Running With Scissors

I've been reading "Running with Scissors" whenever I get the time this semester. It's definitely an odd book, but it is awfully quirky. Not much of the "memoir" has been affecting me like many of my favorite books have (like "Too Loud a Solitude" or "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"). But the chapter I read today made me stop and think.

Here's some passages:

"Freedom was what we had. Nobody told us when to go to bed. Nobody told us to do our homework. Nobody told us we couldn't drink two six-packs of Budweiser and then throw up in the Maytag.
So why did we feel so trapped? Why did I feel like I had no options in my life when it seemed the options were the only thing I did have?...
More than anything I wanted to break free. But free from what? That was the problem. Becuase I didn't know what I wanted to break free from, I was stuck."

"The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do."

There have been several times in my life I've looked for someone to tell me what not to do, and I cannot find them. I cannot get direction of where not to go, that I end up either doing something stupid or more than likely, I do nothing at all.

I was surprised to find such a concept in this book of mental illness, homosexuality and just uninhibited action.

No wonder the novel has had such acclaim.