Growing up crazy

I won't presume to make myself a posthumous spokesperson for dzaster, but I will say this based upon my own experience:

When you grow up in a crazy household, you go out into the world armed with a set of responses to various situations which are themselves crazy. It's like you're taking the field with a playbook completely different from the one the other players have memorized. Of course, you don't know that. All you know is that when you do what you think you're supposed to do, everyone looks at you like you're crazy, and you get into trouble without knowing why.

If you're lucky, a teacher or other adult recognizes this behavior during your childhood and knows how to get you a copy of the correct playbook. If you're not lucky, the grownups respond the same way your classmates do, and you're ostracized at all levels.

By the time you reach adulthood, you feel like you can't trust most people. The only ones you do trust are the ones who are as crazy as your own parents were. You get some short-term comfort, because your bizarre responses to situations don't raise an eyebrow with them, but in the long term, your life remains in chaos because your most trusted friends and confidants are as crazy as you are.

It was mostly luck that I ended up getting into therapy at age 45 and discovering at long last why my life had always been so screwed up. Forty-five is pretty late in the game to start getting help, but it's better than never doing it at all.

The people you know who seem weird and eccentric mostly know, I think, that they are seen as weird and eccentric. But they may not know why. They just keep doing the only things they know to do, which are the things they were taught in childhood to do.

And even when you know, it can be difficult and painful to break the habitual patterns of a lifetime of behavior. Sometimes, the disdain of society seems preferable to the tumult of trying to adapt.