The Liberation of being called crazy

Finding sanity in a mad world

By Lux ROSE

June 22, 2025

I’ve been called crazy more times than I can count.

By lovers, friends, doctors, strangers. By people who barely knew me, or didn’t know me at all. By people who disagreed with me. By people who needed to feel superior.

The label “crazy” has always served a very specific purpose in our culture: to silence someone before they manage to tell the truth too loudly.

Let’s be clear – I know mental illness is real. But for every person who suffers from schizophrenia, there are tens of thousands being diagnosed with anxiety or depression in a world that profits from their pain. If we medicate the people, the system can remain insane.

We call the suffering masses “borderline,” “bipolar,” “overly sensitive.” We say they’re “too emotional” or “just not stable.” But what we really mean is: Don’t speak. Don’t scream. Don’t disrupt the machine.

Anyone who notices the insanity of the system, becomes the one who needs to be put down.

Because if it’s your fault for being mentally unwell, then it can’t possibly be the fact that a small handful of ultra-wealthy people are destroying the lives of most of us for profit.

This isn’t just an essay about capitalism (though I could write those all day.) This is about what happens when you get called crazy – and how to rise when they’re waiting for you to fall.

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The Gossip Campaign

Our culture loves to watch someone unravel.

We live in a social system built on hierarchy, and in any hierarchy, someone always has to be on the bottom. We’ve learned to survive by making sure it’s not us. So we mock, minimize, gossip – because if someone else’s life is falling apart, maybe ours isn’t that bad.

I’ve played both roles. I’ve looked down on people. But more often, I’ve been the one people wanted to watch suffer. This is the life of many neurodivergent people like me.

They weren’t overtly cruel. Most of them were “good people.” But when given the choice to support me or hasten my downfall, they chose the latter – quietly, socially, and with plausible deniability.

Why?

Because if I was crazy, they didn’t have to look at the truth. If I was unstable, they were superior. Their own flaws shrank in comparison to mine.

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The Samosa Incident

I had a friend. We’ll call her Becky. We had been close for over a decade.

Becky had started dating a man who, I would discover, was a raging racist and misogynist. At first I didn’t see it. She made him seem harmless. She convinced me he was cool.

One evening, I came over to cook dinner: homemade samosas and butter chicken. Becky asked to play my favorite playlist – a mix of hip hop, R&B, and afrobeats. We danced in the kitchen while her boyfriend worked in the yard.

When I brought him a fresh samosa, he recoiled like I’d handed him a bomb. I shrugged it off, and went back inside. The music was still playing.

He stormed into their jungle quonset hut, red-faced and spitting:

“I can’t stand it when I hear a [N-word] talking. Turn this nonsense off.”

I froze. Becky looked at the floor. Nobody said a word while we ate. He left his plate in the sink for us to clean.

After dinner, up in Becky’s “lady hut,” I confronted her. “I’m not spending time with your boyfriend again. That was blatantly racist, and I am not okay with it.”

She stumbled through excuses. “He didn’t mean it that way – he’s actually trying to protect Black people from using that word about themselves.”

I called bullshit.

I should have walked away right then. But I didn’t. I still loved her. I remembered who she used to be before this man. I tried to save the friendship.

That was my mistake.

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The Long Goodbye

Over the next few weeks, we texted. She dug in. She defended him, justifying everything. I saw clearly what was happening to our friendship: she was becoming him.

Becky had once dated a Black lesbian from Oakland. Now she was trolling women on the beach like a creepy old man, criticizing their bodies (and mine), parroting her boyfriend’s language. She was sober now, but she was wrapped in an AA group that fed her sense of superiority. Sobriety does not guarantee wellness.

We met once more on the beach. It was the last time I saw her.

I tried to explain how hard things had been for me – going through the pandemic alone, financially devastated, injured, largely unsupported. The world had forgotten I existed. My friends were wrapped up in their toxic romances.

She opened with: “What’s so hard about YOUR life?”

I should have walked away right then. But I didn’t. I tried to explain myself, to no avail.

Eventually I walked away. But the wound stayed open, and what came next felt like punishment for daring to speak my truth.

Becky invited me to a birthday dinner with a mutual friend. I declined. I wasn’t going to fake a smile after how she had treated me. I wasn’t going to be the bigger person, I decided to choose my peace.

