The Crazy, Pt. 1

this shall be a week of Exploring the Crazy. or maybe just a day. we’ll see how compelled i feel to continue writing on this topic.

here is axiom #1: The Crazy can express hate, and in fact has an excess of it. The Crazy can bury you in adulation and pseudo- adoration, a flipped reflection of its own narcissism, but The Crazy cannot maintain emotional consistency and The Crazy cannot feign love.

when i say “emotional consistency,” you might think “well, the very nature of emotion is that it is changing always, that sadness is so unlike joy is so unlike fear is so unlike anger is so unlike calm” but i don’t mean a flat line, i don’t mean a lack of affect. i don’t mean stoic and i don’t mean bland. what i mean by “emotional consistency” is, for example a certain reliability in the temperament, even when pushed to its general extremes. for example, if someone gets rude with me, i may get angry at my worst moments. usually, i will not feed into this a whole lot. but say i’m not feeling good, or already annoyed. at my worst, i may get angry, may retort angrily, may get stupid for a  minute. but if so, and usually even before that, you can generally rely on me quickly backing off, coming to my senses, trying to defuse the situation in some manner because i don’t want to see conflict reach its extreme, which in my experience can be violence. if i find myself feeding things toward that end, even to the point of being reactive or unrestrained in my anger, that is a path to The Crazy. backing away from that path as a reflex is a healthy emotional reliability. in relation to the emotional terrain and behavior which most people demonstrate and deem acceptable, you can rely on my remaining in a consistent relationship to it, tho not in sync with it and despite that i can be very excitable, very forward, moody, and even angry.

so i hope i’ve outlined somewhat clearly the distinction i make between “bland” or “calm” and “emotionally consistent.”

when people talk about those with Borderline Personality disorders, they talk of something called “Splitting.” this is a form of  emotional inconsistency (not to mention always a symptom of underlying problems). aside from my undergraduate study (and brief employment periods) in the fields of abnormal, regular, and child psychology, i once lived with a person who had multiple personality disorders.  even on their meds—Xanax,  perphenazine (antipsychotic medicine related to thorazine), and others—this person did lots of Splitting and as a result, you never knew who their friends were or enemies were at any moment. it all interchanged.

people who practice “splitting” think you are the Tops one moment and the next, they think you are scum and treat you that way. they can actually jump back and forth with alarming pace and extremeness and expect you to still be standing around when they are done exercising The Crazy. Splitting is emotionally inconsistent with what most of us understand and demonstrate as acceptable. that is why there is a name for it in psychiatric books.

• beware of those who burn through many relationships in very quick time. beware of those who carry loads of stories about people they hate who have done them wrong.  if you do not back away very quickly, you will soon be the new story they are telling the next person.

and mostly, watch for the love part. search for compassion. not cloying saccharine poses of empathy or affection, but actual realtime-demonstrated, organic and selfless compassion. look closely. you won’t find it in The Crazy. inside The Crazy, there is none to be found. only a spoiled, twisted, stagnant sort of emotion that seems capable only of looking upon itself with pity, and assigning itself the excess and rotted surplus once meant for someone else, or others. in a like manner, The Crazy will dole out all the vile and bitter feelings they have about themselves, but as if it belongs to you.

connected to why i find compassion in a person so endearing and valuable. the presence and exercise of compassion demonstrates a healthy heart, one able to love. practiced and nourished compassion is a barrier to madness, in fact. compassion is a pathway to others and to freedom beyond the confines of the self. losing compassion or lacking that path outward condemns one to the backtracking and fragmented lunacy of a lifetime-long pacing session in a painted-stuck closet where the air is fetid and all the faces look like your own.