Crazy Compared to What?

Short answer: Compared to how you want to feel.

Long answer: This is all subjective. One person's mildly crazy is another person's normal and yet another person's completely out of control. So I'm not here to judge.

Sure, I might see patterns in how people are behaving, and I might talk about those patterns, but it is clearly not my role to call anyone anything. It's more like, I'm here, and I've been on the planet for a while now and have struggled with many situations where I felt out of control and cloudy and like I couldn't understand myself ... like

when I've gotten stuck in a fat shame spiral trying to get dressed in the morning and feeling 100% like Jabba the Hutt
when I've obsessed about someone hardcore for months on end, fully believing I could force love to bloom through blunt psychic force
when I've lusted about buying more eyeshadow I don't need and ultimately can't resist buying more eyeshadow I don't need and I'm forced to question whether there really is a any concept of free will in the universe.

Over the years, I have found a few things that have helped me reframe these situations, let go of them, and move on to different and slightly more interesting problems (although, yes, I admit it, I still buy excessive amounts of eyeshadow ).

It starts with taking a good hard look at what we've been taught, recognizing much of it for the bullshit it is, and making the choice to leave it behind. No longer burdened, we can then connect more easily with the most rational and relaxed part of ourselves, and bring forth our personal forms of genius.

I know that reading and writing about these ideas helps me -- it helps me remember what is important and what is not. (Not important: the person in front of me going 5 mph below the speed limit. Important: Making some time to write, stretch, and dream every day.) Sometimes in reading I come across a turn of phrase that retunes my thinking in a useful way. And other times I feel certain that spouting off about how to keep my mindgrapes in good nick actually helps keep my mindgrapes in good nick.

So my goal here is to do a couple of things. First, it's just to ask -- how are your mindgrapes? Are you happy with the way you're thinking about your life? Is it serving you? Or do you need to shift some stuff around?

If you do feel like you might want to shift some stuff around, then I hope I can provide some turns of phrase and maybe some new perspectives that will help you retune your brain.

All of this is so that you can spend LESS time feeling bad about your chubby legs or withering away in a relationship that isn't serving you or spending all your money on shit you don't need in a desperate attempt to fill the void ... and MORE time playing with the makeup you already have and hanging out with people who love you properly and making significant contributions to the small and big circles of your life.

Because here's the thing -- all the self-limiting rubbish that's blowing around our heads? It's not even special. As Liz Gilbert says, "Your fears are just regular old mass-produced, made-in-China, sold-at-Walmart fears. Nothing fine or precious or artisanal about them."

Our super-fragmented, always-online culture encourages us to curate ourselves, to treasure our eccentricities and cultivate our tastes with pinpoint precision ... and I think sometimes in the course of doing that, it's easy to end up kind of fetishizing our own weaknesses and fears, to spend precious time tending our garden of craziness, contemplating each flower and leaf, thinking that the complexity of our pain is what makes us special.

But it's not. It so really is not. The thing that makes a person special is what you do after the fear, what happens beyond the pain.

So that's the goal here -- to identify our Walmart fears and set them down, thus leaving our hands free for more interesting work.

You in?