Crazy Is My Superpower: How I Triumphed by Breaking Bones, Breaking Hearts, and Breaking the Rules

by A. J. Mendez Brooks

  And though I had lost all my toys after our last eviction, Dad had managed to find an enormous box of used green, yellow, and blue Legos in the motel’s Dumpster. He proudly handed the box off to me and I was beside myself. I quickly poured them out onto the dining table and began building. When I finished my castle and had leftover Legos in the container, I wrote the names of my Barbies on small pieces of notebook paper, cut them out, and taped them to the back of the excess blocks. These blocks would now serve as my dolls; and the action movies, talk shows, and soap operas I had previously created with my Barbies could now continue.

  I had almost forgotten what it felt like to create worlds, to use my imagination to find a place to escape to. I sunk hours into those blocks. When Dad came home with a CosmoGirl magazine he found in a client’s car, I had even more to work with. This issue of CosmoGirl had a comic strip of a teen named CG, who would have various adventures in high school. Seeing this brought back comforting memories of my brother’s X-Men comics and lit a fire in my belly.

  I began filling my school notebooks with sketches of my own young female superheroes. Over time I began actually drawing out panels and creating continuous story lines for my teenage heroines. I would present the stapled-together pieces of notebook paper to Erica, and she would always give supportive, positive reviews. I had my first fan! When Dad noticed I had filled up the books intended for math homework, he bought me three CVS brand one-subject notebooks, all with green covers—my favorite color. No matter what your circumstance, if you provide kids with creative ammunition, they will blast holes into an oppressive reality and conceive limitless worlds.

  I was beyond appreciative, and the outlet did wonders to soothe and streamline my mind, which for some reason had begun to grow increasingly erratic.

  The first time I remember scaring myself was around 5 a.m. on a weekend. I woke up early because I really had to pee. While washing my hands in the sink, I glanced at the red flashing 5:01 on the nightstand clock. I looked at myself in the reflection of the wide mirror before me. In the blink of an eye, it was 5:08. Seven whole minutes had passed and my hands were still furiously moving under the stream of hot water. I jarringly pulled them out and noticed I had scratched little red lines into my knuckles. Since it was a Saturday, I was excited to hit the proverbial snooze button and go back to sleep for as long as I wanted. But when my head hit the pillow, I just lay there, wondering about my missing seven minutes. The scrapes on my fingers began to burn.

  After waking up so early, I assumed I would be yearning for bed when 10 p.m. came around. But as the lights went off, and everyone closed their eyes, the fatigue I had felt all day faded away. I was wide awake. Squeezing my eyes did not force me to sleep as I had hoped. Counting the tiles on the ceiling only led to recounting the tiles on the ceiling. And recounting them, again. My eyes drifted from the ceiling to the peeling wallpaper beneath it. On top of that wallpaper were body-length mirrors. So many mirrors. On every wall. I wondered, Why are there so many mirrors? Was it to give the illusion that the small room was larger? This room is pretty small. Smaller than I had thought during the day. Did it somehow get smaller? God, Ma is sleeping so close to me. I have no room to move. There is not enough space on this bed for three people. They’re too close. Why are there so many mirrors? Was there someone looking through the other side? Could I get to that side if I went through the mirrors? Were all the reflections they held really just another world I could get to if I tried hard enough? Did other-dimension AJ just move? I didn’t move! She is real! Why am I not breathing? I can’t breathe!

  Before I knew it, I was wheezing deeply and rapidly, waking my mother.

  “I can’t breathe!” I managed to shout as she nervously looked around.

  “If you can say ‘I can’t breathe,’ you can breathe. Just relax.”

  But I couldn’t stop the uncontrollable heaving of my chest. My fingers began to tingle, and my heart felt as if it was beating in my ears.

  “Just relax,” Ma said as she pulled me in, making me the little spoon. With the same shushing noises normally reserved for a fussy infant, she ran her fingers through my hair. My heart began to return to my chest. My breathing slowed. But I still couldn’t fall asleep. I had to stay awake. My eyes had to stay fixated on the AJ in the mirror, just in case she made another move.

