Rats and Alliteration

I’m in a foul mood today. Glad this fucking week is over. LawyerBoy is coming over this weekend to help me with some things. I am again caught up in the conundrum of whether I am crazy or not. God, I hate that word now. It has taken on so much weight and judgment since everything happened.

Crazy Katie Chaos. I love alliteration, and that always seemed to fit. Since I was a kid, I was the one who would do the crazy shit. I’d touch the worm in the dirt in preschool, I’d climb to the highest level of the monkey bar in elementary school. By junior high I was willing to say the craziest shit to get a laugh. I’ve always been known as crazy.

I’ve also had a severe trauma history my entire life. I grew up in real chaos — not Crazy Katie Chaos — but truly disturbing shit no kid should grow up in. Chaos with alcoholics fighting, food insecurity, and abuse: emotional, physical, and sexual. Actual neglect. Nothing was ever secure and nowhere was safe.

But you grow up in that type of environment and normal is weird to you, and disturbing becomes normal. What do you mean your stepdad isn’t drunk in the car and hurting you at home and using you to sell stuff that “fell off the back of a truck” at the flea market when you’re five? Hell, I think I may have helped engage in numerous felonies and insurance fraud by the time I was ten. I always say the show Shameless actually depicts my childhood rather well. LawyerBoy once had to say to me that "you know domestic violence isn't funny, right?"

So I call it crazy. It was better than calling it what it was.

I therefore, also in addition to being Crazy Katie Chaos, have mental health issues. You grow up like me and you'll never fucking end up normal — again, your normal ain’t their normal. I have depression, and finally they have a diagnosis of complex PTSD. I’ve been trying to explain tohat shit for years. Those are diagnoses that happen to you, not diagnoses you are born with. Child brain development in that kind of chaos, with that kind of constant inescapable trauma, fries some shit in your brain when it comes to neurochemistry. Never-ending fear chemical response in the brain fucks up the balance. It’s all chemicals and neurotransmitters. I mean, you can rewire a child’s brain completely — good or bad — depending on what kind of sadistic fuck you are.

So I’m crazy.

I bring it back to {D} because that’s what the audience wants to hear about. I once told him to say something nice to me because he had said something dickish whilst drunk the night before, and he said, “You’re the fun kind of crazy.” Crazy Katie Chaos. I also once ended a conversation with him with the words, “Now tell me I’m the craziest thing you’ve ever slid your dick in!” And of course there is our collective favorite saying: “The crazy ones fuck better.” It was a fucking running joke. It was funny — it wasn’t hurtful or shameful. But now it is being used against me.

Now I second guess the word crazy. “Wow, that’s crazy.” How many times have you said it? How many memes have you laughed at where you were like, “Yup, I’m crazy”? My best friend and I used to do this thing when we were kids — hell, we’re in our mid-forties and we will still do it and she’s a goddamn physician — but we would repeat to each other, with different tone and inflection:

Crazy? I was crazy once.

They put me in a room.

A rubber room.

With rubber rats.

I hate rubber rats.

They make me… crazy.

And we will go for hours just taking turns saying that to each other. God help us if one of us starts it. That is my kind of crazy.

Now I feel like everyone thinks I should be in a goddamn straitjacket, living in an asylum. I’m not that crazy, or that kind of crazy. I’m just overwhelmed that something that was once, not too long ago, a fun descriptor of my personality is now weaponized by those who once laughed along to the stories of Crazy Katie Chaos. All that identifies me now is that I’m crazy — but not in the fun way.

So yeah, maybe I’m crazy — but I’m not their kind of crazy. I’m the “touch the worm, climb the monkey bars, recite rubber-rat poetry for three hours, possibly commit a felony before puberty” kind of crazy. The fun kind. The storytelling kind. The kind that survives. And honestly, if anyone wants to shove me in a straightjacket, they better make sure it matches my shoes. My grandma always said never wear cheap jewelry or ugly shoes, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to start now. If I’m going down, I’m going down stylish and still laughing at my own goddamn jokes. See laughing at your own jokes, that shits crazy... 

Crazy? I was crazy once...