You probably don't need me to point out that President Donald Trump has come completely unhinged. He's always been a raging, narcissistic psychopath, but now he's a psychopath on steroids. God help us!
When he started raging around about busting out of Walter Reed and claiming he felt better than he had in twenty years, I thought, Whoa, I know that feeling, and then on CNN, Dr. Sanjay Gupta remarked that people all over the country who've been on steroids are now nodding in understanding.
Yep.
I was in the middle of writing a rough draft of my memoir Wedding in Yangshuo when my doctor put me on a course of prednisone, a steroid, for a suspected ear infection. She warned me I might feel extra energetic.
Ha! I went completely manic. Instead of an eked-out thousand words a day, I wrote THREE thousand. I didn't sleep. The best part was that I knew I was brilliant. I was writing the greatest book ever written. It would be a lot like Eat, Pray, Love, I figured, and people would travel to my daughter-in-law's hometown in China and make her mother's charming little hotel famous! But why stop there? It would probably improve the economy of all of Yangshuo!!! And oh, look, what a beautiful silk dress on the Johnny Was internet site!!! I should buy it! !! It would be perfect for when I walked the red carpet when my book was made into a movie!!!!! A movie that would probably win an Academy Award!!!!!!!!!!
Unlike Donald Trump, though, I was—even under the influence of these drugs—self-aware enough to suspect what was going on. I did not actually buy that dress. After one phone chat with my mother, I stopped calling people. I could hear myself sounding crazed. I didn't leave the house. I just rode that crazy bucking bronco around my office until the pre-arranged tapering doses ran out and I came back down.
Reporting to my doctor later, she was alarmed. "Why didn't you tell me?" Well, I would have, if she'd phoned and asked, because I can't lie to save my soul. But she didn't. And, honestly? I was having too much fun to complain. I felt a little sad when she said she was putting on my chart that I must never be given this stuff again. When I mourned that I had been so productive in my writing, she said, "Yeah, but was what you wrote any good? Because we had one guy on this stuff who wrote a lot and then he never quite came back."
They say a writer is somebody on whom nothing is lost, and I tried to pay attention to how all this was working as I lived it. Prednisone didn't give me any better words to use. It didn't provide a more interesting story to tell. What it did was allow me to get out of my own way. I did not waste the time I—and many writers, I suspect—usually do on beating myself up with negativity. No way! With chemical permission to feel brilliantly confident, I just barreled on through and nailed down those words at three times the pace I normally would.
But Donald Trump. The guy is already crazed with his own grandiosity. He cannot hear the horror of the things he says. Maybe he needed these drugs to save his life, but a mind like his, under the influence of drugs like this, has no business calling the shots from the oval office. It's dangerous. It's scary. Isn't there anybody back there who can stand up to him? Apparently not.
We should lock him up. And then VOTE HIM OUT. He talked about draining the swamp. Instead, with everybody around him dropping from Covid-19, they'll have to fumigate the White House.