Dumbstruck

I have laryngitis. I can barely talk. This isn’t very compatible with my job.
1. I can’t answer the company phone.
2. I can’t teach.
3. I can’t participate in meetings.

Sigh. I don’t even feel that sick today. My voice just sounds like a mouse that’s being stepped on. I’m just trying to catch up on email.


But that’s not what I wanted to write about tonight.

I watched the movie “Proof” again last week. (Thanks to my many hours riding the couch of illness)
The movie is based on the Broadway stage play by David Auburn. A brief synopsis: Gwyneth Paltrow plays a daughter who has curtailed her math studies to take care of her aging father. The father, played by Anthony Hopkins, is a brilliant mathematician struggling with an unnamed mental illness. After her father dies, she begins to deteriorate into depression and her own fears that she’ll inherit her father’s illness. Fearing the same thing, her sister misreads her eccentric behavior as the early signs of madness. At the same time, a young colleague befriends her and discovers an impressive new math proof in her father’s office. Paltow’s character claims she wrote it but nobody believes her. After a while, she starts to doubt it herself.

To say that I identified with this move would be an understatement. It didn’t help that when this movie came out in 2004, everyone kept telling me that they thought I looked like Gwyneth Paltrow. Um… I do not look like her. We both have long blond hair. That’s it. Otherwise, she’s probably about half the size of me. Apparently, the only time there’s a remote resemblance is when she’s playing a sleep deprived, unwashed mentally ill nerd.

And then there’s the math part. Once upon a time, when I was 15, I accidentally wrote an original geometry proof. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that I answered a problem on a pre-calculus test in a way that my teacher had never seen before. (BTW: I failed the test.) Anyway, I spent the next year teaching myself calculus and trying to prove my theorem. Why did I do this? I thought it would be cool to have a theorem named after me. Turns out, it was a corollary to an existing theorem. I never learned enough math to finish or publish it.

When I first saw the movie, I was struck by how confused Paltrow’s character becomes. She should know whether or not she wrote the proof. But when everyone doubts her, she grows confused. You can see her mind go around and around. Did she write it or is she just crazy? I really identified with that. If there’s one feature of my illness that annoys me (and my doc) the most it’s my distrust of my diagnosis. Sometimes I get confused – I can’t really TELL if I have a mental illness… what if I’m just smart enough to convince everyone?

And that’s the thing that struck me when I saw the movie again last week. Madness IS made more complicated by intelligence. When you’re highly competent (or intelligent) the disparity between your highs and lows becomes confusingly large. One day I’m a successful architect and the next, I’m dissociated and nearly psychotic. One day I can write a math theorem and the next, I’m in the throws of depression, fantasizing about suicide. There’s a certain… unreal quality to this. How can these two extremes exist in one person? Surely, it must be an illusion, a deceit or trick of my mind. I must be faking it.

It’s hard to say which extreme feels crazier... When I do something really mad like cutting myself or getting lost in my own mind, it feels kind of familiar. Almost predicable. But when I do something competent, like conduct myself professionally or fix some problem at work… THAT seems foreign. I’m supposed to be the crazy lady. How come I just got offered that promotion? Did that really happen? I must be imagining it. It’s a delusion. Commence the internal debates. Cue the confusion.

Sometimes, I think it might be easier to be a bimbo. That way, when I did something dumb, at least I’d know it was real.