Losing My Mind/Grey Matter

Debora Cahn on "Losing My Mind"...

Original Airdate: 5-15-08

Why aren’t you crazy? It’s a question that’s posed in the voice-over at the end of the episode, but at that point you’re (hopefully) so wrecked over the fact that Andre showed up and this poor woman’s in a coma and she’s never going to wake up and he was the love of her life and she was someone who thought she’d never have love, and then it happened and they were happy and on a boat, but she had a brain tumor, which is a good way to ruin a cruise for anyone, but he stayed with her, stayed, because he loved her, and he came home from his snazzy business trip to Singapore early to be with her in the hospital, but he’s just a little too late, because when he shows up, she’s already in a persistent vegetative state – YOU’RE WRECKED, so you don’t know that the voice-over says, “Don’t wonder why people go crazy. Wonder why they don’t. In the face of all we can lose in a day, in an instant, wonder what the hell it is that makes us hold it together.”

Why aren’t you crazy?

I thought I had it pretty bad in high school. I thought things were pretty wild in my world. There were parents, with a divorce, and my dad moved into an apartment next to a graveyard, and it was HIGH DRAMA and I couldn’t believe I was making it through. Just getting from one day to the next. Didn’t know how I did it. And then I… I don’t know, read the paper, or a book or something, took my head out of my 16 year old butt, and realized my drama was sort of piddly and pathetic next to just about everyone in the universe, which momentarily made me feel better, and then made me just overwhelmed with the sheer volume of insanity in the universe. I used to imagine these big thought bubbles around people’s heads that contained their stories. Their life stories. And everyone’s was so big, there wasn’t enough room for all of them along the cartoon horizon in my mind. Especially in New York, where everyone was stacked on top of each other – the story bubbles over everyone’s heads just couldn’t be contained in the atmosphere over Manhattan. I’d think about it and my chest would get tight and I’d worry the stories would eat up all the oxygen and we’d all suffocate.

High drama.

Point being, isn’t it amazing that we hold it together? I want to congratulate you all for acting like civilized members of an orderly society, given what you have seen in your lives. We sit around every day coming up with stories for the show, and the craziest, most outlandish, you-can’t-put-that-on-tv-cause-it-sounds-fake-it’s-so-crazy stories come from the newspaper.

Moving on…

I had fun with this episode. The Bailey and Tucker fight was fun. It was satisfying. It was satisfying to write a fight where there’s no good guy and no bad guy and no mistake, just two people who love each other and want to make it work and can’t. Because it’s really friggin hard to make it work. And love and good intentions and good actions don’t always help. It’s just hard.

The Andre thing was really fun. We were putting together this story about a woman who was lonely and sad, and because of her tumor, crazy, and the crazy manifested itself in her fabricating a man to be in love with. And she’d have this whole big happy love affair with a man who didn’t exist. And then Shonda walked in the writer’s room and said, “Okay, fine, she can be in love with a guy who doesn’t exist, as long as he shows up at the hospital after she falls into an irreversible coma.” That’s when I become filled with self-loathing, because I didn’t think of him showing up and being real the whole time, and then I decide I’ll leave writing and become an organic goat’s milk farmer, but I’ll stay long enough to write the Andre story because it’ll be fun. And it was fun. And I don’t really like goat’s milk, it has a weird smell.

And Mark’s new leaf was really fun, because I think Mark’s the most satisfying character ever. He is who he is, and no matter how badly he wants to change, he can’t, because he doesn’t make choices, his behavior is written into his DNA, it’s as honest as rain. I enjoy him so much. I’m a big fan of Mark’s. I think he takes a lot of crap from a lot of people – all that “he’s a manwhore” business. He’s honest. And he’s a fan of a good doink at a nice hotel. He never claims otherwise. But he seems so sweet and lost when he’s trying to be all romantic and sensitive man-ish. It just warms my heart.

It was all fun. For me, anyhow. I like my job. I told my husband yesterday that I get much happier as I get older. I hated high school. College was better, but not as good as after college, and my 30s are better than my 20s were – it just gets much better as I go. I don’t feel crazy like I did in high school. I still have stuff … you know, real life stuff, that in large piles makes people run screaming down the hallways throwing mashed potatoes at the walls. I have it in small enough piles that I don’t really ever end up throwing mashed potatoes, but I have it. But it never seems as bad as it did then. I guess I learned to handle it. Break it down. Process it. That’s what we learn, I suppose. To handle things that seem like they’ll destroy us. It’s sad, in a way, what we teach ourselves to accept. What used to seem crazy, and now just seems… like what people go through. I guess my point is, if you feel like you’re crazy, you’re in good company. Because, take a look a around. Why would sanity make sense?