Crazy Like Me
It took me 15 years to find a diagnosis. Then the rest of the world caught my disease.
Once I had a brilliant thought about secondary emotions—you know, it wasn’t the anger that was so hard to deal with, but the shame out the anger. The anxiety about the sadness. The feelings about the feelings.
When I explained it to my friend, he said he was pretty sure the Buddha came up with that 2000 years ago. This was the first of many, um, “brilliant ideas” I’ve had, not realizing that other people had already expressed them long before—including the idea that social media has created a generation trained in the fine art of the kinds of personality disorders that I have been running from my whole life.
I wrote this piece several years ago, long before I ever heard of The Coddling of the American Mind, a book I highly recommend. I stumbled onto it again last summer and then recently, after the kerfuffle that ensued after the autogynephilia pieces I published (more on that another time), I thought of it again. I decided to share it here, even though it’s deeply personal and not about gender.
I’m at conferences this week, but back at the reporting next week.
-LD
Curled under my desk at work, I was crying so hard that the humps of my shoulders pulsed against the faux-wood veneer. 6:45PM. Everyone had gone home. This was back in the mid-90s, when people worked normal hours, even people in kids’ TV.