KEY POINTS:
This week I received an invitation to be a guest on a community radio show dedicated to mental health issues, with specific focus on the stress of being around one's family at certain times of the year.
Having made the decision a few weeks ago to turn
my family into fodder for this column, I'm gratified to see such immediate and wide-ranging results.
Already I have wished my sister down upon me, not to mention invited the scorn and excoriation of literally tens of readers, outraged at my cynical approach to family life.
And now, on top of this, comes an invitation to expound at length about them and also one of my favourite subjects - myself - on Planet FM, Auckland-wide on Tuesday week at 12.30pm.
My cup runneth over. This is vindication. I knew that the confessional tone was the way to go. Who cares if my memories are the usual overstated/badly remembered/downright fabricated tales of your average traumatic, impoverished
Irish childhood.
They're gleaning results! If I needed any more encouragement to pillage my past and trot out my deepest secrets for your titillation I've got it. In the true spirit of compulsive oversharing that defines our times, I shall continue to reveal all. Either that, or I'll just go back to posting about it on Twitter.
The invite was funny, not because I find mental health issues amusing in themselves - John Kirwan sucked the fun out of depression a while ago - but rather because my own mental health has been causing me concern for quite some time now.
That isn't to say I'm going to join the raft of New Zealanders currently urging you to tackle the tension, deal with depression, go to the doctor and get on the lorazepam because it's not okay, or whatever the current tagline is.
I'm not depressed, not clinically anyway, nor am I bi-polar, suffering from OCD, SAD or OMD. But I'm not quite right in the head either. I've known that for quite some time.
That doesn't make me special, though, I know. It puts me dangerously close to being kickably boring. There is nothing more annoying than perfectly miserably normal people who insist that they are ker-aa-zee.
Only terminally boring people ever tell you they're nuts. The legions of crashing bores who think they've gone over the razor's edge after one skinny-dipping session.
They're the same sorts who think watching an episode of Summer Heights High gives them a sense of humour, who hope knowing the words to a Sarah Silverman song makes them edgy.
Who won't drink espresso after 8pm in case they spontaneously combust. And who always want to split the bill. Those people aren't mad at all, but they will drive you mad with their insistence on the sort of ersatz individuality we're all so desperately cultivating these days.
No, the really bonkers people don't make much noise at all; they're too busy writhing mutely under the weight of their own mental agony to bother you, or, more happily, far too wrapped up in the happy delusion of being Napoleon or the Messiah to need much of your time.
Thinking I'm a bit unbalanced makes me predictable as well. Show me a young woman at this time of her life who isn't insecure and neurotic and I'll show you a happy proponent of constant, fantastic sex and/or well chosen medication. Generations X and Y have been quietly, and not so quietly, going round the bend for a couple of years now.
It's almost a rite of passage. Except for the poor unfortunates who get stuck in the mire, of course. It's not funny to be sick, and even less funny to doubt one's grasp on reason.
That said, my generation would appear to be singularly bad at distinguishing between a full-on mental breakdown and a very bad day. Indeed you could argue that it is only in our case that the latter actually precipitates the former.
Our infinite capacity for self-reflection, coupled with our winsome refusal to stop pondering the whys and wherefores of existence, and actually, you know, get a job, means we're prone to crippling anxiety.
That or screaming hysteria when we come back from three months getting stoned in Chang Mai and the bills start rolling in. That's why it's nice to see the generation beneath us, the Zs or the snores or whoever, the lithe little slips of things with Gossip Girl wardrobes and great skin, who seem to be coming through unscathed.
They're far too busy building blog empires and turning into reactionary wee Tories to have much time for the self-indulgence that bedevils my generation.
Sure, they're far more public in their private lives, as illustrated by the reports about teenage behaviour coming out of the UK this week. Courtship between 15-year-olds would now appear to consist of pxting each other the sorts of body shots that came wrapped in brown paper a few decades ago.
They seem a bit more willing to engage in the world around them. Probably I'm seeing in these kids the same odd mix of innocence and exhibitionism that every generation sees in the one that comes after them. As a child of grunge, I can appreciate the shift in outlook.
We were the generation who spent hours in our bedrooms railing at our parents for being accountants, for making us do our homework. This lot are dealing with worldwide financial meltdown by swooning over Twilight and making their own sex tapes. At least they're not wearing miserable old lumberjack shirts.
They don't seem to be quite as taken with the lachrymose wailings of Jeff Buckley, Eddie Veder and the like as we were either, thank God. They'll need a happier soundtrack to get through the doom and gloom forecast for the world they stand to inherit.
