Your Crazy

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

It's hard, I know, to wrap your head around someone else's crazy. To see them in the distorted funhouse mirror they use for themselves. I'm not so full of myself to imagine that I can pull it off perfectly, but maybe a little better than average. I have my own shit, too, after all.

But I can't, I can not figure out how to twist myself to see you as badly as you see yourself. I can believe all kinds of crazy things, throw myself into the craziest of situations and feel it in my chest as real as the chair I sit in. You know that, you've seen it. I can see how people get themselves into the cognitive traps of tribalism and prejudice, how billionaires make victims of themselves, how victims take on the burden of blame for their own abuse. I get that shit.

I want so badly to sit you down, to make you write with pen and paper all the objective measures of your own success. I want to let the air grow heavy as you try to look away, to force the words from your lips, to make you see. The awful discomfort of smashing your prison cell. God, I want to make you look at me, to see the sincerity when I tell you that you are valued and you are no impostor to that space. To let the tears come.

I have been to bizarre places, seen strange things. I have rubbed shoulders with news anchors and actors and anarchists, with anti-terrorism units and state senators and lobbyists. You cannot pretend I have no basis for measure here. I have shut people out of my life so hard the walls shook. You cannot pretend I am not a judgey asshole. These things should matter when I tell you what I see looking at you. You are not smarter than me, you have not pulled the wool over my eyes.

There is a very short list of people who I want to die beside, if it comes down to dying. Your place on it is not accidental. You are loved.

[LMNO]

This is good, and necessary.  Thanks for writing it.

[Doktor Howl]

I, too, have my own fair share of crazy, and I don't expect other people to walk around in factory condition.  Whether or not I am prepared to take their load of crazytown on top of my own is a different matter, of course...Just as I try very hard not to ask those around me to handle my crazytown.  That's half of what it all comes down to:  Try not to spill your crazy on others.

So what I am is a badly dented primate living in a badly dented desert in a badly dented state.  I do not say a badly dented nation, because we all decided years ago that we're not really in your nation.  We aren't even sure we're in your universe.  This is the Dirty T, and your customs and your rules of physics do not apply to us.  Or at least that's what we all believe.  Either way, we are not viewing the world the same way outsiders do, so we're crazy. 

BUT HOW HAS SANITY BEEN WORKING OUT?  I bet things could be better, down there in the "normal" world.  I bet Joe and Sally Sixpack spend an awful lot of time with their fingers dug into the arms of their recliners, thinking they aren't concentration camps, they are just detention facilities.  Because nobody wants to be THAT kind of crazy, right?  They look at Stephen Miller and say "There are always going to be a couple of bad apples."  I bet they wake up at 3 AM entirely too often, wondering if they're going to even be around to worry about what the weather is doing.

So sanity seems, right now, to be the state in which you deny the reality of how bad things really are.

And if that's the case, I'll take crazy.

Sorry for the digression, and thank you for your time.

[altered]

I've made big strides in not spilling my crazy on everyone else but I'm still not very good at it.

I've gotten to where my crazy doesn't affect everyone around me all the time, and even to where I can see beneficial uses for it (nothing perks up your coworkers like seeing you have an autistic happy moment with your job) but I still spill the bad crazy everywhere sometimes.

It's a constant battle, but I seem to be winning by attrition. That's sometimes the best you can hope for.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]