Reflections on Crazy
Occasionally, I’ll share portions of Crazy: Reclaiming Life from the Shadow of Traumatic Memory that didn’t make the cut. My editor, Sarah Chauncey, taught me that authors have to learn to “kill their darlings,” which means a good piece of writing may just not belong in this spot or in that piece of work. “Save it,” she told me, “and use it some where else.” This blog post about ‘going crazy’ and ‘becoming sane’ was originally scattered throughout the first draft of my memoir. I share it with you and hope it holds some meaning for you. ~ Lyn
Going Crazy
What does it mean to be ‘going crazy’?
Art Credit: Crazy Faces by Angelo Pioppo
For me, it meant that my world was crumbling around me and I didn’t seem to have the capacity to put it back together.
It meant I could understand that my children were alienated, depressed, frightened, and angry but I couldn’t do anything about it.
It meant that I knew, at least theoretically, what needed to be done but didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to do it.
It meant that different inner voices were pulling me in different directions and the result was inner chaos.
It meant that small things would “trigger” me, render my skin and muscles raw and weak, and send me to bed curled up in a fetal position.
It meant that I was so overwhelmed with so many confusing emotions that my body shut down and I became numb. I felt no emotion. I walked around like a ghost.
It meant that I was looking at myself as if I were a spectator sitting on a perch in the corner of a room, out-of-body, watching this wretched woman go through the motions of life, unable to function, in spite of the fact that in my professional life, I was functioning, and highly effectively at that.
It meant that everything I ever wanted in life – happy children and loving family – had slipped through my fingers. What irony that what I valued most, I lost! And I couldn’t do anything about it.
Stir Crazy
The colloquialism ‘stir crazy’ conveys the sense of the craziness we might feel while being incarcerated or institutionalized or just unable to get up and do the things we usually do because of illness or disability. Sometimes we say we are going stir crazy.
Paradoxically, entering the women’s unit (in a mental institution) did not make me stir crazy. Stir crazy feelings were already multiplying inside me, like a virus replicating and attaching itself to the lining of my psyche long before I ever stepped foot into the psychiatric hospital. My insanity was the culprit. It was shutting me up and out of my life and making me stir crazy.
For me, stir crazy meant I could teach young children in a classroom that no other teacher could reach, but I couldn’t reach my own children.
It meant I could manage an entire school, as Head of School, yet I couldn’t manage my own family.
It meant that I could be successful at everything I did all day long and come home and feel like a complete and utter failure.
It meant that even though I wanted to die I knew I wouldn’t because I had made a contract with myself that if I ever tried again, I wouldn’t fail, and the voices inside couldn’t come to agreement on whether or not we wanted to live or die.
It meant institutionalization didn’t scare me, it reassured me. I was clearly unable to manage life, so maybe the hospital could manage it for me.
It meant I was in a jail of my own making, looking through the bars of my prison, seeing my life pass before me, watching my children suffering, tempted by a world I could barely touch. Maybe I was on the outside looking in, or maybe I was on the inside looking out. It didn’t really matter because I was separated from everything I loved in the world.
It meant I had no other options. The voices who had spoken at my earlier suicide attempt were right. I was either going to live or die. I didn’t know which.
Crazymaking
Reentering real life after my 30-day hospitalization challenged me to balance a growing professional life, a minimalized parental life, and an ever-deepening plunge into my complicated emotional life. While I was stable in comparison to my state before hospitalization, I felt crazier than ever. Only that reality check, coupled with the anchor of regular visits with Sonia, enabled me to manage my day-to-day responsibilities and life tasks.
Crazymaking meant that I came face-to-face with the realization that my parents may not have been who I thought they were, that they may not have had my best interests at heart. Slowly, I allowed myself to imagine I might be better off without their toxic brand of love. Gradually, I tried to stand up for myself in the face of my father’s control and my mother’s victimization. Yet, the stark reality that all my primary relationships were illusions was devastating.
Crazymaking meant that I spent endless hours scribbling nonsense into reams of journals that turned out to be more like angst-laden poetry occasionally revealing hidden kernels of memory or insight.
It meant that I spent a large portion of my life in session with Sonia, in silence, in tears, in rage, in confusion, in disbelief, in hate, in not knowing, in knowing, in throbbing pain, in debilitating fear.
It meant that the pain didn’t subside but enlarged while, at the same time, became more touchable, more knowable.
It meant that I still had no concrete memories and it was all I could do not to take all the blame for my craziness, not to believe that I was responsible for my emotional turmoil, not to buy into the notion that something was wrong with me but rather, perhaps, just perhaps, something was done to me.
Really Crazy
Art Credit: I Am Going Crazy. Click here.
Trying to lead an active professional life that would pay my bills, at the same time I was delving deeper and deeper into my inner world, made me feel really crazy. Carrying more than a full load in every area of my life, except parenting, consumed every fiber of my mind, body and spirit with barely time for rest.
Really crazy, for me, meant that my ties to my children unraveled. Eventually none of them lived with me so I could focus on healing and putting myself back together. I was fully aware that I was abandoning them emotionally so I could save myself. I rationalized that I wasn’t much good to them if I was dead or in an institution, and I accepted the need for me to remove myself from their lives to a large extent. Yet I loved them with all my heart and this separation was excruciating.
It meant that I extracted myself from my parents, too. Without my children or my parents in my life, I sometimes felt like a blob of pain floating in the universe with nothing to anchor myself to. The feeling was both real and unreal. Real, in that I had no distractions from the pain that was me. Unreal, in that all birth connections were severed and I existed in an untethered bubble.
It meant that the pain didn’t go away; it got worse. It meant that the triggers didn’t go away; they grew in number. It meant that the harder I tried, the more out-of-control things seemed to become. It meant that I still felt worthless, defective, and confused while at the same time I was growing, accomplishing, and unknowingly finding a path through the darkness.
