But anyway, here's that old post I erased where I listed out a bunch of things I've heard preople refer to or referred to myself as "crazy." I'm pretty sure I was high when I read it over and erased it, thinking, "Doing this will be used against you at your commital." or "They're gonna fire you when they find out this is what you're thinking about at work." Reading it now, it's just not that interesting! Add to list: PARANOIA. (oh it's already there. I knew it was exhaustive!)
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If I can get this post down right then maybe I will never need to write anything ever again because this is the thing that preoccupies me most of all...
It's the word "crazy." People use this word to stand in for a lot of things. I do. I want to make a lexicon of crazies. I have not even taken Psych 101, yet behold:
I think it's best to start with Depressed. Lots of times people say "Crazy" and it would do just fine to sub in "Depressed". So let's start with kinds of ways of feeling depressed:
1) Genuine grief. Definitely not crazy and no one calls it that. Time eventually dulls this which is a lot like healing it. You do everything you can to make time pass in the most effectual way for you.
2) Like I do sometimes! How I am crazy! This would be, a little fatigued with it all already... life's full of obligations that can wear you down. And then add to this fatigue any old crush to the ego... say you find out your boyfriend you're living with is actually more bent on destroying you than supporting you and doesn't actually know you at all somehow, nor you him... or falling for someone stupidly (getting swept up, bitten by reality,) or you accidentally hurt someone's feelings; they accidentally hurt yours... and you were tired already! You examine your life as objectively as you can (difficult!).... but you feel sad and think you must be CRAZY to feel sad. No one's ever going to understand you. If you get fatigued, sad, cyclical, like this, and you can't shake it off by your best efforts, you get to be officially depressed. But maybe you ususally avoid it through some methodology you've developed somewhere in-between consciously and unconsciously. If not, i.e. you can't avoid it try as you might... add extreme wit and you're like Dorothy Parker. Add intensive hemorraghing the first time you have sex and keen awareness of the 1950's role of wife and you're a Sylvia Plath - sorry! Add rockstar and congratulations you are Janis Joplin. Boys, if you sleep with someone like this, (even one of the crazies who does generally dust herself off) try not to tell her she's "crazy" too often, or at least not more than once when she's waking up, because she'll A) get mad and/or B) might spend the day feeling teary/ wondering if she's crazy.
3) More specifically the fatigue much harder core, like too fatigued to get out of bed and by corrolary even more despair, increasing and increasing. This would be the hopelessly depressed. This would be the kind where you think "maybe altering the brain chemicals with drug therapy would actually help." This is Depression. These people probably aren't usually even called "crazy." I've heard it happen though.
4) Personality Disorder Depression. I believe we're still talking about different kinds of depressed. (Seeing as this can often be called "crazy.") It's starting to get a little dicey but bear with me. Personality disorder types are the people I personally probably call "crazy" the most. For example a friend might say : "My landlady insists that I scratched her car last week but I wasn't even in town and now she's leaving increasingly strongly worded notes on my door." and I'd say "That's because she's Crazy. Have you ever heard of a landlady who wasn't Crazy?" I still say this is a depression though -- a depression complexly morphed into a disorder that we can call crazy. People's bi-polar sisters are typically this kind of depressed, often called "crazy." Instead of feeling sad-bad, these people just go on with their bad selves when a delusion makes their roiling feelings feel justified. They don't know where their strong emotions are coming from -- strong emotions are scary -- so they decide, maybe just in the moment, that it's because of some immediate person or thing or obstacle -- such as not having a $10,000 drum set. This is also the kind of "crazy" a mom goes when she suddenly smacks her kid becasue he's there. If this is consistent behavior, congratualtions you're bi-polar I bet, or at least disordered. If you add Crystal Meth you're "crazy" just like many people residing in Hollywood .
5) Schizophrenic. Like the above but with voices and hullucinations. Can't understand difference between what people generally agree is transpiring in reality and what you perceive is transpiring. Leading possibly to homeless.
