It had been nearly three long hours since I’d last eaten, and I get pretty loopy when hungry, so I marked myself ‘Busy’ on Slack and headed to the kitchen. 

One of the drawbacks about working from home is that we only buy healthy snacks. Missing the office’s ultra-processed offerings, I pushed past our wide selection of nuts and reached for the colorful box all the way in the back. It was something called “Mary’s Gone Crackers.” I immediately felt affronted by the box. Who is this Mary, and is she getting the psychological help she needs? No idea. All I could find was this: “Go ahead, call us snack-happy fanatics. Because at Mary’s, we’re totally crackers about using ingredients that are good for the health of our bodies and our planet.” 

What’s with this bogus dare? Has anybody ever uttered the phrase “snack-happy fanatics” in any context, ever? And if they have, what would the situation have to be that it could be interpreted as an insult? (Or a compliment, for that matter.) As I stuffed a fistful of crackers in my mouth I wondered whether Mary herself wrote this, and if it’s a symptom of her mental struggles. The more I thought about it, the more I saw this as a call for help that nobody is heeding because we’re too busy wiping the crumbs off our mouths. 

Now, I don’t mean to make light of mental illness—not after having been in psychotherapy for twelve years. Yet not even when I was pathologically munching on the stale store-bought cookies in my shrink’s waiting room did I worry that someone would call me a “snack-happy fanatic.” It was clear I needed to look in on Mary to find out what was causing her anguish. After all, I do have a bachelors in psychology—and more to the point, I’m a copywriter. 

Like the consummate professional I am, I googled “crazy scared of being called unlikely names” to find out what Mary’s irrational fear meant. I discovered this delightfully alliterative bit from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5): “Persons with Paranoid Personality Disorder are hypervigilant to physical, verbal or social attacks.” 

It’s true that I majored in psychology because I flunked out of my school’s pre-med program, but even I know better than to make diagnoses based on just the text on a box. I needed to dig deeper. 

Fortifying myself with more crackers, I went to Mary’s website. Suspiciously, the only mention of Mary on the entire site is on the About page, where they inform us that “The first Mary’s Gone Crackers® seed was planted the day Mary discovered the power to create amazingly appetizing, gluten-free snacks using wholesome ingredients. The popularity of her tantalizingly tasty crackers quickly spread far beyond her home kitchen—inspiring her to leave behind a successful career to take a chance on her true passion. We continue to build on Mary’s original ingenuity by baking fabulously flavorful, seed-crafted snacks for you to crunch, top, dip, share and love.” 

While that provided more than my daily allotment of adjectives, I wasn’t at all satisfied. All I learned was that Mary left a successful career to make these crackers, but no hint of what this career was, or when and where this happened. The secrecy smacked a little of Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic. (I also took a couple of English Lit classes in college.)

Perhaps Mary was just one of many personalities inhabiting another person’s mind, Sybil style? To find out, I was forced to do something no one had ever done before—I visited Mary’s Gone Crackers, Inc.’s page on LinkedIn. There, the company describes itself as “Passionately, unabashedly & irrationally obsessive about crispy, crunchy snacks.” The italics are mine, because, more than hyperbole, I saw this as another clue to Mary’s mental state (I won’t weigh in on their annoying misuse of the ampersand). Plus all those adjectives seemed suspiciously like the ravings of someone in a manic state. I stuck another fistful of crackers in my mouth and dug into the People tab looking for any employees named Mary.

Wouldn’t you know, it turns out there is, indeed, a real Mary. Her name is Mary Waldner, and, are you sitting down?—she has a masters in psychology. A big weight was lifted off my shoulders knowing that she’s well prepared to tackle her many mental challenges. But then, as I was just about to throw out the now-empty box of crackers, I froze. A sentence on the side of the box jumped out at me: “Some see a cracker. We see a tiny plate with endless topping possibilities.” Now, I may not have a master’s in psychology myself (I walked out on my GRE because I was hung over, if you must know), but doesn’t that sound a bit… delusional? I’d investigate further, but it’s getting close to lunchtime and I’m not quite myself on an empty stomach.