Functional & Crazy

Can your life be so functional that it ends up making you crazy?

I guess that depends on how you define the term functional and how you define the term crazy. If functional can be defined as the conventional ideal … and crazy can be defined as anything else, then who is anyone to judge?

In my line of work, I expected there would be crazy. I’m a therapist, after all. And yet even though I expected crazy, there was one simple fact I never expected. 

There are those that are crazy. But then, there are those that are driven crazy. Loaded up on a bus headed to Crazy Town. A bus filled with people whose experiences, traumas, tragedies, and pain convinced them they had a one-way ticket.

But I would not be convinced. For one reason and one reason only: 

That just didn’t make sense.

When people walk through your door day after day after day expecting you to fix the disorders that brought them there, you first have to find the disorder. But what if your therapist can only find “disorders”? 

What if she begins to identify that the disorders you thought you had were actually authentic sensibilities in disguise? Moving you from the back of the bus to the driver’s seat? 

Compelling you to think that maybe a one-way ticket isn’t so bad after all …

Functional and Crazy is the strange twin of C+F. It’s a 40,000 word stand-alone companion best described as the love child between Oliver Sachs and the Bill & Ted movies.

While both are self-help, they take more cues in tone from graphic memoirs like Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Persepolis than they do from comparable self-help books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and You Are A Badass.

The catalyst for Crazy and Functional was this one question: “Why do my clients consider me so high functioning despite being the conductor of my own crazy train?” Functional and Crazy takes the question to the next level: “What is considered functional, and who makes up those rules?” 

And finally through all of my research, media writing and speaking as a therapist, I arrived at this question: “Could it be that the rules of what is defined as functional actually be what makes my clients crazy?” 

The books open up larger conversations, such as: Is authenticity reserved for the enlightened, or can it be taught? Does the teacher of authenticity need the wisdom of a guru or the true grit of a rodeo trick rider?

While both are self-help, they take more cues in tone from graphic memoirs like Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Persepolis than they do from comparable self-help books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and You Are A Badass.

The catalyst for ...