Hey, Wanna Hear Something Crazy?

I don’t remember the exact date that I went crazy, but I remember the weeks preceding it.

In mid-June 2004, I got sick. I didn’t know what it was at first. I worked during the day at a local internet provider. At 5p, I’d come home, and immediately go to bed. I couldn’t stay awake. I would get so tired, I could barely stand. I would pass out at 6p and stay asleep until I had to get up for work the next morning. At first, I figured it was just a bug and I would shake it soon. But it lasted a week. Then another week. So, at the urging of my wife, I went to the doctor. After a comedy of errors, including a completely unnecessary overnight stay in the hospital, I was diagnosed with mono. Which is as awful, soul-sucking, life-draining a disease as I’ve ever gotten.

Great.

Origins 2004 was coming up—a mid-sized gaming convention that was only a couple hours away from my house. I was with an outfit called Key 20 back then—a sideline tabletop publishing and consolidation business I ran with a friend—and had to be there. So I went. Sick. I powered through the first couple days as best I could. On the third day, a Saturday, a miracle happened. I woke up in my hotel room and I felt better. Not just better, I felt good. I was over it. I had survived mono. Naturally, I partied like crazy that night.

The convention was soon over. I’d had a lot of fun hanging with some faraway friends, sold some books, and came home. Whew. I had made it through.

Time passed. And I started to notice something.

Many years ago, someone I know went through something. An event. That’s all I’ll say about the specifics. But I knew about it. And it upset me and always had from the minute I found out about it—I was (overly) sensitive like that—but I dealt with it. Or tried to. Eventually, fed up with the thought of it, I shoved the event deep into the recesses of my mind and bolted it behind a door. I guess I hoped it would die from hypoxia or something. Over time, I figured it must have since it hadn’t made its way into the light for many years.

Then suddenly, like a lion breaking from its cage and rushing into a frightened crowd, it burst from the door and smacked me square in the head.

Actually, it wasn’t that sudden. It started as flashes.

I’d be watching television or reading a book or playing a game or eating dinner, and the event would pop into my head. Quick, little how-do-you-do-hey-remember-me peeks from behind the door. I’d push it back down and carry on.

The flashes became more and more frequent, more and more annoying, and I started to get angry. I didn’t want to think about this thing. I had already dealt with it, I told myself, and I was done with it.

But it wasn’t done with me.

I remember headaches. High-pitched noise would pierce through my brain carrying snapshots of the event like etchings on a bullet. What started as a once a day nuisance became a several times a day distraction. Then several times an hour. Then constantly.

Every second. Of every minute. Of every hour. Of every day.

I couldn’t even escape it at night. I would wake up multiple times with this event running on constant repeat in my head. Every night before bed, I would break down crying, sobbing these massive sobs as my mind turned against me. As I realized that I was not in control of my own thoughts. Something inside me was torturing me by playing this endless loop of an event I did not want to think about it. Not only was I thinking about it, I was obsessing about it.

It grew to be bigger than just replaying the single event. It became about details, questions, every facet of this one thing. This one stupid thing that had nothing to do with me. I didn’t even know the person involved when they went through it. Why was my brain stuck on this one thing? Why couldn’t I stop thinking about it? Why couldn’t I sleep? Why couldn’t I escape it?

Why had this one thing taken over my entire life?

I had no appetite. I would eat because I had to. Often, I would buy food and look at it. I’d nibble a few bites and throw the rest away. I estimate I ate around 700 calories a day. Turns out, being crazy was a pretty great weight loss program. I don’t recommend it.

Weeks passed and this was my life. My new normal. This one thought—this one ten-second thought—running on constant loop in my brain every waking moment.

I wondered how I would ever be able to escape it. Could I ever escape it? Would I have to kill myself to get this to stop?

Is that what it would take to get some peace? To end everything?

Then, I got a call.

First though, I got an email.

I had applied for a job at Human Head Studios back in 2002. The job came down to me and one other candidate and the better person got the job. That better person wasn’t me. But that better person was now vacating the position and Head was looking to fill it.

Of course, the email just said, “Hey Jason, are you going to GenCon? If so, I’d like to talk with you there.”

Like Origins, GenCon is a gaming convention, though a bigger one. As a publisher and a game designer looking for a convenient excuse to hang out with my friends, I was definitely going.

“Yes, I’ll be there,” I said. Then I added oh so casually, “What would you like to talk about?”

It turns out the person who sent that email, Tim Gerritsen, wanted to talk about what I was hoping he’d want to talk about.

I had a job interview waiting for me at GenCon.

At this point, I had been stuck in this hell-that-has-no-name for about three weeks. I had become pretty good at acting like everything was fine. I’m sure I came across a bit distracted at times, a bit down, but I practiced every day at faking like nothing was wrong. At pretending my mind wasn’t my own worst enemy.

I went to GenCon with a smile on my face. I spent most of the first two days behind the Key 20 booth, chatting with friends, giving sales pitches, hearing about people’s characters, and being present. That Saturday, the third day, I sat down with Tim and we talked. It wasn’t a very formal affair—I had already interviewed for this job two years earlier. We spent an hour chatting about hopes and the state of the games industry and about Madison, Wisconsin (where Human Head is located). The entire time, that ten-second highlight reel was playing in my head. Over and over. But I smiled, and engaged, and asked questions, and acted as normal as I could.

The job interview over, I decided to head home that night. I was exhausted. The more people I was around, the more energy I had to put into pretending I was fine. I couldn’t let the mask slip. I couldn’t let on that I was losing my mind. That I was under constant torture and just as constant pressure to act like everything was a-okay. I said my early goodbyes to my friends and hit the road.