It meant that I struggled with trust. Everyone, including Sonia, was suspect and worthy of great caution. Group was the arena in which I played out my fears, but other people triggered terror in me as well. No one could be trusted. Everyone had the capacity to hurt me. To trust meant intimacy, and intimacy meant hurt. I vacillated between becoming a hermit, committing suicide, and dancing by myself in the rain.
It meant that I gave myself permission to acknowledge and give names to different parts of myself that had, for years, been creating chaos inside me. In naming and acknowledging, they became a part of me to collaborate with rather than an alien force to fear or try to control. Still, the whole idea made me crazy.
It meant that I was always afraid. Afraid of being discovered, afraid of being found out. Afraid of being hurt by someone or some unknown force. Afraid of what I might find out or what I might not find out. Afraid of dying. Afraid of living. Afraid of nothing, which was the biggest fear of all, because if nothing was there, then I was crazy.
It meant that bizarre stories detached from my gut and made their way into my conscious mind as memories – visceral memories that I hardly believed and am, even now, loathe to recall. Body memory notwithstanding, concrete memories never came to the fore. Memories I could take to the bank were not in the offing. My logic went like this: if there are no “real” memories, nothing happened, if nothing happened, then I am defective, if I am defective, then I’m making this up, if I’m making this up, then I am really crazy!
Sane, Normal, & Happy
Over the many years of my recovery, becoming sane meant becoming who I was meant to be. While I was decompensating in pain and angst, I was also reconstructing my authentic identity.
Sane meant I was becoming a woman of faith in the broadest sense of that term, a woman who had faith in the ‘process’, a woman who had faith in herself, a woman who had faith in a power greater than herself, a woman who had faith in God.
Art Credit: Spiritual Lotus Flower, click here.
Sane meant I was creating a narrative that made sense out of nonsense. That narrative was grounded in the experience of my woundedness, my healing process, and my slow inexorable journey towards health. It was grounded in the many voices who were desperate to have airtime. It was grounded in reason as I learned more and more about traumatic memory and how it manifests in different ways. Finally, in the Christian story my narrative found a larger story to become a part of. Death and new life made perfect sense to me. Resurrection was not a fairy tale but an actual, real life experience.
Sane meant I not only tolerated my alters but came to love them, embrace them, and appreciate the many ways they helped me at various stages of my life. Learning how to love them meant learning how to love myself. In time, they gradually ‘integrated’ back into my total self, embodying in me the gifts they carried, as is often the case in dissociative identity disorder. Now I revel in my caretaking (Nanny), my assertiveness (Mike), my playfulness (Sylvia), my intelligence (Paula), my love for my children and grandchildren (Laura), my protectiveness (Snake) and my innocence (Rosie). Rolled into one, today, they are me.
Sane meant I let go of the need to know. For whatever reason, my system was not about to reveal much detail about the abuse. One might argue I was never abused and I really was crazy during this time in my life. Or one might argue I was never abused but the clear dysfunction in my family caused me to become crazy during this time in my life. Or one might argue I was horribly abused as a very young child over a prolonged period of time by a trusted caretaker, and the depth of the hurt was so unbearable that my internal system was loathe to reveal it. I will never know. I saw my father one more time, in the nursing home, months before he died. I was with my mother in the days before she died. I discovered I felt compassion for both of them but that was all. I didn’t grieve their deaths because I had already spent more than a decade grieving that loss.
Sane meant I slowly rebuilt my relationships with my children. I am grateful that I have been given another chance to be a mother – albeit with adult children – and humble that we are, indeed, a family though separated by thousands of miles in some cases. We love each other imperfectly which is about the best that any family can hope for!
Sane meant that I forged through my fear and anger to that beautiful place called gratitude. I am deeply grateful for almost everything now, for life, for breath, for joys and even for the challenges that stretch me to grow.
Sane meant that I found two different men, who were equally as sane as I, to have loving relationships with – what a gift – just one more reason to bow in thanks and awe. (My second husband tragically died one year after our marriage; my third husband is joyfully with me now!)
Philosophers debate the definition of happiness, but I say that happiness is simply the result of sanity. Sanity makes space for happiness. That’s as normal as it gets.
One Week to Writing-in-Place Lite!
Join us for our first evening, one-hour+ writing-in-place workshop on Wednesday, July 5, 8 pm Eastern (7 Central, 6 Mountain, 5 Pacific). We’ll have a welcome, short breakout groups, a Little’s prompt, adult prompt, sharing (or not) as we wish. Spend the evening with your peers in a safe, supportive environment! If you subscribe to Dissociative Writers (DW), no registration required, just show up! If you aren’t yet a subscriber, click here and become one. See you soon!
One Space Left in Memoir 101
Our annual beginners memoir class runs for six-weeks in September-October 2023. Our maximum number of participants is eight and our minimum is four. We currently have six registered participants, so there’s two spaces left! If you’ve been thinking about writing your memoir and want a supportive, structured environment for delving into this difficult, wonderful work, this class may be for you. You can register by clicking here, or contact Lyn to have a conversation by clicking here.
2024 DW Anthology Call for Submissions!
Dissociative Writers is gearing up for our third annual Creative Healing Anthology, open to all subscribers to DW. All writing and art may be submitted, along with the Guidelines and Agreement to Publish (found at Groupeasy/Documents/Anthology 2024), between July 1 and September 16 by clicking here. Anticipated self-publication date is January 16, 2024. The digital anthology will be available for free on the Dissociative Writers website. For more information, click here.
🕊️
Being crazy isn’t enough.
~ Dr. Seuss
Lyn
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