Maybe I’m Crazy

Perhaps my greatest fear is that I am crazy. That my inside reality doesn’t match my outside reality. That I’m stuck in one dimension of existence with my mind and another with my body. I hear my body but can’t meld with it because my mind is on autopilot. I feel a lack of control. A loss of autonomy. I never feel “real” when I’m alone.

I don’t know how long this has been true but it’s something I’ve begun to put into words over the last 3.5 years. I keep waiting to find something that will make more sense than “she can’t stop thinking that she may not be real or is crazy”. But here I am, writing a blog, trying to be another layer more honest about what I am experiencing as a person. I don’t want to admit that’s how I feel and that’s what I’m struggling with. I don’t want to put it on a public blog with my real name on it. Why? It’s this sharp, mumbling fear difficult to comprehend that essentially tells me that I will lose my job and all social privileges if I tell you that I can’t stop thinking that I might be crazy.

I wait for the people around me who I am telling about this to say to me, “Oh, yes! I know exactly what you’re talking about” so that I can brave talking about it just a little bit more. That’s worked with other things in the past that I’ve been discovering about myself. However, I haven’t encountered that kind of validation yet. I have received validation from a historical perspective from my family and society at large that what I experienced in evangelical Christianity was pretty fucked and has hurt a lot of people. So I figure it’s hard to write myself off as just being lazy or stubborn (i.e. “sinful”). That said, I keep waiting around here trying to figure out what’s next. OK, so we all agree what happened to me wasn’t cool? Good. And I have psychologically safe employment and a comfortable salary? sigh And my most important relationships have finally reached a level of intimacy I didn’t realize existed? Wow, okay. So what’s going on now that I feel crazy, isolated in a hell room in my mind, and really struggle when I am alone feeling like I am real? But… no one has yet related to me that they know what it feels like to obsess over whether you’re real or if you’re mind is broken, causing your sense of self to instinctually and self-defensively wind up back away from itself, … which it can’t exactly do so it is in a split state of repulsion and fear of insanity. I can’t stop watching the crazy.

Is this … “ mental illness”? How should I know? Who out there is actually really talking about what they experience of themselves? Everyone is heads down doing the human story but not having an intimate relationship with their experience of self. Or maybe there are people like that. Maybe I wouldn’t have recognized them if I had met them? After all, I watch media from back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, that I found out were communicating sophisticatedly about a life truth. Or maybe it wasn’t actually sophisticated. Because to me, now, it seems obvious when art is sharing an emotion or story with you. If you know what emotion and story are. But if you are being brainwashed to categorize entertainment as either Christian/holy or not, you’re just scanning for the moral code of the entertainment instead of the emotion and life story being told.

I think I’ve always been thinking these kinds of thoughts. It overwhelms me even now that I am able to just write without pause right now given that my source is this invisible mental monologue that I describe as happening in my head. But is it fair to say it’s happening “in” my head? How much of the story of humans is told from one culture’s view? The culture that went around killing and brainwashing everyone. Perhaps my experience living in white supremacy has blinded me to its highly limiting existential story of exclusivity, individualism, purity, punishment, and reward instead of everyone’s true story which is our belonging in this context, together, and we don’t know why other than saying something came from nothing. I’m not very worried about the god problem. Not yet. I’m more curious about why humans are even asking the question.

So I am going to write about those thoughts finally. There’s a good chance I am not actually crazy but I’m stuck in a thought problem in my head and I won’t let go until I figure out how to relate to this thing. If in hell, keep going?

Well, now I feel I’ve made myself look really brave and intellectual and I am imagining the judgment of people who feel intimidated by my self-awareness and the plainness by which I speak about it. I am imagining the shame and inferiority they feel when they finish listening to me (being sprayed with a firehose?) and have a turn to respond. I always feel like I’m about to fall off a cliff once I’ve finished sharing some of these deeper thoughts, waiting for the other person to actually respond my mind plays a clip of how it imagines they’ll react.

I start talking about shit like the paragraph above and then I just can’t follow my own train of thought anymore. It’s things like that that contribute towards me feeling like I am crazy. I have these pretty sophisticated insights into reality and life and then my mind just goes blank and I can’t grasp what I was thinking or saying anymore. Like I was etch-a-sketched. But it all made sense not just a couple seconds ago and I felt a feeling of truth and wisdom and excitement. And then blank/swipe, nothing I just wrote makes sense to me anymore and I feel like I’m reading something someone wrote in a memory.

When I describe these things, I wonder what people will think of me. Will they think I have a mental disorder? They might say I have OCD. Or CPTSD. Or that it’s existential rumination from religious trauma. If they’re a spiritual person, they’d say I’m on my “journey” and to trust the process, be compassionate to myself, drink water, and take walks. If I talk to my friends who also have cPTSD, they’ll tell me to do whatever I need to do for myself: weed, food, TV. They will say that I am fatigued from chronic trauma and I need to rest and do whatever I need to do for this time. If I talk to a health-focused person, they’ll tell me to limit the time on my phone, create routines, assure a healthy diet, and get physical activity every day. If I talk with someone who knows and me and loves me, it doesn’t seem like they’re trying to “think” anything in particular of me. Almost like they aren’t personally concerned with “who” I end up being or end up discovering about myself. It’s almost like they love me at a deeper level than where I am at with relating to my psychological wounds. And that they trust me and that I can handle this and respectfully and supportively spectate my life as one of my biggest fans, but they’re definitely not my coaches.

When I write these things, I see scenarios in my head of people coming up to me at social gatherings and telling me with this passively apologetic tone that they’re sorry they can’t keep up with my blog posts. The content is so long and is so deep and dense. Oddly enough, that’s usually the kind of thing my mom says about my writings. She never intends for it to mean anything other than what it means for her. This amount of content and this amount of length isn’t something her brain can do much of. I can accept that. But somehow it’s stuck in my head as a warning. That I can anticipate people feeling obligated to read what I’m writing here but apologetic that they aren’t interested in actually reading all of it. And that they’ll apologize to me for that. And I suppose that’s why I invested some money for the next 12 months in having a blog subscription/notification process set up for y’all. Cuz I could write this stuff on Facebook. I could write it either on my personal or my professional profile. But publishing on someone’s else’s platform takes the power and control away from me as they can control how my content is handled on their platform based on their rules. Whereas, if I write blogs here on my platform, people can come here, say “Yup I like this”, subscribe and then get emails straight to their inbox made of content that they actually want. It’s why I prefer getting emails from blogs that I like. I’m tried of checking controlled feeds. So I’ve invested about $400 on the necessary apps this year to make that flow a possibility. And why do I want to share my thoughts?

OMG, as you can tell, I have been playing with ChatGPT whilst writing this blog post. I got access to ChatGPT today through work so I already needed to muck around with it. So while writing about my craziness and how I want to start to use my blog as a safe place for me to share about my craziness, I wanted to tell you that I often illustrate my mind with this metaphor… I feel like someone sitting in the middle of a football field and my job is to “be aware” of myself, the football, but it has been covered in a dogpile of footballer bodies that continue to infinitely stack themselves to the sky. I’ve described this nutty metaphor dozens of times to people but today I finally have more than a dozen images to illustrate it. I’ll wide up this blog post by letting you enjoy the many iterations of AI generated mind images that I was able to create today.