6) A depressed that's really into the alienation/hostility side and creeps people out. Maybe this is your "sociopath." Not good at the social stuff. Brooding, quiet, into metal. Maybe you're a 14 year old boy. Maybe you never stopped being like you were when you were a fourteen year old boy. Columbine, among other things, gave this "crazy" a bad name. It would be nice if there was a clear determinant which people like this were serial killers and which were just this odd-ball crazy, not good with people, don't want to make friends type, love the pain. (I've never met the serial killer kind I don't think.)
7) Needy. Everyone's somewhat needy. I start saying "crazy" when they go to the dark side, myself included. Obviously subjective.
8) Somehow empty. Also depressed. Rich. Stuck in childhood. Stuck in general.
Moving out of depressed crazy, here are some other things that get called crazy.
1) Dumb as dirt. Often called "crazy."
2) Very Shy
3) Very Loud, Raucous
4) Creative and paranoid
There are more. But this has been very satisfying for me.
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9 comments:
It's like a textbook!
But I don't think it's long enough. There's lots of other kinds of crazy. There's people who have different opinions than I do. There's people who don't understand when I need to be alone. There's people who are normal and uncrazy, and that makes them crazy. There's people with electrodes in their brains. There are people who have funny faces or mannerisms. There are people who go around acting like they are crazy, but they're really not. There are rude people and selfish people. There are people from other cultures who don't have the same basic assumptions. There are people who see colors when they hear sounds. There are people who forget to be afraid. There are people who can't hold two thoughts in their head at the same time. There are naturally bad drivers. There are people who have read really really bad advice. There are people who have to be crazy to keep their job. There are people who don't have one or the other emotion. There are people who are terrible at math, but smart about other things. There are people who are selectively hyper-intelligent about one thing only. There are people who don't have a theory of mind. There are people who enjoy pain. There are people who have never been challenged. There are powerful people whose brains operate differently than ours. There are people who are overwhelmingly lazy. There are people without gonads. There are people with both sets of gonads. There are people who think perfectly normal thoughts, but all that comes out of their mouth is a string of nonsense. There are people who are parodies of themselves. There are people who go around pretending they are a different person even when they are alone. There are people for whom talking to themselves is the most efficient method of not forgetting things. There are people who are so bored they will do the first thingthat occurs to them that seems remotely exciting. There are people who like to see how far they can push other people.
I don't know. Psychology can never be as advanced as psychedelic realism. Not as real as an overheard conversation. I still think that it makes sense to organize things by putting them into slots, it's just I think there should be at least a million different slots. I wish I could find the people who fit in my slot. Or the corresponding slot of greatest compatibility. I'm sure astrology doesn't work. Maybe blogging is the key? No?
Logan's blog:
http://thelogan.blogspot.com/
Soooooooo...it still annoys you when people tell you to "calm down!", right?
Is that what you'd like to tell me? (I'm a little better about it now. little.)
Yours would be a very very wonderful textbook Gwaz. I'd like to write the test. And grade it.
No, no, of course not. I was just thinking back to the long history of your engagement with the concept of "crazy" and I remembered the calm down thing.
I don't think you need to calm down one bit! In fact, I think you need to get a little more RILED UP!
I mean, you aren't that fragile that I need to watch what I say around you Alexis. I mean, if anything you need to watch what you say around me.
I think you're a little bit crazy.
:) :) :) :) :)
Why do you think you are nuts?
That's a video.
They are not having fun.
I can’t have fun if they don’t.
If I get them to have fun, then I can have fun with them.
Getting them to have fun, is not fun. It is hard work.
I might get fun out of finding out why they’re not.
I’m not supposed to get fun out of working out why they’re not.
But there is even some fun in pretending to them I’m not having fun finding out why they ’re not.
A little girl comes along and says: let’s have fun.
But having fun is a waste of time, because it doesn’t help to figure out why they’re not having fun.
How dare you have fun when Christ died on the Cross for you! Was He having fun?
- R. D. Laing
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