  “Hey, Ma. I think I saw something in the mirror,” I whispered to the groggy woman trying to lull me to sleep.

  Without opening her eyes she shushed me again, “Shhhh. Go to sleep and stop acting crazy.”

  It might be hard to reconcile the fact that I wore denim booty shorts for a living with the fact that I don’t have daddy issues. No, when I’m thirsty for a pity party, or blaming someone for my adolescent proclivity to fall in love with gay men, I fill up at the deep dark well of maternal abandonment. I truly believe Janet fought against her demons and tried her best to be an ideal mother. But over time, the façade of strength would crack. The guarantee of a traditional mom would slowly become unreliable.

  As humans we are programmed to crave motherly comfort, despite ourselves. We want to be enveloped in protective warmth. To have an all-knowing blanket of safety who will stroke our hair and then rock us to sleep. An unconditional shelter from an unforgiving world. No matter how old we are, it is something our hearts will find a way to ache for. No matter how big and strong we grow, there will always be an innate urge to run to Mommy when we fear the monsters underneath our bed. But sometimes the person we depend on for that comfort becomes the thing we fear the most. Sometimes we just draw the short straw of uteruses.

  My mother has been bipolar for most of her life. Janet was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was in college, but she clearly suffered from its painful effects for years before it could be properly identified. The disorder can be indefinable and mysterious, and it is often confused with depression. However, accidentally treating it with antidepressants does nothing but magnify the illness.

  So what is bipolar disorder, exactly? In precise medical terms, it is a giant prick. An uncontrollable, malevolent force, it is a psychological disorder that causes unexpected, severe shifts in mood and reckless behavior. These cycling episodes of mania and depression affect day-to-day functions, destroy relationships, and can cause suicidal thoughts.

  Ladies, imagine you are on the worst day of your period and then multiply it by seven…ty thousand…and you’re in a sandstorm, naked, with scorpions crawling all over you, and there’s a pissed serial killer somewhere in the vicinity, and also you’re pretty sure your boyfriend is banging that chick Sheila from his office.

  Oh, and guys, imagine the exact same thing, except instead of your period, your balls are delicately hovering over a rusty bear trap. And instead of Sheila, you suspect your lady is handing it out to Brad, that handsy personal trainer from her gym. Imagine trying to focus on all that emotion, discomfort, fear, insecurity, and paranoia, at the same time.

  This is the tiniest insight into what a day, or even an hour, might feel like for someone going through a bipolar depressive cycle. And that’s just half of it.

  Mania isn’t a lazy Sunday in sweats, either. Sure, it’s all fun and games when the boost in morale inspires you to clean the entire house and start a small business in under an hour. But it’s a slippery slope from there to spending two thousand dollars online ordering Victoria’s Secret lingerie, trying to scrub the shower tiles so hard your fingertips start bleeding, and feeling so invincible you are tempted to run into oncoming traffic.

  Janet’s condition controlled her. Its onset occurring during her twenties, the disorder slowly consumed her, changing every facet of her personality, until eventually only remnants of the original woman remained. One of my biggest regrets in life is not noticing she was being eaten alive before it was too late. We were uneducated and naive about mental illness.

  In fact, depression and anything of the sort, in the Mendez household, was perceived to be a creation of people who weren’t strong enoug
h to handle their own problems.

  “Don’t act crazy.” That was the stock response I would get if I felt my mind begin to mold in dangerous ways. That was the response I got when I asked if talking to a psychiatrist might help the growing anxiety I felt. That is how Janet and Robert were raised, and it is the sentiment they would pass down to us, even while they fought their own demons. Sadness was weakness. Giving any force besides yourself power over your mind was the ultimate sign of ball-lessness.

  I wish I would’ve known enough to call bullshit on that way of thinking. Bipolar disorder was not a choice my mother made. Had we opened our minds, had we done our research, had we paid attention, maybe we could’ve helped her. If mental illness is the greatest villain I’ve ever faced, then we were all its unwitting accomplices. The signs were there. We were just too busy being hurt to notice.

