The Nervous-Tempered... a Normal Person, Says the Doctor!!

If you say to someone, "You are nervous," you offer him an insult he will never forgive you; for this word has been so misconstrued and so ill used that it has come to be understood in the sense of madness. People shun the nervous person without pitying or understanding him; on the contrary, they accuse him of selfishness and laziness — he is weak-willed, so why does he not overcome all this and become like other people? His conduct is not natural — and on the basis of this notion he receives his treatment from those around him.

An educated friend came to me, complaining of his wife. "I hate to say this about Samira," he brought out, perplexity spreading over his features; "she is my wife, and a charming woman, but I feel that something inside me will burst if I do not speak." He wiped the sweat from his cheeks and went on: "She is resentful of me, and sensitive in the extreme, so that I am forever wounding her feelings without meaning to. She cries at the slightest cause, and accuses me of hard-heartedness!!"

I asked him whether this was her constant behavior, and he answered emphatically: "The monthly period has nothing whatever to do with it; she has been like this for twelve years, and perhaps this was her state before, only I did not notice it."

"I was shaving this morning when she pounded violently on the door, shouting that the icebox had suddenly stopped and she did not know how to set it right. Nor was that the only thing that upset me: when she banged on the door I gave a start, and the razor jerked in my hand and cut off a piece of my skin, and I waited until the bleeding stopped, while she still stood there accusing me of selfishness and of shirking out of helping her."

— How old is your wife?

— "Thirty. No, it is not her age that affects her conduct. Ah, those moods! Coming into the house has become like a frightful dream, for I am never sure how I shall find her — forever broom in hand, cleaning."

— She is orderly, then?

— "Let her be what she pleases; she crushes

my spirits and hurls me into a mental inferno, screaming if I do not tidy my desk, or hang up my hat, or if I fail to empty the ash tray. She pelts me with harsh words."

Here my friend paused to light a cigarette, then went on with his story: "And with all that, you find her forever afraid that some misfortune will befall one of us; she wants me never to go far from the house. If she reads of somebody's death, she suddenly declares that one of us is suffering from the very same complaint, and she fills the house with drugs and medicines; and to keep the scales of peace balanced I am obliged to take my share of the medicine, though the doctor has assured her that we are both sound of body." He went on talking about her, but this much suffices for an understanding of her trouble.

— Yes, all this proves to me that your wife is nervous of temperament. And the nervous person may come to a sadder state still, shrinking into himself out of some fear, or a feeling of inferiority and pessimism, without uttering a word; or foreboding the coming of disaster and talking forever of his pains and his weariness. Yet these are intelligent and amiable people, and in the life stories of the great we find that most of them belonged to this class. My friend's belief that his wife is nervous means, to him, that she is mad — when in truth nervousness is as far from madness as night is from day.

The nervous person finds himself unlike those who surround him; so he grows troubled, and suffers from the mere imagining of illusory things, and he is in a perpetual struggle to master them and return to his natural state. We must look upon him as one who has failed in a battle and needs encouragement; once he finds someone to lean upon, his life rights itself and runs in its natural course. So instead of insulting a person by calling him nervous, this ought to be a phrase by which we praise him!...