On Crazyness

It occurs to me not infrequently that I am, in all likelyhood, crazy.

On good days, I would like to think I am able to achieve some of the KRAZY sort of mental condition. In other words, kooky. Weird. Maybe a little fun. Harmlessly annoying. A condition described by a wise man simply as Lukeyness.

I try, with varying success, to foster such krazyness. It containeth much jocularityishness. It can rarely even be entertaining for other people. Sometimes. Cue the 'annoying' portion of the above comment. Regardless, the feeling of dynamic creativity which springs forth from such behavioural adventures, though perhaps largely illusionary, can certainly be invigorating. That and... well... I suppose the best word to describe it would likely be soothing.

So yes, hooray for good days. May everyone have them in as great a quantity as they need.

Though perhaps to use the term 'days' is disingenuous. Things are hardly ever that cut and dry, and if they were reality would certainly possess a level of diffuse contrast I would find eminently numbing. Even the best of days should have a mix of the positive and negative, I think... if for no other reason then to provide perspective. So, instead of speaking of bad days as some sort of monilithic generality, let us instead look at the specifically implied opposite state that would make up the primary component of such a calendrical unit. You have possibly been impatiently waiting for me to get on with it, and hurry up my meander over to that yonder topic anyway.

So... the bad moments which elicit the aforementioned thoughts of craziness. They are largely difficult to vocalize, stemming as they do from a certain ethereal sense of... brokenness. Not in the complete sense, of course... I am not so angsty as to quote such cliches as 'life is pain' or the like, and if I thought I was genuinely insane I would take measures to lessen the risk such a state would pose to others. No, rather I refer to the small, tiny little shards of mental sector faults that seem to define as much as they disrupt the internal self-monologue that is my consciousness.

I get the impression I won't get away without giving examples. Well, I will confess to some degree of apprehension regarding the release of such onto the wild untamed frontier of ye' ol' Interweb. But hey, where else but the Internet will you find such a limitless source of shameless, self-important navel gazing?

(luke shrugs) Hey, I can at least take solace in the fact there are maybe ten of you... tops... that might ever read this stuff. Hooray for not undeserved Internet obscurity!

So. Perhaps you kind Readers out there can enlighten me as to your personal experience in this regard... do you ever, during quiet moments, have some small and generally unimportant memory bubble up of its own volition? I imagine you do... let us all sing a jaunty-but-glorious tune to the human brain and its wonderfully chaotic random neural impulses! Where I get my sense of brokenness, though, is the fact a large portion of these memories of mine tend to be remembrance of past mistakes, embarrassments, or general Lukish foolishness of one variety or another. And when they hit, they generally leave me practically doubled over in a tense, seizing moment of inward-focused humiliation and rage.

That doesn't seem quite right to me, personally. I would like to think I am possessed of sufficient self-awareness to know I don't enjoy such feelings. One of the portions of my brain seems to think that keeping those experiences fresh will keep me either: A) From making such mistakes again, or B) A 'good person'. Point A) is obviously hogwash simply considering the fact that I always find a way, no matter how difficult it proves to be or how far out of my way I have to go to pull it off, to find a way to do something monumentally stupid. Point B) ties into a weird sort of Catholic-style Guilt justification that I've been dismissing as a valid excuse for some time now.

Anyway, I seek here not to explain why this happens. Oh sure, there are always excuses... Grade 9 in Lorette was a bad, bad year for me indeed. (And that's all I'm inclined to say about that.) But the simple truth of the matter is that I am the custodian of my own identify and I refuse to have it... defined... by others.

The situation is simple... there is something within my neural network, some small broken thing within me, that causes this almost physically painful emotional impulse. I am aware of it. I can sometimes almost feel it inside my head, like a small paper cut on your finger that only hurts when something brushes against the grain of the wound. I have tried repeatedly to simply not allow myself the luxury of dwelling in such hubristic self-flagellations, but they have proven rather insidious at evading my attempts to purge them.

Thus my thoughts on craziness. As the saying goes, 'everyone is someone else's weirdo'. Everyone has their quirks. But how does one tell the difference between a quirk and an actual crazy behaviour? The simplest definition would simply relate to consequence... a quirk is a particular behavioural habit that is fundamentally harmless. The crazy ones are probably those that, by performing, actively harm or disadvantage their keeper. Is revisiting old memories what one would consider 'harmful', per-say? Well, yes, probably, if the process of mentally reviewing them make passers-by actively avoid the twitching crazy person.