  I would experience the fallout of my mother’s illness more intensely than anyone else in the family. Always a strict parent, she was an enforcer of her standards for academic success and appropriate behavior.

  I never minded her concern. I liked having a parent who would make sure I did my homework correctly. I was proud of having a mom who taught me to not squander my value on boys who weren’t worth my time, especially while I should be focused on schoolwork and my future. But bipolar disorder tends to take who someone is at their core and multiply that essence by a million. It amplifies and distorts their traits—the good, the bad, the scary—into something unrecognizable.

  I was my mother’s premature baby, riddled with health problems, extremely undersized for my age, and hopeful to a fault. I was the fragile child she worried for the most. Her disorder would manipulate her concern into a fixation. It would transform it into something dark and dirty.

  One weekend, all of us Mendez kids were home sitting in the kitchen with Ma. As the kids sat around the table, playing a game of “who can make who cry,” I fired off a particularly uninspired diss at Robbie.

  “You’re ten, shouldn’t you be taller?” As I gangster-leaned back in my chair, looking smug as shit, my brother shot back.

  “You’re six, shouldn’t you be able to tell the time?!”

  Ma stopped in her tracks and made her way over to us, laughing.

  “That’s not true, is it, AJ? Come on, what time is it right now?” Smiling, she extended her arm until her watch was directly in front of my face. I knew how to tell time, I was just occasionally an hour or four off. However, despite my ability to come within a day of the correct time, I was notorious for cracking under the pressure my mother presented.

  “I don’t know,” I quietly responded, silently wishing someone would help change the subject.

  “Stop playing. Where’s the little hand?” She seemed to be more or less teasing me. Maybe I was safe.

  “I don’t know. Just leave me alone.” This kind of back talk was a mistake. She was no longer laughing.

  “I’m not joking around. What is the fucking time?”

  “Game time!” my brother said, joining in. I always appreciated his inappropriately timed humor.

  “That’s it. Go to your brother’s room,” she snapped.

  I couldn’t tell what was happening. Was I in trouble? Did she want to talk to me in private? Why Robbie’s room? Because it was the closest? Looking back, I realize the answer was because it didn’t have any windows.

  “Leave her alone!” Erica shouted, but it was too late. We were on our way, hand in hand, to the privacy of a dark room.

  “Go stand on the bed,” she ordered. I felt like I was on a stage in the middle of a play, but I couldn’t remember any of my lines. She tossed the plastic watch my way, and I didn’t catch it because not only could I not tell time, I was also a butterfingers. I was not shaping up to be the pick of the Mendez litter.

  “Pick it up. Look at it and then tell me what time it is.”

  “I don’t want to. I’m embarrassed!” The nervous tears were well under way.

  “This isn’t embarrassing,” she insisted. “Embarrassing is not knowing how to tell time when you’re already in the first grade! I’m so disappointed in you.”

  “You’re embarrassing me!” I was a faucet.

  “You want to know what embarrassing feels like? Take off your shirt,” she unexpectedly fired back.

  Without questioning why, I pulled the T-shirt off. I quickly wrapped my arms across my chest to alleviate some of the exposure.

  “Every time you can’t answer me right, you’re going to take another thing off. That is the only way you are going to learn.”

  After several unsatisfactory responses, I ended up completely naked, shivering and bawling, standing atop a crude stage like a stripper during an afternoon shift, but more depressing. At some point the panic engulfing me began to slip away. I couldn’t explain how I was doing it, but I started to feel less in the moment. Like it wasn’t me who was stuck frozen in fear. It was like I was watching myself from a safe distance. It helped.

  Instead of making my mother feel culpable for her method of parenting, I began to excuse it. Whether I was being directed to stand perfectly still facing a wall for two hours because of my sassy mouth, or being asked to present my back for overhand slaps for getting an 85 on a test, I would apologize like a meek little mouse. Then my mother would be stricken with guilt. She would console me and ask me if I understood why I had to receive the punishments I did. It was a sickening cycle with no end in sight.

