Today is my 71 birthday and this is a whimsical description of how I made it here despite my neurotic nature

Making Friends with your Crazy

My grandson often tells me I am a strange combination of intelligent and ditzy, some people have noted that I go from friendly and outgoing to reclusive and solitary, relaxed and easy going to frantic drama queen…and all I can say is …yes. I do all that, I am all that…it’s not an act, a cry for attention, a one woman comedy act…I admit I have been known to use any of those to my own ends at times, but most times it isn’t that contrived. I realized at an early age that I wasn’t wired right…I always knew I was intelligent, school proved that, I was a decent person…church taught me that…but other things that I won’t go into also taught me that I was much more than that and the much more is what this is about. At a young age I began acting out, became promiscuous, flaunted the disregard I had for people, their opinions and their society. In restrospect, the cause of this seems pretty obvious, but we were not an enlightened, self-aware bunch back then…not in my circle of family and friends anyway and I just became the crazy one, the ‘bad’ one and I fell into that role with enthusiasm. But even then, when I seemed to have no concern for anyone, I could switch roles at the drop of a hat. When on a road trip with a biker, he was arrested and had to call his grandparents who lived nearby…resulting in my spending an afternoon with his grandmother, while he spent time with his grandfather dealing with the bike and whatever else they found amusing. For that afternoon I was just a young girl from Alabama, raised to be polite and able to carry on a conversation without the dramatics I usually employed. I guess I did okay, I never heard anything negative about that afternoon. Or any of the other times that I fell back into the girl I used to be and still could be for short periods of time. There were many over the years.
But my crazy behavior often had results that bothered me…jail, didn’t like that at all. Once I ended up in a mental instution where they began to feed me a steady diet of Thorazine. Luckily, I was intelligent and aware enough to see where that was going and how to end it. I very politely began requesting a discharge, against medical advice but unless they were prepared to go thru a lot of work to keep me, they had to let me out. The key was to stay calm, and adamant about leaving, without acting out in any way that would justify more drugs. I never did that one again either. And since this procedure does’nt work in jail, I decided I didn’t want to go there either. I did see several psychiatrist over the years, several I seduced, which took away their power in my mind..a couple saw me as the problem I could be and quietly arrange me to be switched to another psychiatrist who could better handle my unique issues. I didn’t stay with them long. I finally met one who I could not be seduced, manipulated, ignored..he finally made me see what stemmed my behavior, what I was doing and why. He felt that I needed a lot of therapy…I felt I knew enough…I could control my issues once I recognized them. This coincided with other changes going on in my life that made me want a different life so I set out to figure out how to be NORMAL.
Since my negative behavior began at my formative age, it was a lot like my sense of style, it was seriously lacking in positive role models. This began a period of about 4 years where I watched and evaluated things I saw in other people, deciding whether it was worth incorporating into the new me or not. I was a blank canvas, I had no sense of morals, right or wrong, no ‘normal’ to pull from. I went to college, finished raising my kids, worked every day and slowly became the person I am now. Which unfortunately is still nutty as a fruitcake. I just now had coping mechanisms, some of them good , some of them born of desperation and maybe not the wisest choices. Early on, when I was still drinking, when the home life got too crazy with my son and his drinking buddies, my daughter and her crazy love life, when my youngest was living away from home, I would occasionally ‘run away’ for a few days, check into a motel and hide from everyone till I felt more able to cope. Not a great idea and pretty expensive. Once I was working, when things were crazy at home, I just went to work, where things were normal. I handled things at home by trying to fix them, establishing a firm pattern of enabling my two older children while telling myself I was trying to help. I probably robbed them of any chance of being responsible adults in the process but I hadn’t learned about enabling and would not for many years yet.
I was lucky that my daughter Susie had little need of my more destructive ‘help’ and by being who she was, she inspired me to be a better kind of help to her. When Michael was born, he became the focus of life, as my younger grandchildren had once been before their father took them away. Luckily I had gotten control of my crazier side and it seldom came out, allowing me to be the person my grandson sees me as now. And that was me.
But as I told my son once when he confessed that he often felt he was crazy…crazy is just another facet of our personality and we just have to learn to live with it…I had learned early on that crazy is only noticed when it is different from the crazy of the other people around you…stick to compatible craziness and your hardly seen. For me, it was working with computers…the craziness is just part of who we are, and no noticed me at all. I found something in the job that made me want to be good at it and worked on that…until it became who I was…most of the time. Occasionally things would boil up in me and I would pick a totally irrational argument with someone, usually carefully chosen, and I would vent my emotion and because the argument was so obviously ridiculous, I could then apologize and admit I was totally wrong. I developed a reputation for avoiding social situations, keeping my group of friends small and spending most of my time with Michael, even taking him to work with me when possible. He brought out the best in me. I had given up relationships, sex, dating …once I saw how destructive those relationships were for me, I just quit. I gave up drugs and alchohol because they took away my control and because they were not how I wanted my grandson to see me. I found that I was excellent at quitting things, and lousy at controlling them. My lifelong battle of the bulge is part of that…it’s hard to give up eating for very long and I had almost no sense of moderation.
I’m 71 years old today, retired and seemingly one of the most normal people you could ever meet. And yet my mechanisms are still firmly in place. I spend most of my time alone. I am very present on social media because I can be as upbeat and confident on Facebook as I want, whether I’m cowering in a corner at home or not. I keep time with other people short and with an easy out in case I need it. At home, I cope in several ways…one of my favorite is how I spent the afternoon today. The cold weather, my birthday and all the changes I have gone thru recently sent me into a panic, so I turn off the phone, the tv, close the blinds in my room, crawl into bed and roll up as tightly as possible in a cocoon of blankets, so snug I feel like a swaddled baby, I feel nothing, no aches and pains, no discomfort, not temperature awareness, I slow my breathing, my heartbeat, clear my mind and just lay that way as long as I need to. When the need recedes, I will feel my hand has gone to sleep, my feet want to move, thoughts of what I should be doing with fill my mind and it’s over. I continue my day. Or write it all down, like this.
So there it is, the story of becoming friends with my crazy, neurotic mind, learning to co-exist with her, or them as the case may be…and it only took me 71 years and counting…But that’s me and why you haven’t seen me on Facebook the past few days…how was your day?