I Was Never Crazy
an open letter to someone.
I still have bad dreams, and sometimes you show up in them. They’re bad dreams not because you’re in them, but because you’re in them and you do nothing. You do nothing to pull me out from the quicksand swallowing me or to rescue me from the fire licking my calves and burning my shins. You do nothing to change my dream from bad, to better.
So I open my journal and write a letter to you after these dreams, because I will never have the opportunity — even though I’ve worked up the courage — to tell you face-to-face.
I was never crazy. I was born in a cage, rusted by a corrosive generational curse. While my baby book was filled out with my favorite foods and picture books, my days of being that carefree child were numbered. The abuse started twelve years before we met. Maybe the teenager I was, wasn’t past saving, I’ll never know.
But I was never crazy. I was driven there in a shiny family sedan, that looked just like every other family’s car.
Because the abuse never stopped, even when I screamed louder than my vocal cords allowed. My reality was denied. My well-being was a child was neglected. And I was forced to carry around dirty, shameful secrets inside of me all the way to high school, which feels like a war zone to a damaged kid. But I performed well enough, so well that you bought it. Bought into me being just any other teenage girl.
So when I started acting erratically, when I stopped sleeping and eating, when I ruined the best relationships in my life and shot bullets at the sun — taking aim at people I loved so much it possessed me — everyone just assumed I was insane. Lost cause, troubled girl, what a shame because she was a smart kid, but some kids just don’t make it.
People said these things to one another about me, because no one openly discussed darker topics like sexual assault, rape, gaslighting or crazy-making in those days. You went along with these things said about me. But you were just a kid.
I wasn’t crazy. But I would have been crazy if I weren’t.
You just happened to come along when my capacity to hold it all in was reaching its incendiary limit. What a show I put on, right? I’d learned how to make cinematic-worthy performances to get what I wanted. I knew how to make an impact.
I’m sorry for the things I did.
I was still screaming then, waiting for someone to hear what I wasn’t saying.
I was never crazy, sitting in a circle of forty or so addicted teenagers, most of whom had been sexually abused, violated, and raped like me. I wasn’t crazy when I chose the two rehab counselors I liked and trusted the most with some of my secrets. I wasn’t crazy when my parents refused to back my claims and I decided fuck this shit I will get high as soon as I leave this fucking place because who cares anyway.
When I was sleeping behind a Circle K, the leather jacked gifted to me on my fifteenth birthday the only thing keeping me warm, I wasn’t crazy, I was running from a nightmare I couldn’t escape. When I was holed up in a dark, cockroach-infested room with dirty spoons and empty baggies, I wasn’t where I belonged, though I thought I was. Trash, living in trash. It’s what I assumed you thought of me, anyway. Hurt me to hurt you. Hurt me to hurt them. It didn’t work.
I wasn’t crazy when I was so high that I levitated, and you got a glimpse. I was numbing myself so I wouldn’t feel anything. When I sobered up and realized the chaos I’d let you witness, I’d get high again. It was a crazy cycle.
I wasn’t crazy when I let rage take me over, because you’d hurt me and you didn’t care. I was dealing with an old, open abandonment wound, a wound I was unaware of. I was maybe eighteen years old, but still trying to outrun my abuser and the havoc he was wreaking in my life. I was projecting — using that neat little trick I could do blindfolded.
I wasn’t crazy when I used my car to hurt myself. I had a death wish because I had lost nearly everything that meant anything to me, and I was left with the family that I hated.
I wasn’t crazy when I listened to that song over and over, crying from the deep well of ache in the center of my body.
I wasn’t crazy when I went to my old boyfriend’s apartment smelling like you, which could easily set him off.
I wasn’t crazy when I did things to spite you. I had reached a level of anger I didn’t think existed, and I wanted you to finally hurt. Finally, hurt like I did. I wanted to see manifestation that you loved me too, born from a place of pain inside of you.
I wasn’t crazy when I thought that the more pain we can take from someone, the more it proved we loved them. That’s what I had been taught.
I wasn’t crazy when I made you the metric of my worthiness, when I sought your forgiveness, burned to hear you say I love you one more time, replayed the image of you walking towards me, pulling your hands from your pockets and opening your arms for me to climb in. If you accepted me the way I was, accepted me and everything I’d done, I thought that I’d be worthy at last.
I wasn’t crazy when I turned away from you, cut my losses and slammed the game board shut. That was one of the more sane things I ever did (even if I didn’t execute it in a sane way).
Here’s the way it often worked, when we were young: girls started their young lives hopeful, trained to be pretty and obedient and sweet. The unlucky ones were pretty and sweet around very sick people, their instilled obedience used as an advantage against them. By people who enjoyed harming them. This led the unlucky girls into crisis — and you had a front row seat for mine.
I still have bad dreams. And I cry so loudly, the person with whom I share a bed wakes me up and makes everything alright again. Which makes me wonder if I’m crazy now, because it’s all still so fresh in my subconscious or unconscious, that I dream vividly. I must be crazy now, because the wounded child still rages inside me and loudly declares that she isn’t going anywhere.
So, I read a few social media therapy memes I’ve saved. I look through the highlighted sentences in my healing from complex trauma books. I journal. I journal, it seems, the same things over and over. I’m so fucking angry, I’m so fucking mad, my journals read. I listen to ‘Every Time I Hear That Song’ by Brandi Carlile.
Does all of this make me crazy?
While I wait for the only-time-heals repair of seventeen-year-old me and her abandonment wound, her scorned pride and temper tantrum over not getting her way, I live my life. Some days I wish for a different beginning as a child. Sometimes I wouldn’t change anything out of fear it would alter or omit what I love about my life now.
And, I’ve embraced alchemizing this pain into something else. It’s what I’m supposed to be doing. That’s how you know you’re not crazy, I tell myself.
But I had to get this out of me, today. Even if you could not care less about my story, even though you’ll never have a visual of the things that were done to me. If you did, you’d look at me like you never have before.
I had to tell you, for my current self and every self trapped inside of me, that I was never crazy.
And that you never really knew me.
You knew a kid with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and a death wish.
You knew a woman who existed in survival mode, but made it look normal.
I had to tell you, even though I’m okay being misunderstood by you. I’ll take that chance. We had similar minds once upon a time, we just saw with different eyes.
Though I’m okay being misunderstood, I won’t lie and say it isn’t important to me that you know. It is. It is important to me. Not because I’m still invested in you. But because sometimes I reside within that short blip in time that created such internal devastation and I am still forgiving myself. It’s harder than it sounds. Some pain just never leaves us.
It hasn’t left me, and not for lack of trying. I guess I was hoping this confessional would help.
I was never crazy. I was an untold story, and today I felt it was time to change that.
