200 Milligrams of Sanity

So I had a really shitty weekend. It involved lots of crying.
That wasn’t any one’s fault; it was just various flavors of people’s crazies interacting with mine in ways that amplified all my weakest points.  Yet come Sunday, I was drained and weak, prone to hushed stammering, barely able to get out of bed.
Monday, I was having a full-fledged breakdown.  I holed up in the basement for two hours, just staring at things, muttering the same phrases over and over again.
This morning, I realized I hadn’t taken my Vitamin D supplements.
It wasn’t a conscious effort; I’d dropped the pill down the sink on Saturday, Sunday I woke late and forgot, and Monday I’d been so rattled I couldn’t do anything.
But there’s a really good chance that the lack of a few hundred milligrams of a chemical was what sent me spiralling into craziness.
That’s kind of terrifying to think of; that all my mental health rests on a microscopic puddle of chemicals.  A splash so small I might not notice it next to the sink is so important that I completely crash without it.
And yet it shouldn’t be terrifying.  All we are is chemicals.  I’m aware if I don’t get enough food, I’ll die.  I know if I have too much food, I don’t feel like having sex.  I know if I get too little oxygen or too much, my brain will malfunction.
Yet looking at this tiny amber capsule, realizing that all of my resilient contentedness emanates from this droplet of fluid…
It’s weird.  I don’t like to think of myself as an elaborate chemistry experiment, something so fine-tuned that a dosage that could rest comfortably on my pinky fingernail is all that stands between Ferrett The Functioning Writer and Ferrett That Asshole In The Darkened Basement.
Yet there’s a good chance it is.  And I don’t know why, as humans, we are so horrified by this idea – all the time I see crazy-ass motherfuckers like me looking at their pills and going, “I feel fine, I don’t need this!” and tossing it away and then crawling back when they realize for the seventieth time in their life that holy shit, I do need this, God, life sucks without it.
It shouldn’t be terrifying, staring into that little gel-capsule and muttering, “Sanity rests inside.”  But it is.  And it’s more horrifying that my logical brain tries to tell me this is no big deal and yet this wet biological mass of nerves recoils as reflexively as fingers from a fire, resisting this idea all the way down to the mitochondria.
It’s a rational idea that seems irrational, and my God, I am a tangled nest of crossed wires.
My God. All of us are.