A Confession about Craziness

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm at least a little bit insane. I've always tried to feel okay about this by rationalizing it to myself in a multitude of ways.

• Everyone's a little bit crazy - the only people who are truly insane are the one's who say they're sane
• I tend to keep my crazy to myself and not spew it all over everyone, so I'm not impacting others and therefore my crazy is okay
• I warn other people that I'm crazy upfront, and therefore they have no right to be annoyed with me later when it turns out I wasn't lying to them about it
• I can function and therefore my crazy is okay
• My craziness is actually useful in many situations and so does it really count as crazy anymore?

In listing these things out - which is forcing me to think a lot more carefully about myself than I am typically wont to do - I realize that perhaps I might be a bit more crazy than is good for me. However, even this realization is not going to overpower my real and deep fear of being crazy and of psychologists in general enough to have me seek out someone who will give me little pills to help me "cope" so I suppose I shall just settle for writing a blog post about it instead.


The first thing that I want to talk about is, funnily enough, outlined in the last sentence of that paragraph right there. I don't want to be crazy. I also do not want to be sick. I am kind of internally obsessed with the idea that I might possibly have some very real illness and being terrified of it and therefore denying any possibility that it could exist. This all makes sense in my head. For example, I know that I have some physical problems that impact my daily life. I have an elbow I fractured a couple years back that still gives me trouble. My knees ache regularly. I get migraines. I also somehow manage to catch every bug that comes within two miles of my location even though there doesn't appear to be any reason that my immune system is crap at keeping the bugs out (it seems to be just fine at beating them up once they arrive). However, for the most part I have no idea why these things are problems for me. I've gone to doctors for some of them, but the doctors by and large have been extremely unhelpful. They have also done their best to terrify me of not only my body but of any and all possible treatments for what could be the problem. They also made me marginally afraid of treatments for the symptoms of what is wrong. I basically live in fear that there is something seriously wrong with me and one day my joints and/or other body bits are going to give out on me and then I'll have to go in for these expensive treatments that have no guarantee of even helping what is wrong in the first place. When I'm not worrying about that, I'm worried about taking pills to manage the pain from these problems because the doctors have mostly all been on board with the fact that if I regularly take pain pills to, you know, manage my pain that I will become addicted to them and/or they will stop being effective and it will eventually end with me on a morphine drip, strung out and unable to function.

So, I'm afraid of doctors. I have this kind of irrational thought process that if I go to the doctor, they'll find something wrong with me that can't be fixed or treated safely and will just serve to make my life miserable. Somehow this manifests into the "if I can't see it, it doesn't exist" concept. As long as I avoid the doctor, I don't have to deal with any of it. Well, except for the pain and other symptoms that the doctor isn't going to help me with anyway. And I get the bonus of not having to try to convince the doctor that I'm not a drug addict just looking for a score when I ask for a pain pill so weak that if I didn't worry about being arrested I could just drive up to Canada and purchase them over the counter. (FYI: My pain drug of choice? Tylenol 3s or Tramadols)

This fear is compounded nearly infinitely when I contemplate seeing a psychologist. This might be because when I was in the third grade my mother told me that I needed to lie to the psychologist about the drug use in my house or they would take me and my brother away from our family and put us in group homes. It may also be because the one time I opened up to a psychologist in High School, the woman tried to kill me (via putting me into a dangerous situation involving my mother's abusive boyfriend). Or it may just be a pure extension of my fear of doctors. I don't want anyone to actually write on any kind of chart that I am, in fact, certifiably crazy. Because of this fear, I have mostly taken to self-diagnosis. I analyze my behaviors as objectively as possible and determine where they cross the boundary from normal behavior into crazyland. I verify this with friends who know me, and very often by leaning on a friend who has actually had both schooling and experience in the psychological field. This has led me to determine that I am likely OCD (or whatever they're calling it these days, I swear they keep making changes to the names of things just so they can release another DSM that year), possibly with a bit of ADD or ADHD and some social anxiety thrown in.

This is where the problems with self-diagnosis begin to rear their ugly head. I am a big fan of shows like House. I enjoy reading and discussing medical and psychological issues with friends. I watch movies or television shows where the main characters have obvious psychological or medical disorders. And then I begin to wonder, do I have that? One of the biggest problems with this is that so many disorders - especially psychological ones - have symptoms that are completely normal as long as they are not something that overwhelms your life. Every person can be easily distracted at some point or another, but this doesn't mean they have ADD or ADHD. Every intelligent, socially awkward person does not have Asperger's. But how do you draw that line?

For most people, they don't worry about it. They go to a doctor if they think there's something wrong (or, in the case of psychological issues, a psychiatrist) and let the doctor handle the diagnosis. If they are pronounced fine, they stop worrying and go about their day. I do not want to do this, and the thought of going to the doctor - really, any doctor - fills me with anxiety. So I task myself with figuring out whether or not that behavior I notice in myself is enough to actually qualify as being a "problem". Even this doesn't sound so bad to most people as they are reasonably certain that they can recognize a problem in their own bodies or minds and can reason out whether or not this problem requires attention or is something they can just live with.
I have discovered a problem with this theory, and it makes me worry that I might actually have a problem because I've become kind of obsessed with the idea. Hypochondria. I have circled this problem again and again and I just can't get away from it. Hypochondria pops up in my mind every couple months or so and I obsess and worry at it for a while until it fades from my daily anxiety and then I shelve it to think about another time. What I have realized is that it is nearly impossible to tell whether or not you have hypochondria. On the one hand, obsessing over whether or not you are a hypochondriac is a clear symptom of the disorder. On the other hand, if you truly were a hypochondriac, would you be able to recognize the symptoms of the disease through the haze that it puts on your mind? Does worrying that you have hypochondria automatically mean you have it, or that you don't? I probably should just find a reliable psychologist that I feel comfortable talking with and get the matter settled for once and for all, but I worry that no matter which way the professional finds the matter it will make the anxiety even worse. I worry that if they say I am a hypochondriac that I will question myself every time I feel sick or hurt - is this real or is this just my disorder? I worry that if they say I am not a hypochondriac that then it means that I really am sick and messed up in all the ways I worry about because I can't blame that one disease for making me think I have all these other ones. I also worry that they'll say I'm a hypochondriac and that there's nothing to be done for it but to just live with it and be constantly worried that I'll end up dying because I thought that I wasn't sick, but was just having a hypochondriac episode, when it turned out that that time I really was sick and should have gotten help.

I suppose that that anxiety is a lot of what my crazy is - I see too many possibilities in the future of any one action. I'm not necessarily a negative person. Sometimes I see a lot of good things coming, sometimes they are bad, sometimes they're neither. But the point is that I can extrapolate a lot of things happening from just one choice or action and it often makes me feel like I can't make any choice, but then I realize that not making a choice is making a choice in it's own way and then I get freaked all over again. This is probably why I like to control my environment so strictly, because it minimizes the choices. This isn't a choice of where to put the book, it goes in alphabetical order and therefore is not a choice, per say, but more a what must be done type of thing. It alleviates a lot of the anxiety and allows me to take a lot of the weight of decisions off of my shoulders. Which is funny, in a way, since many people looking in from the outside would assume that being ultra controlling about, say, where the spoons must go in the dishwasher is a choice - it's my choice - and therefore would make everything my fault.

I guess you have to be kinda crazy to understand it.