part 121, or "getting my nails done is not crazy"

Wanting to violently hurt someone else, to me, is pretty crazy. Not “weird” or “astounding” crazy, but CRAZY crazy, and I have always been terrified of being that kind of crazy.

I’ve lived my entire life not knowing if I was crazy or not. Its just in the past couple of years that I’ve gotten firm footing when it comes to how I view my mental state. I have done so many tests on myself, studying my own behavior and thoughts in reference to whatever is (or is not) going on around me at any given time. I’ve researched my sanity exhaustively, and it’s getting boring, because I’m not crazy.

Well, maybe a little bit crazy. I guess it depends on how I define “crazy.”

Here is what I think a crazy person looks like:

Wild hair, no make-up, eyes that are always seeing something terrifying (real or imagined), wearing jammies all day (even in public), and wandering helplessly lost through the library or grocery store or on the street, even when they have lived there for the past thirty years.

Crazy looks like someone who knows something, but can’t remember that they know it. Confused, bitchy, unpredictable, and inappropriate. If someone is standing in a store staring at the same thing without moving for ten minutes, that looks like crazy. If that someone is wearing jammies and has greasy, unwashed hair, and bits of polish on their nails left after they picked the rest of it off, then that person looks certifiably insane.

All of my ideas about what crazy looks like are rooted in my own behavior – I don’t know if I think I’m crazy because I have looked and acted that way, or if looking and acting that way is what defines me as crazy. Regardless, I cannot deny at least the appearance of what I feel defines crazy, at least some of the time, in my life. In fact, I go around picking my nail polish off all the time, even though when I see someone who is obviously mentally ill, and they have mostly-picked-off nail polish, I say, “note to self: stop picking off nail polish; it makes you look crazy.”

I guess recognizing the crazy in other people has allowed me to be more accepting of myself, and of my illness, and of what it means to be ill this way. The other day I walked out of a store with all of my newly purchased items falling out through a hole in the bottom of the bag, and I was completely oblivious to it, and another customer had to run out after me to stop me, and the girl who worked there picked up all of my stuff after me and brought it to me at my car, and I smiled and said, “thank you,” and she said, “there’s a hole in the bag, do you want me to get you another,” and I said, “no, that’s okay, I will just carry it holding the bottom instead of by the handles,” and she stared at me strangely, and for some (crazy) reason I thought she meant that the bag was ABOUT to break, and the items she picked up after me were things accidentally left out of the bag at checkout, and I didn’t put it all together until after I started unpacking the bag when I got home and saw there was a big hole in the bottom.

And then I thought to myself, “wow – I was acting really crazy in that store.” And then I though to myself, “eh, don’t be so hard on yourself – if you were acting crazy, it was because you kind of are a little bit, but only the kind of crazy that comes from what you’ve been through, and not the scary kind of crazy.”

Scary crazy is when someone knows what is going to happen in the future, who believes they have special powers, and who has unfailing confidence in everything they do, because they already know they are going to end up the victor at the end of it all. That was who my dad was, and his dad, and probably my brother. That’s the crazy I am terrified of being – it’s the crazy I’ve been battling all along.

I get confused between what hope feels like, and believing I absolutely know everything will turn out well in the end because I am a superior being. I guess it’s the difference between taking care of myself and waiting for myself to get taken care of.

Even by my own admission – and something I have been saying for years - I was always waiting for men in white jackets to come and take me away. I would say, “I’ve always been expecting men in white jackets to come and take me away, but they never did, so I finally had to send myself to the mental hospital, ha ha ha” (for some reason, I always found this funny, but now I’m not remembering why…).

Anyway!

 Seeing and accepting the damage that has been done to me has helped me learn to take care of myself instead of waiting to be taken care of. It’s kind of paradoxical, because it would seem that seeing and accepting the damage to my mind and body would reinforce that I am a victim. But I am figuring out that the difference between being a victim and being a survivor lies in my ability to stop looking around for people to come make things better so I wouldn’t have to deal with the pain myself.

What happened to me was not fair; it was not right; it was not okay; it was not my fault. And it HURTS – beyond what I imagine the depths of hell feel like, even if I don’t believe there is a hell (not outside of life on earth, anyway).

But not accepting the pain, and staving it off until someone comes along and makes it go away (aka, “denial”), means that it is impossible to be anything other than a victim. I can’t accept help from other people if I can’t acknowledge what I need help with.

But I have spent my entire life building a façade that says I am brilliant, I am beautiful, I am special, and I am thereby entitled to have my pain taken from me so that I can be left to bask unfettered in the glory that is me. I have stood by that façade, and sworn that it was real, and fought to defend it at all cost. I have put a lot of time and energy and effort and pride into maintaining that façade.

But it is still a façade.

I mean, yeah, I’m smart, but I’m not Einstein, and yeah, I’m pretty, but I’m not a super model. And yeah, I have a lot of really nice qualities that are valued by society, but not to the extent that I outshine everyone else and am entitled to have effortlessly what everyone else must work for.

A huge part of my struggles have concerned the fact that I haven’t ever gotten what I believed I was entitled to. My greatness has never been cosmically acknowledged by money or power or fame, and those are the essential components to proving my greatness to the world. Closing in on 40 years old, not having that proof really sucks – I mean, if I am not powerful and famous and rich by now, wouldn’t that mean that my greatness isn’t so great?

Um…yeah, probably.

But now I am falling in love with humanity, and with being human, and it feels so much better than fruitlessly touting greatness I do not possess. It feels sane. It feels real, and it feels safe. It’s really a pretty nice way to feel.