Does That Make me Crazy?

I think I might be getting less crazy. Which sounds like something a crazy person would say. I want to describe to you my day, how I’m doing, what interactions I’ve had; I want to give you the context you need to live inside my body today so that you can understand me better. Why? I dunno.

I already feel like what I’m writing sounds crazy. I’m imagining people I want to like me, people I know don’t like me, and random people I have no idea what they think coming across my blog, reading the first paragraph, and feeling judgmentally repulsed yet pity for my obvious insanity.

My brain keeps scrolling through different stories I could tell you. I’m not just writing what I’m thinking. I’m writing what I decided to say I am thinking. But before I picked the thing I was going to say, I scrolled through a bunch of other story options. It’s like I am rehearsing what I’m going to say before I say it. Which, even applies to being alone, listening to my own mind.

I get frustrated because I seem to be unraveling some kind of beautiful thought and then I have this compulsion to click away, go to another window, check notifications. I switch over and see a lovely message from my partner which I can feel in my body. I return to this window and can’t for the life of me remember where the hell I was going with that thought? And that makes me feel crazy. I guess partially because I saw representations of insanity or high people as being unable to track their own reality. Am I to expect to feel like I feel oriented within my own reality? That would be “not crazy”, right? But what if I don’t feel oriented within my own reality and I … well, have memory malfunctions. I suppose why not?

You know, one thing is for sure, I am going to work very, very, hard on no longer gaslighting my own self and my own experience. It’s a lot to adjust to, tolerating that self-sustaining inner dialogue that I seem to have no control over and which has my worst fears. But in the darkness of the last nearly 4 years since doing psychedelics, I have searched very hard for the truth and it has lead me to this. That we can trust ourselves. Trust that what is happening within us is true within it’s environment (being signals from the archive of your nervous system and the live signals coming in from your temporal senses). Interoception. No one ever talked to me about interoception. I have been floundering. Leaving Christianity, I survived through marriages, binge eating, Xanax, corporate ladder climbing, and rescuing others. Then I did shrooms. And I saw what I couldn’t see within all of those “symptoms” of trauma. That I didn’t know “what” or “who” I was (or who or what everyone else was).

I worry about people reading this and having a different reaction that pitying judgment… what if they feel intimidated? What if what I am feeling and writing about is actually some pretty great innate human intuition and knowledge about Life? What if I have never been saner than I am now? What is sanity isn’t the lack of being insane, but the grasp on a natural essence which we’d call “me”? Oh, but anyways, I was worried that me talking like this would intimidate others. I know that I felt intimidated and uncomfortable around “intelligent” people when I was living in a existentially dissociated body.

Is it okay that I hear a sentence in my head, begin to write it, and then midway through writing it, I have lost the sentence? I had been repeating it to myself over and over once the initial thought arose so that I wouldn’t lose it. But I just couldn’t seem to get the focus. Some would call that ADHD. But I don’t want to stop there. Why can’t I focus? Is there something that’s happening more subconsciously that my fear and shame for memory burps is covering it up? If I could just relax deeper and deeper into my experience, I wonder what I will find out is going on there and how much I could actually make a huge influence on my mental health by doing the deep dive myself, inside my own head, a place where no therapist nor family member has ever or will ever be able to reach?

Oh, and now I’m concerned that I’ve written too much. I’m worried that you “like Marie” as a consumer of my mental art but that you didn’t sign up for this whole “long blog with no pictures and lots of rambling” situation. But then I wonder if that’s more how I would feel if I read a blog like this? I get frustrated when I read if it’s not very clear about what it’s trying to say and where it’s trying to go. I think some of that has to do with how poeticism and metaphor was used in Christianity but also because of the pressure to memorize things you read in school.

This is fun, though, not forcing myself to finish a thought if I’ve lost it. So often I just stare at the screen, once I’ve lost my train of though, and try to will myself into remembering what the hell I was trying to say. I’ll re-read the sentences preceding and try to see if I can jog my memory but it never works and I feel crazy and just decided it’d be best if I just stopped being here/real/focused/present. But now I’m here at this point in my life where I have such little obligation, stress, noise that my mental health is the absolute worst its ever been because my “ears” are right next to the “speaker” and it’s fucking loud and overwhelming me to be so aware without the amount of distraction I’m used to having to cope with the noise. I have nothing left to do but to talk to you about it.

Why am I talking to you? Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know why I can’t think this through on my own. I don’t know why hours and hours of conversation with therapists, partners, and family hasn’t produced the kind of catharsis I am trying to get. Everyone keeps inferring I have some kind of psychological trauma that needs to “heal” and that I have to “do the work”. If all if you all know what the fuck that means, I would be shocked. Feels like everyone’s acting like they know, though, and that’s really annoying and results in people like me feeling gaslit. Cuz … I am fucking trying. I have been trying for decades. Do not fucking tell me to “do the work”. I simply do NOT trust humanity’s grasp on the idea of mental health right now. I don’t know what it is, what exactly they are devastatingly wrong about but I feel it. It’s so wrong.

