Crazy

“I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind”

I remember when I lost my mind. It was about a year before I left home. We were living in a town called Playas New Mexico. It was a strange little mining town that was built for the people who worked at the mine to live. We were living there because my father was the cop.

I had spent most of my childhood going from town to town because my father was always taking new cop jobs and moving us around. He always took jobs in really small towns and this one wasn’t any different from the rest of the places that we’d lived.

Some of the towns that we lived in I did well in as far as popularity and friends go. This town I did particularly well in. Everybody liked me. And then one day I sort of woke up and looked around me and realized that I had been feeling accepted and important because a very small group of people said so, because I was playing by all of their rules. I was dressing how they said I was supposed to dress, acting the way that they thought was acceptable…and I starting thinking that sure, I might be have a social status in this town but in another town, I’m nothing. And then it dawned on me that the fact that I was being what people wanted me to be, instead of who I really was, was really messed up.

And so I started, at first doing anything and everything to let people know that I wasn’t a part of their made up little social structures. I wanted to prove that I didn’t have to live by their rules and so I started behaving in a way that I knew that they would see as being weird. Which really meant that I made up my own dress codes and that I started speaking up about various things. These little changes in me were enough to get EVERYONE, and I mean everyone to not want to talk to me anymore. I went from being popular to no one even wanting to sit next to be at lunch time. It was strangely fascinating. And strangely empowering.

“Does that make me crazy? Does that make me crazy? Does that make me crazy?
Probably…”