Random Run In Of The Week

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Apparently Catherine

I had another one of those ‘random run in’s’ the other week. This time with an older woman at the hair salon. She was waiting in a chair as my hair was being painted Smurfette-Blue, her equally as blue eyes were twinkly and darting wildly around the room until they eventually met up with mine. She was about my height with a kind round face, she smiled widely and asked me about my hair and I asked her about hers and she said she was having a wig fitted for presentations as she had been doing a speaking course to progress herself as she was a writer, my hairdresser is also my good friend so she smiled and commented “Oh so we have two writers in the room today”.

Naturally the “what do you write about” conversation followed and she was extremely positive as she encouraged me to publish my book as an e-book just ‘to get it out there.’ I asked her about herself and soon she was telling me how she was in her 70’s but decades ago, when she was 32 and had 4 children she had come to an amazing realisation and chosen to live in an alternate reality of her own making. Her world was very scientifically based (her father was a scientist, like mine) over time she had figured out how everything worked, the way energy reformed, God the universe, everything. She had cracked the code and planned on doing a TED talk about her discoveries in the near future.

My first thought was that she looks and sounds like me when I am manic. I have cracked the God Theory, I have it written down, it still sort of makes sense when I am not manic but it becomes too hard to think about, so I try not to.

Curiosity got to me and I pressed her for details, she supplied them and the trouble was in that moment as the old lady divulged her crazy to me, a complete stranger, her stranger than fiction truths? Well they made as much sense to me as gravity and I wanted to tell this old woman that I could see it too, all of it!

She knew the same things I knew or had perhaps once known, and I wanted to talk to her for hours, ask her things figure it all out together. How could we both be wrong? Maybe we are more in tune than other people, maybe we do know the truth, maybe the doctors are wrong and we aren’t crazy after all. How do you know? How can you know? The only reality and truth is the one you are experiencing, for me that’s the one I am experiencing. For her it’s the one she has chosen to experience.

Part of me also wondered for a moment, okay many moments, if she WAS me, future me, sent back to tell me my manic delusions are reality after all. The other part of me knew that made no sense. But I’m blue eyed, round faced, 32yrs old with 4 children, is this my moment of realisation, her realisation, OUR realisation???

This was of course in the presence of my friend/hairdresser so for fear of looking loopier than I already did I couldn’t say and ask all that I wanted to, couldn’t ask how to contact her. Probably good that I didn’t, as when the woman left my friend commented how delusional she was and that she hoped this wig wasn’t actually going to financially cripple her.

I knew it deep down too, yeah, delusions of grandeur as well as the general kind, it was text book, whatever. But what if it wasn’t?

But that part of you, that part of you that wants to believe? It can be strong too… Sometimes it can be stronger.