So... when one has acquired a particular personality foible, made manifest upon the cerebral plane through some dark progenitor crafted from personal nature and external world experience... and one has deemed such aspects of identity to be harmful or even simply disadvantageous... how does such an individual overcome it?

I wonder... is that the primary appeal of alcohol, or the other various illicit pharmaceuticals whom most people who aren't me seem to have used at one point or other? Is the major motivation behind it that everyone is just as nuts as I am, but with the right chemicals, you can forget this unhappy truth for just a little while? Beats me. I'm not inclined to test such a hypothesis directly, knowing all to well one of my other mal-adaptations is the tendency towards addictive crutches. As such I'd prefer to simply avoid that whole can of worms. Perhaps other may share with me any enlightenment that might prove of insight in this particular field.

The situation as it stands finds a sober, relatively boring sceptically agnostic secular humanist on one side, and a rogue's gallery of unappreciated aspects of that same individual on the other. He has tried acceptance of his faults... the serenity in knowing who you are, and accepting that there will always be positives and negatives therein. But one can hardly claim to be dedicated to personal self-betterment with such a mind-set. One instead seems to need to believe that anything about one's self can be changed with sufficient effort and understanding that there are certain things, like Gravity, that won't yield simply because you tell them to. (Though, man... there are some days I really hope I'm wrong on that last bit. At least for myself personally. I'd certainly be less inclined to grant that power to other people. Dick Cheney should not have the capacity to kill people with mind bullets. But perhaps this is just me being selfish.)

It seems the only 'sure' way to change one's self in the personality department is to deceive yourself into thinking you are somebody else until you forget that you aren't in fact like that normally. Which, when put that way, probably sounds worse then I actually intended. After all, if by pretending that you are a Creative person is required for you to actually try and create... is that really a problem? Since one learns by doing (or so the saying goes), if you work hard enough at writing, you'll become a better writer. If you paint everyday, you'll become a better painter. It doesn't mean you'll ever necessarily become good at it, but you will improve. But am I cavorting amongst an apples versus oranges situation here? Does repetition work the same way with personality? And if so, why? Shouldn't simply telling one's self 'I will do this' or 'I won't do this' be enough to override habit and habitual momentum?

I wonder... is self-awareness a double-edged sword here? One must know one's self to know what parts of that self could use improvement. But like trying to cut down on eating, the act of thinking about something tends to keep you focused on it. Resisting succumbing becomes a battle of willpower... or of finding sufficient things to distract the synaptic chanting of 'Want, want, WANT!'. 'No,', I tell myself, 'I won't eat the last of that pizza. I've had enough.' But that just keeps reminding me that the thrice-damned delivery mechanism of cheesy tastiness lurks, waiting for consumption. Much the same way goes personality quirks, I find. 'No, I won't allow myself to dwell on such things'. 'No, I won't play through that video game yet again instead of doing actual creative tasks.' 'No, I will not choose to believe that the people laughing a couple seats over are laughing at me.' 'No, I will simply go to bed, rather then stay up far too late searching for mildly entertaining clips on YTMND or YouTube'. The things listed here that have an understandable endorphin response make some sense, at least... but the unsettling ones? Mercy, why would anyone want to inherently default to the belief that they are the brunt of the jokes of everyone around them?

Does Crazy VS. Not-Crazy really just come down to the ability to effectively distract one's self from the irrational impulses percolating inside our heads before they 'stick'?

But heck, I guess that crazy or sane, simply being functional is a blessing in its own right. All the rambling I've done here amounts to simply whining in the grand scheme of things. So I'm a little bit broken. I'm at least mostly... not. And where I exist in a less then optimal state, at least the only one affected is myself. Though while that shouldn't mean I shouldn't try and do better, I at least have the selfish comfort that I could be in a much, much worse situation.

The question about what that says about me... that I am soothed by the knowledge others have an existence far worse then my own... is perhaps a topic for a different self-involved rambling.

Aug. 18 2006