I’m eating butter toffee peanuts while I write to. Why? I dunno. It’d be great to try to understand more about my eating behavior. That’s why I’m here after all. I have all this time and freedom finally and I am being flooded with distressing sensations and thoughts that I can’t avoid anymore because all the distracting factors are gone from my life and, from what I can see, may stay away from my life indefinitely. All that’s left is this damn eating disorder that I never really talk about but yet talking to my friends, seems like a LOT more people “have it” than my internal shame wants to accept.

Does mindfulness and meditation really have to look like me listening to Panamanian flutes and Hindu chanting? Could it be laying comfy in bed with a laptop, listening to ENM music, typing away and rendering ChatGPT images to illustrate and share my thoughts with you? Seems so.

I said the other day to someone that I think my eating disorder is there to keep me from needing to be aware of myself and my experience of myself.

My brain is mad now that my blog is image-asymmetric. Two images near the bottom but none in the middle or top. DEAR LORD WHAT HAVE I DONE? I HAVE ALIENATED MY READERSHIP!

Sometimes I think how funny would it be if my blog started getting more of a following because I finally decided to be the exact kind of crazy that I truly am and people liked it? Wouldn’t that be the kicker? That I spent all this time curating myself to be exactly what culture said it needed me to be in order to get attention, love, and belonging, and so I became it and it made me feel dead and so I tried to remember how to stop doing those things, nearly lost my mind, finally started purging crazy thoughts, and everyone was like, oh wow!, and followed me and liked me? That’d be nuts.

Hey. Can I write this here? Yup, I can. My blog.

I’m trying to decide what to do now. Sometimes this happens. My brain just freezes and the thoughts are running as quickly or as catchable and I find myself feeling fidgety. I ask myself, “Oh, am I done with writing? Is that what this means? Or is this my brain getting fucked up? Should I keep trying? Should I stop? What do I need? Who knows,… I’m eating to cover it anyways.” And, well, for today, I’m choosing to deal with those thoughts by writing them down here for you. I sometimes wonder if this blog is just mostly about me being honest about how anxious I am about everyone’s judgment and what I’m afraid everyone may be thinking about me. I’ve referenced it as “Big Brother” before. This regular sense inside of me that my thoughts, my behavior, my words are all being observed and judged as not enough. Not in a “go to hell” sort of way, but like, you don’t want me on your softball team kind of way. I want to be on your softball team.

Brain is trying to come up with a clever way of closing this out. You know, something punchy and that ties everything together. And then a part of me imagines you reading it, getting to this point, being totally riveted, inspired, and then boom you read this last paragraph of mine that is like making the perfect landing on the bar thing from Jumping Around Sports. And then you’d finish and be like, “DAMN.” and stare at the wall and have positive images of me and my intelligence and self-awareness taking up all this space in your head. Oh, that does feel quite good to think about. And what if it were true and someone read this and afterward reached out to me and was like “Oh, Marie! ‘Quote’ was the best. And OMG ‘Quote’. So good. I’ll be chewing on this for a WHILE” and then I’m all like, “Oh, that’s lovely. Thanks for reading. That means so much to me.” and what if I didn’t mean it? What if writing this out is the scariest thing I can think of and I’m terrified and feel so vulnerable that you read it and I’m worried, based on your response, that you may still think I am someone to “admire” or be “inspired” by. Why does that bother me? I guess my first thought is that I’d rather relate to others from a sense of equality. Equal respect. I respect you. I sometimes feel like that’s the best gift I can try to give others. Give them respect even when they don’t have it for themselves. It would be so easy to eat up their lack of self-respect and bask in their praise of me, my intellect, my ability to put things into words. But the whole thing makes me feel sick. We are drowning and I am learning how to swim. Don’t waste your time admiring me; try to swim.

Oh, man, that would have been a perfect mic-drop / end-of-blog. But I’m not really into nice and tidy closures. That said, I thought I would feel more “accomplished” by the end of this blog. After all, I have hardly written in years and struggle to talk about my feeling and my thoughts. And here I am, well into a blog post about my real emotions AND I made ChatGPT art. I wonder why that is. I guess what I wrote still feels crazy to me. I still think I’m crazy. I still feel like if you read this you’re going to think I’m crazy or pity me. That’s a real emotion I can’t shrug away as much as I want to. So there it is. Pragmatically, the plan is,… just keep doing this. I have no idea where it’ll go and I really don’t like the thoughts/emotions I’m working through because they bring my sense of being crazy to the forefront but I’m kind of at a point of no return here with how my life has settled at the moment. So, until my next mad entry…