough from where I sit.

Posted by Nic at March 17, 2009 12:02 PM | TrackBack