Between 1982-1986, I was probably crazier than I have been for most of my life. The only thing that comes close is another terrible episode for maybe eight months in 1991 when I got so out there that I thought I was going psychotic.
I did have a major theme at the time. It started off a with a classic well known theme that I will not reveal, but later it morphed into all sorts of weirdness. There was war in my head between the Crazy and the Sane. They did ferocious battle for some time. At some point, the Sane side simply surrendered and said, “Ok Crazy, you win. Do what you gotta do. We are tired of fighting you. We give.”
And then the Crazy pretty much took over and OCD had control over my life to the point where I had to do whatever nutty thing it was telling me to do. Mostly it was telling me to do things that were more or less normal behaviors.At one point, Crazy set up something called The Rules. It set these up because Sane kept being bad and breaking whatever Rule Crazy had set up. Crazy would set up some evil rule that I would have to live by. Sane was furious about the Rule, and at some point it would try to break it and succeed.
This just made OCD mad, and it would simply come up with a new Rule. I do not want to go into the nature of these Rules too much, but one Rule was that I could not be happy. I would start enjoying myself and then the Rule would come crashing in and I would feel that I had to obey it. The Rules were very powerful, almost as if they were coming from God or better yet, a child’s parent, and I was very frightened of them and usually felt compelled to obey them due to this scary power that they had. There were lots of other Rules, but they were rather weird and I do not want to go into them right now.
But during the 80’s episode, none of the craziness was outward, though I did have a some rituals like having to tap my back pocket two or three times on occasion, especially when I went through a doorway. Actually one of the Rules was that I had to be crazy, but that the craziness had to be hidden and secret and my outward behavior had to be as normal as possible. But the rituals were nothing anyone would pick up. I tried to make my outward behavior as normal and sane as possible, and I was in school and working the whole time. I earned a teaching credential at USC while I was out of my head, and then I worked very regularly as a substitute teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District.
I was seriously nuts the whole time I was teaching school, but it didn’t affect my work performance because my outward behavior was quite normal.
I was also running all over LA trying to break Wilt Chamberlain’s record by screwing half of the hot women in LA, and while I never got even 1% of the way to 20,000, I still dated a lot of women and had a ton of sex.
I was seriously out of my mind while I was running around LA trying to screw every other hot chick I saw. I don’t know I managed to date so much when I was that nuts, but I somehow pulled it off. But the women all picked up that there was something wrong with me. They usually called it “anxiety.” But I rampaged through the female population of LA nonetheless, craziness being nut much of a barrier. I may have even gotten some battle wounds in the process while on sexual duty. You know, the kind that make you go to the doctor?
Women were not the only ones who caught on. And at both USC and especially while teaching, most of my colleagues and instructors caught on that there was something seriously wrong with me.
Problem is when you are not right in the head, you can act like the most normal person on Earth, and everyone will still call you nuts. That’s because if you are “secretly nuts” the way a lot of neurotics or OCD’ers are, it still shows in your eyes, on your face, and possibly in body language.
If your head is nutty, you will give off nutty nonverbal vibes, some in body language but most in the way we can sort of read people’s minds by looking at their faces, eyes, etc. A lot of “secretly crazy people” will appear distracted, disconnected, terrified, haunted, stunned, nervous, anxious, out to lunch, off in space, or on their own planet somewhere. Stares, both thousand yard and blank, are common and lead to a lot of people labeling these folks as crazy. You see a guy with a thousand yard stare, and it really doesn’t matter how normal he otherwise acts. That Nam vet stare alone will cause most folks to think he is somehow not right in the head at all.
You really can’t hide crazy.
The more mentally healthy you are inside, the saner you will appear to others. The crazier your head is, the more you are going to seem a bit nutty or “off” to others, to say the least.