Have you ever wondered: Would the neural connections in my prefrontal cortex have survived the 20th century completely intact? Would Freud have diagnosed me with hysteria? Is that a woman I see in the wallpaper?
These questions are more common than you might think, and today you can learn the answers. Based solely on my personal opinion, I have created a self-assessment to determine the stability of your mental state. You earn one point for every statement with which you identify. If you end the game with four or more points, I am inclined to believe that you would have been lobotomized in the 1940s. Good luck!
You are a woman.
This one goes without saying. Roughly 60 percent of lobotomies in America were performed on women. Give yourself a bonus point if you are a woman with a light peppering of mental illness. Give yourself another bonus point if you have rejected a man in the past eight weeks.
You have had a crush that lasted over one year.
There is no way to put this kindly, so I will just say it: a crush that lasts this long is not a crush. It is a delusion. Delusional people would have been lobotomized in our grandparents’ time. Get over your crippling fear of rejection and make a move, let them go, or face the possibility of brain surgery.
You were in Model UN or Speech and Debate in high school.
As someone who competed in Public Forum Debate for four years, that shit changes your brain chemistry. Imagine a room of one hundred children wearing suits, all of whom have spent the last five weeks memorizing facts about the Yemeni Civil War and economic sanctions on Venezuela, and all of whom believe that they are destined to be a Supreme Court Justice. No one emerges from that environment mentally stable. Add one bonus point if you practiced your speech by talking to a wall. And one more if you know what it means to spread.
You have read and enjoyed The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.
The Goldfinch is an embarrassment to the Pulitzer Prize. This book is almost eight hundred pages long, and basically half of it is about furniture. It ends with a mob shootout in Amsterdam, and somehow Tartt manages to make the mob shootout at the end more boring than the furniture. Also, Donna Tartt loves to make her straight male protagonists kiss other straight men and then never talk about it again. If you read this book and liked it, you are genuinely sick in the head. Forget the lobotomy; you should be locked up.
You have watched at least two full seasons of Glee.
So you heard Will Schuster say, “You’re all minorities. You’re in the Glee Club,” and you continued watching the show. I’m afraid of you. There is no way you emerged from this series unscathed. That said, if you had a crush on Jonathan Groff or Darren Criss, you have good taste, I will give you that.
You are on the pre-med track.
I am convinced that being pre-med is a lot like being a Protestant woman in a Charlotte Brontë novel—you must convince yourself that your suffering is somehow noble. Oftentimes, you have a superiority complex because you believe you are studying something with a greater purpose than your peers. Whenever you stop to question why you have relinquished your earthly desires (a social life, a healthy sleep schedule, any fun extracurriculars), it sends you spiraling into crisis. I recommend therapy to all of you.
You are in an a capella group.
If you aren’t afraid of standing in the Wayland Arch and singing a Lizzy McAlpine song, then you fear no god. Yes, you are talented, but at what cost? I’m trying to get to the Ratty. People who disrupt the social order in such brazen ways would have been lobotomized in the ‘40s.
You tell people you are an artist, a writer, or a filmmaker.
Self-explanatory.
By now, you should have more clarity on the status of your mental stability. Remember: there is nothing wrong with a little bit of female hysteria and being a little unhinged every now and then. Unwind and revel in the fact that you live in the present and not the 1940’s.
