“No.”

And this kid rolls his eyes because DUH and he says “Why not?” all cranky-styles, so I said

“Because you don’t need to go to the bathroom, you’re bored and you need to move. If you need to move, tell me and I’ll let you know if we’re at a part of the test where we can pause. Like, for example, we can pause right now if you wanna race me around the building.”

And when she goes a bit ’crazy,’ when she starts crying and can’t stop, when she sits and stares into space for an hour because she can’t figure out what to do next or how to do it, when she doesn’t want to go for a drink after work with her colleagues and can’t bear their jollity, when she can’t concentrate at work or remember what it was that she was doing, when she lies awake at night worrying about how to pay the mortgage… when all these things happen, no one actually says that she’s gone mad. Everyone understands that she’s in grief and that it will take time, perhaps a long time if the death was sudden and unexpected, for her to rearrange her life again so that the new normal becomes automatic and comfortable and comprehensible. And even then, for decades afterwards she may contend with the why? questions of sudden tragedy and life not being as sugar-sweet as the John Lewis adverts suggest. But when we have a ‘breakdown,’ when our dissociative coping strategy that has kept our trauma or abuse at bay for years or years suddenly collapses in the lounge and dies on the floor, and we find when we come home from work that it’s not there anymore, people don’t see our resultant behaviour as normal. Even we ourselves think we have just ‘gone mad.’ We don’t have a paradigm for it. And because there’s no corpse in the lounge, no funeral cortège, no life insurance pay-out and a bank statement in a single name, because it’s all intrapsychic and hidden in the undergrowth of our mind, then our outward behaviours do seem ‘crazy.’ When we can’t go to work the next day, and we can’t concentrate, and we keep bursting into tears, and we can’t bear to socialise, and we lie awake at night, and everything seems too much, then we don’t think, ‘This is normal.’ We think, ‘I’m insane.’