  “I’m sorry I was bad. I’m not mad at you for teaching me.” I would make myself believe.

  My mother found one thing more important than insisting I was on the Honor Roll, and that was making sure I would one day die a respectable virgin. As a teenage mother herself, she feared her daughters would go down a similar road if she didn’t instill proper values and morals as early as possible. In an attempt to snuff out any ounce of sexuality before it grew, she hounded us several years before we even needed training bras.

  While waiting for my sister’s elementary-school volleyball game to start, I sat next to my mother on the gym’s bleachers. I unwrapped a green apple Blow Pop, an award from my teacher for getting the highest score on a pop quiz. I was unaware of the severe connotations associated with a third grader holding a lollipop in her mouth for over thirty seconds, but my borderline pornographic behavior caused Ma to yank the lollipop stick out of my mouth, almost taking my front teeth along with it.

  “You’re giving the wrong impression!” she scolded me as she cracked the hard candy shell against my head in front of almost fifty schoolmates and parents. When I attempted to pick the sticky green apple candy bits out of my hair, she snapped again, “You leave that alone. Maybe it’ll teach you to not act so nasty.”

  At times, I felt I could do nothing right by my mother. I couldn’t even walk right. Literally. There was a six-month span during the fourth grade where she would make sure to walk at least two feet behind me to monitor my gait. According to her, I walked like someone who had been having sex. I didn’t even know what sex was in the fourth grade. I assumed it was whatever my sister made our undressed Barbie and Ken do, which was aggressively smash their boobs against each other.

  To be fair, Ma was actually a bit more specific in her accusations, an actual reprimand including “You walk like you’ve had a dick up your ass.” Which was immediately followed by, “Wait until I find out. You’re gonna get it.” Get what? I wondered. A punishment? A beating? An actual dick up my ass? Was that even a physical possibility? In a world where I could literally walk the wrong way, naturally I became terrified of my sexuality.

  The idea of anything I did being misinterpreted as welcoming mischievous thoughts, as “asking for it,” made me shun anything that exposed my femininity. I became an asexual slob, refusing to comb my hair and exclusively wearing sweatpants and oversize T-shirts.

  In a way, it was incredibly freeing. I didn’t have to be a girl. I didn’t have to live by the female codes of conduct or the male standards of beauty. I didn
’t have to be anything but an amoeba in a Windbreaker. In another way, it was suffocating. I feared how I could ever interact with people in the real world. Boys spoke my language. We liked the same things, shared the same interests. I wanted to be friends with the boys in my class, but I was deathly afraid of my mother finding out.

  “Your daughter has a wicked hard punch, man,” a boy I had punched in class told my parents after school. His delivery, his shit-eating grin and giggle, led my mother to believe that our scuffle was somehow inappropriate. Perhaps a love spat or a strange form of flirting. When we got home, Ma gave me a few good overhand smacks on my back before making me stand facing a wall in the kitchen for three hours while she interrogated me.

  Her interrogations always consisted of me having to stand facing a wall, while she screamed every curse word in the book, until she could get the information she was looking for. Question after question about my sexual experiences: Did I ever kiss a boy? How many boys had I kissed? Did my whole class think I was loose? I couldn’t win. I defended myself and yet still got in trouble.

  At a routine doctor’s visit later that year, I was stuck in a lose-lose situation yet again. When asked if I would be comfortable getting a vaginal exam, I met my mother’s eyes. If I were comfortable, that would mean I must have experienced taking my pants off in front of men. If I refused to let him check me, she would assume I was hiding something. I denied him access (the first of many men) and found out my suspicions were right.

  Furious at my refusal to be violated at age ten, she let me have it. “Do you know that I asked the doctor to check if you were still a virgin? I’m going to assume you’re not until we go back there and you prove to me you still have a hymen.”

  Could parents actually ask a pediatrician to check for that sort of thing? I was dumbfounded. I felt violated and deeply terrified of ever returning to a doctor’s office. Also, I was certain my hymen had already said good-bye to this cruel world during an ill-advised attempt to change a lightbulb while balancing on a wooden bed frame.