Then came the whispers.

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The Rumor Mill

I was house-sitting at this time, quietly writing and caring for a blind cat. I thought things with Becky had simply faded. I didn’t realize she was launching a full-scale smear campaign.

First...strange conversations. I pick up my art from an art gallery, and the owner of the gallery tells me she took hormones to stabilize her moods. Very out of character. Then a friend at a store says something similar.

I go to the beach for volleyball, and James, a beach regular, stumbles up to me and drunkenly slurs: “I hear you’re menopausally suicidal. You okay?”

I laughed. Because what else can you do? I thanked him for his directness.

Nobody checked on me. Not one person. Not one friend texted, not one acquaintance reached out on social media. But everyone had apparently heard the rumor.

This is how narcissists thrive: hiding their attacks behind concern.

“We’re just worried about her.”

No you’re not. You’re establishing a storyline that paints you as the hero.

People didn’t want to know my truth. They wanted a scapegoat.

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The Cult Town Awakening

Eventually I proved the rumors true by leaving Hawaii for a tiny town in Iowa. I enrolled in a college centered around meditation. They promised I didn’t have to “join” anything.

It was, of course, a cult.

Every class circled back to the same dogma: their method was the only path to enlightenment. Anyone who didn’t follow it was deemed lesser than those who heard the call and followed the guru’s teachings.

I dropped out after one semester. But I stayed in the town – for the tattoo job that was lucrative, for the cute apartment, and eventually, because I got sick. Really sick. Covid exposure had wrecked my gut.

I stayed in the cult town for three years.

I was ostracized there too. Labeled crazy. Considered too unstable to engage with. Or people were intimidated by me. This time, I let them.

Because I’d started to see: these people are not well.

The week before I moved there, two kids who grew up in the cult murdered their Spanish teacher because she gave them a bad grade. The cult members were brainwashed, their children addicted or mentally ill. The Evangelicals of the town were deluded. The alcoholics and meth heads were high. The gossiping moms were bored and bitter.

Of course they thought I was crazy. The whole world is a madhouse pretending to be sane.

Being called crazy became a compliment. It meant I was stepping outside the distortion field that holds our collective madness in place.

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The Rise Begins

This rising is not an ascent above anyone else. It’s simply a realization:

The truth is, I’d internalized the same sickness.

I’d been petty. I talked shit. I’d wasted time with people I didn’t respect. I had wished revenge for things I myself was guilty of. I had needed to feel above others to feel safe.

When I finally turned inward and really looked at myself – that’s when everything changed.

I stopped needing to be right. I stopped needing others to be wrong. I started healing.

And the world around me began shifting in response. The pulse we put out, ripples back to us in the world.

I no longer needed validation. I was no longer chasing community through conformity or performative people-pleasing. I no longer needed to be liked.

What started as a smear campaign had become a revelation that dissolved the bars of my cage.

I stopped telling myself their stories.

I stopped calling it a breakdown.

I started calling it inner freedom.

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How We Rise

This isn’t a case against community.

It’s a call for healthy community – beginning with ourselves. We need a community built by sovereign people who’ve faced themselves and chosen healing. Not a social ladder where everybody claws upwards by stepping on somebody else.

Hierarchy is a collective illness.

We cure it by looking at ourselves. For every flaw we see in others, we ask: Where do I echo this? What still needs healing in me?

Yes, there is evil in the world. But every evil began as a child who needed love. We are not so different.

Healing is contagious. When others see it in us, they begin to believe it’s possible for themselves. That’s how transformation spreads. What we mirror, we become.

You don’t convince people by preaching. You convince them by becoming. Not by performing, but by truly living it. We walk the wisdom into the world with every step.

So let them call you crazy. Let them whisper your name.

Become the living example of your inner wisdom.

One beacon becomes a hundred. A thousand. A million.

Village by village, heart by heart, a tapestry of light.

I see you, fellow beacon. Let them talk.

It’s time to rise as radiant sovereign equals, into a new world.

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Thank you for reading!

If you’d like to read more of my work, check out my Substack! i’ll be building this site at my own pace :)

Substack: The Lantern Works of Lux Rose