I once worked in a store with a young lady who was mentally ill. I’m not sure or can’t remember now what exactly her problem was, but she was about as insane as a person can be and still function and show up for a job. She was very friendly and talkative (though it’s possible I’m only remembering her manic phases) and did interpretive dance: limb flailing hippie movements you might take as a joke but they weren’t. She had a self-chosen name (wonder if she still goes by the same one?) and if I knew anything about her history, I forget it now.
What I do recall distinctly is one of the finest, most extreme examples of Magical Thinking I’ve ever encountered (yes, I think we all know it’s enhanced by insanity). She said to me one time when we were working together, “God talks to me every day through numbers.” Apparently the random numbers she saw as she went through life spelled out a significant message to her. For me, if I were crazy or just a hair more eccentric than I am now, I could maybe see taking meaning from words or phrases I came across, but it’s difficult for me to conceive of a message sent through numbers, and this just makes the idea all the more fascinating. I felt, when she told me this, a little twinge of jealousy. I knew she was not sane and I certainly didn’t envy her in general. Yet the idea, even if it came with lunacy, of receiving secret messages only you could read, sounded kind of fun and entertaining.
This is still, a good decade later, one of the strongest examples of Magical Thinking I’ve ever encountered. I imagine, in order to receive these holy missives, she had to build up an intricate numerical philosophy in her mind. Or maybe she just thought she had a coherent key between numbers and meaning but she really just made it up fresh every time. Maybe she just said it because she thought it sounded good. I’ll never know.
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