Why I'm Proud to Call Myself Crazy (and You Should Be Too!)

The power of declaring, "Yes. I am a square peg."

I’m crazy, and I’m not afraid to say it.

I’m a little “outside the box,” and I get wild ideas and go off on tangents and chase rainbows. I’m highly functional, but sometimes my life gets a little chaotic and things fray at the seams a little.

But personally, I think the crazy people in our world are actually the most fun and interesting. 

We need to take some of the charge out of the word. 

When I looked up “crazy” in my trusty online thesaurus, I’ll admit that most of the synonyms had a negative connotation (“psychotic” and “feebleminded” stood out). Others were on the whimsical side, including “fanciful” and my personal favorite, “one sandwich short of a picnic.” Picnics can be involved! How fun!

Reimagining this word could be analogous to the recent trend of fat people embracing the word “fat.” For them, it’s not an insult, it’s just a fact.

And if we take the sting out of the word crazy, perhaps some of the crazy folks would be less afraid of stigma and would feel more comfortable coming forward and showing people their special flavor of crazy.

Crazy to me means “out there.” It means thinking differently. It means I’m on the edge a little bit, a little reckless, and sometimes a little dangerous, but in a good way. And we all have that side to us. Well, okay, Mitch McConnell doesn’t have that side to him, but he’s a douchebag and he doesn’t count.

Crazy can sometimes be fun. Crazy is Steve Jobs and Helena Bonham Carter and my friend Carrie who went on fifty Tinder dates in a year. Why would anyone do that? She’s crazy. See what I mean? The word just isn’t that bad.

When I was brainstorming advice for entrepreneurs who are either neurodiverse or have mental health issues, I wrote down “Beware of crazy clients” and a friend said, “You might want to avoid this word.”

But the thing is, there ARE crazy clients out there, and sometimes it’s best to avoid them. And sometimes not! Some of them are fun, but some are time sucks who will drive you up the wall.

So clearly, not all crazy is good crazy. And there are boundary issues at play when you’re running your own business.

Some might argue that reclaiming "crazy" could trivialize serious mental health conditions, but I think it’s more a matter of stating what’s so. When I do that, I get the opportunity to say more, if I choose to, and it opens up opportunities for discussion. Crazy can be a bridge into bigger conversations.

And anything that involves picnics AND bridges is okay by me.

If we embrace the crazy, I think the folks with depression and anxiety and OCD and bipolar disorder will have an easier time talking about who they are and how they think and how they live. It’s a step toward taking the stigma away.

Here’s to the power of living and naming our crazy truth — quirks, chaos, and all.

Photo by Nandhu Kumar on Unsplash