I'm not crazy...

I'm reading another book by Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. I'm addicted to her writing. And I tried to get my friends to read her stuff last year, and they said they didn't get it, they said she was crazy. But books like hers, like Sylvia Plath's (is it Slyvia or Cinthia?) The Bell Jar, like Edgar Allen Po and e.e. cummings, people that my friends don't get and don't like to read, are the books I love most. I love the fluidity, the surreal writing. My friends say, too much detail. But to me, the universe is detail. There is the concrete- but the concrete means nothing without the smaller parts that make it up, without the characteristics.
I remember when I was seven and I told Olivia to read my favorite book, The Clearing, and she said she didn't get it, and that it was boring. Looking back, that was when I first started realizing that I was different, that the way I thought and felt and looked at the world was perhaps far too mature for my age. I wrote a poem in third grade about how life is like a sledding hill, you go up and you run into trees and you get lost and you break your legs, but in the end you have to try again, because sledding's fun. I also wrote a poem in third grade about how my brother's life was a glass house, and the drugs were dynamite, and he'd blown it up, but he was trying to rebuild. In kindergarten I told my counselor that my family was like a puzzle and my brother was the missing piece.
The adults around me were shocked. I'm not proud of the maturity I had- in fact, if that is my only reward from the instances that made me mature, I'd take immaturity and ignorance any day.
And I remember watching The Hours in seventh or eigth grade and I loved it, I could relate to the characters so much, and I read Michael Cunningham's book that it was based on. And my grandma and my uncle and my parents just said after the movie was over, "Well, they were all crazy."
And there are lots of instances like this, I could go on, when the things and people I relate to and love most are the things and people everyone else thinks are crazy. And I think that even now I still think way too much and way more than my friends, and that I have understood things most adults haven't.
Does this make me crazy?
I remember in the summer before eigth grade when we were in Hawaii and I was psychotic for the first time. And I couldn't read or concentrate, I couldn't sit still, i couldn't sleep, all I did was cry and pace around for a week and the walls were waving and I kept seeing things that I knew couldn't possibly be real and hearing these voices that I knew weren't there. It was horrible. And I came home and I thought, "I'm going crazy," and I thought how sad it was to be thirteen and going crazy.
And I remember in eigth grade when my dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) started coming out of me, and how crazy I thought I was, and how scared of me my parents were, until it went away.
It will come back though, my counselor says.
Incidentally, I can talk to my counselor about a lot of things, but not about the things that really matter. I've been seeing her since I was seven. Before that it was this horrible counselor that I saw when I was three. I've been in counseling for a very long time and I hate it. I quit for two years between fifth and seventh grade, but then my fifth grade teacher started emotionally abusing me and screaming at me in class all day long and calling me stupid. And she eventually got fired but it really tore down everything I'd worked hard to build up. But I can't talk to my counselor about the things I really need help with because she'd tell my parents, and they'd ship me away to some island like they did to Craig, and it wouldn't help, I know it wouldn't help because I know I'm not ready for some crazy drastic thing like that. It didn't help my brother. It just made him worse and ate up a lot of my parents' money.
Anyway, I was so worried that I was going crazy. Until I finally just accepted that I was. And I still didn't accept the things that were wrong with me until lately.
And now I've decided that being bipolar and DID and having OCD GAD ADD and PTSD are all either a genetic part of me or things that my past did to me. And I can't make them go away. And if people think that I'm crazy because of the psychosis that goes with mania in bipolar, or because I'm all split up into different people inside, too bad. I don't care anymore. I know I'm not crazy and that's all that matters. Even if I do hear voices and have hallucinations. I'm a human being just like everyone else in the world and I don't deserve to just be called crazy and forgotten.
Today I ate the whipped cream off my italian soda for the first time ever. I couldn't eat breakfast, I just sat at the table and watched everyone eat french toast, trying not to think food was horrible or dirty, trying not to be disgusted with even the thought of eating. And it made me feel really fat and monstrous to eat that whipped cream in Hastings, but I did. And at breakfast this morning my mom just went on and on about how proud of me she is for keeping my weigth down. And last summer my grandma who doesn't love me said, "I thought you were going to be a porker, but you're so thin!" and it seems like all my mom ever talks about is how she doesn't eat much, but then I watch her at dinner and she eats a lot more than I could ever handle (psychologically) eating without later getting it out of me. And I wonder how people are okay with eating that much. How they can not hate themselves for it.
And I remember when I was very little, three or so, my mom started putting me on the scales every day. And I remember hating the numbers. And I remember my mom saying, You need to lose a little weight Lindsay. And I grew to hate it. But it was a routine of my childhood, my mother weighing me, telling me I needed to lose weight. And she put me on diets as I was growing up. And all I ever wanted was to lose a little weight, make those stupid numbers go down, because I thought maybe if I was thin, she'd be happy. And I thought maybe if I was perfect I could be happy.
And now my mom's so proud of me because I finally lost a little weight, and it's enough for her. But now the problem is it's not enough for me.