troublemakers

Learning to Love My Crazy.

 

{Photo via Tumblr}

{Photo: Hannah Escano via Asylum Art on Tumblr}

 

Learning to love my crazy feels really fucking hard.

What I watched when I grew up was crazy. It was actual crazy. It was blended with surface sanity in moments coping needed to happen, but behind closed doors crazy let loose and found its home — its home on me, my sister, my arms, my emotional bones.

And then there were those four years where there weren’t even those surface sanity moments.

The four years psychosis drifted like a storm, ready to hit at any moment, sweeping up the (already pretty crazy and stormy) calm up into the arms, the eye, of the storm and however many days or weeks later, landing it — landing my mother — back down again, face first into the wreckage the storm left behind.

So the crazy I find inside me feels scary. In fact, it’s felt — and sometimes still feels — terrifying, but I’m learning to notice this fear.

I’m learning to notice my inner critic’s reaction that flies off into hurting dialogue in response to my crazy — my anxiety, my racing mind, my depression, my trauma that surfaces — and to spot the moments when I realize that what I’m feeling or experiencing is a memory of her.

It’s a memory of her crazy living inside my bones that, as I heal, is coming out to be seen and heard and expressed, and to have the feelings I never felt then, felt now.

It’s the memory of her trauma that lived through me, that lived with me when I was there, but a memory that now — as I heal — I get to sift and step through, leave behind, and choose what I want to take with me.

My crazy — the crazy that I’m noticing and the crazy that part of me fears or criticizes — is different. It’s a healthy crazy. It’s a crazy that so many of us feel.

It’s a crazy that lives here because of society, because of the trauma I’m healing, because of the life that’s been here before me, because of the responsibility I held as a child, because of the fact that I’m feeling after spending a lifetime (until two and a half years ago) of not, of surviving.

So the world does feel nutty at the moment — and I do often, too — but I believe it always will, and I always will. Perhaps a little less, and sometimes a little more, but that crazy and sense of nutty-ness will always be there because it’s a symptom of being a human on this wild and beautiful, and extensively modern and humanized, earth.

It’s a symptom of being a wild creature living inside a city that breaks me and compresses me and sits on me, whilst it also nurtures and inspires and and connects holds me.

To love my crazy feels — to the wounded parts of me — insane. To those parts of me, that crazy was what hurt me. That crazy was what brought instability. So to love it, to welcome it with open arms, to show it to other people, feels nutty, it is — to these parts of me — madness.

To fight it, to let myself fear it and try to be anything but, it feels healthy. That feels normal, and okay, and like I’m listening to what they need to say.

But it hurts. It really fucking hurts.

Because to other parts of me, to love my crazy is to experience complete sanity. The parts of me healing, learning and discovering what Health is, know that crazy lives inside all of us.

The parts of me who already know this are blossoming and getting bigger and stronger as I continue to listen to when they say, “Yes!”

To love my crazy is to allow myself freedom to say Thank You to all the things that make me whole. Because without my crazy I’d be bland, I’d be beige, I’d be saying Yes to it all.

I wouldn’t be dipping into my instinct, touching into my wild, honoring all the different parts of me and listening to what they have to say. I wouldn’t be listening to my needs with wild abandon. I wouldn’t be saying No where I want to, and saying Yes where my heart sings to.

By listening to the crazy wrestling inside me, I have continual flashlights shining on what I want and need to do. I hear bells ringing that let me know what lies out there for me to tackle and dive into.

I’m offered a ticket, an invitation, to a love affair with myself that comes from the deepening connection with my body, with my soul, with my heart, with my lungs, with my blood, that anxiety leaves me reaching and searching for.

The wilderness of depression gives me the gift of creating golden wonders I wouldn’t get to if staying safe ruled my veins.

The chaos of healing trauma leaves me hunting for band-aids that come in forms I would never have suspected, trusted, or asked for until now — until moments things are desperate.

After hours of fighting for air, obsessions leave me grateful and raw when I meet my compassion nose-to-nose and cry.

Lost wanderings and whirring thoughts bring me gladness for the qualities of the world around me I so often fight — the hustle and bustle, the routine, the stability and consumerism… the normality.

The crazy I find inside me often feels a million miles from the place I want to call me, but the more I fight it, the more I fight a freedom that belongs to me, and the more I can’t see its beauty. My beauty.

Because to love my crazy means to allow myself to be free. To allow myself to be free is to give myself the gift of truly being me. And to give myself that gift is to give myself the love I deserve to feel, know and be.

 

*****

 

{Love it All}

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Amani Omejer

Amani Omejer

Amani lives in Bristol, UK. She can be found enjoying herbalism, swimming in rivers, surfing, laughing, and talking about life with friends or anyone who will listen. She is a firm believer in telling your story in order to heal. She is currently writing a book. Connect with her on Facebook or take a look at her website.
Amani Omejer
Amani Omejer