I came home to a cake. A real extravagant one made from scratch by my wife, using a Death by Chocolate recipe. It was my 28th birthday.

Tim followed up via email and we hashed out the details. Human Head made an offer, I accepted, and my family and I began the long process of packing up our lives in NEOhio, getting our house ready for and then on the market, and relocating to the Dairy State.

My wife and I were both born in NEOhio. We grew up in the same town, though went to different schools until we were teens. I’d lived in Illinois for a year in the mid-80s but moved back at the beginning of the following school year. So NEOhio was all we really knew. Our families were there, our oldest and closest friends were there. Moving away was an incredibly difficult decision.

But one we had to make. I had an opportunity to do something I loved, to start a real career at a great studio, and I had to take the chance. NEOhio didn’t have anything for me, professionally-speaking. And I was getting too old to still be trying to figure out a path, I reckoned. I was writing and designing and publishing games but it wasn’t paying the bills. This was a way for my creativity to help with a roof and food on the table and all that.

In the time between the offer and the move, I tried therapy to help get out of this constant mental loop I was in. I went to a counselor, told him what was happening, and he gave me options. Medication, he said. Or aversion therapy.

I was against medication at the time. I saw what I was going through as a failure on my part. I needed to toughen up, change my behavior, put control in my hands. Medication was a non-starter. But aversion therapy? Sure. I’ll snap a rubber band against my wrist whenever I find myself obsessing. That sounds good.

Not to cast a poor light on it, but aversion therapy did nothing for me.

The thought of suicide, at that point, was a regular occurrence. An ugly patina on my damaged psyche. The bad news crawl running over the unwelcome movie in my head. I was desperate for an exit and suicide is the most desperate exit there is. I wasn’t making plans to do myself harm but I recognized the option was on the table.

At my lowest, I seriously considered killing myself. I’d tell my wife I wasn’t thinking about it but I was. I’d smile and say I was working through this obsession but I wasn’t. I was drowning. I was dying. I hated every moment of being alive and wanted nothing more than relief. Nothing more than some peace. Nothing more than to be in charge again. Of my mind, of my life, of anything. And if this is what my life was now, I didn’t want it. If death was the only way out, I didn’t care. I was tired. Tired of hating myself and my brain and every single breath I drew. Tired from the constant pretending. Tired from crying. Trying from feeling frayed and afraid every single moment. Tired of asking the same questions over and over again: Why couldn’t I get it to stop? Why wouldn’t this end?

I wanted out. I wanted it over. I wanted to get away from everything.

But I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. I had a new job waiting for me, a baby girl who needed a father, and a wife. I had made connections and commitments. My life was not a toy I could selfishly take away if I wanted. Others depended on me.

I had to fight.

I made the conscious choice: I was going to fight. I was going to win. I was going to live.

Moving was hard on my wife. We were new parents at the time and balancing new jobs, a new state, a one-year old, the sense of losing touch with those closest to us. We were going through a lot. On top of all that, I was crazy.

Crazy. That’s a hell of a word.

Not everybody likes it. Me? I don’t mind it. I was crazy. I called myself crazy. My wife didn’t like that I did that but I told her, “I have no control over what my mind is thinking. That’s crazy. I don’t see any reason to call it anything else.” I was afraid of so much already, of every waking moment, I wasn’t going to be afraid of a five-letter word.

We moved to Madison two days after Christmas 2004. About five months after I lost my mind.

I can with honesty say that the intensity had lessened by then. The first three months were the hardest. Those were the constant days. The neverending days. The not-eating days. I had lost forty pounds in those three months. Told you crazy was a great weight loss plan. Though I don’t recommend it.

By the time I started my job at Human Head, I was only about 70% crazy. That is to say only 7/10s of my day was taken up by this obsessive thought in my head. My appetite was back. I was eating. In fact, I was over-eating to deaden the pain. I wasn’t going to deny myself basic wants. I was going to focus entirely on not being crazy anymore. I still couldn’t make it through a night without waking up at least once to that godawful replay but it still felt, overall, like I had crested a hill. It felt, as faint as it was, that there was light somewhere beyond all this darkness.

I focused on that light. Some days, I focused solely on that light. I would sit at my desk, head in my hands, and push through the pain. Push through the thought. Push through the event.

Every day, I fought. After enough time, I started winning. The obsession lessened. Each month, it lessened more and more. It took all my will to fight, to keep a steady hand on the tiller, but I fought. Eventually, I could breathe again. I never knew I had such will. I didn’t realize how strong I actually was.

But that’s unfair to that me. I wasn’t that strong in the beginning. I became strong. That me fought. Every day.

The summer after I went crazy, one year from zero hour, what was once my living hell had gone back to being only a nuisance.

And I wasn’t just locking it behind a door. I was beating it to death. I had had it. I was in control. I wasn’t going to let some impulse hijack my life.

Eighteen months. A year and a half. That’s how much of my life I had lost to mental illness. Somewhere in all that time, I came to realize what I was going through, to understand what I had.

In case you thought OCD was some cute set of quirky mannerisms, a funny trait to assign to a wacky secondary character, let me tell you with certainty that it is not. Having OCD means someone has a copy of the key to your brain. And occasionally, they take it for a joyride. It means having a voice in your ear that tells you all the worst things that could possibly happen. It’s a string around your finger to remind you of things you’d rather not think about. It’s feeling real physical pain wracking your body as you fight to not relent to a facial tic, or a sudden unnecessary hand gesture, or checking a door handle seven times—exactly seven times—before turning out a light.

Giving it a name allowed me more weapons in my arsenal. If I was going to obsess about something, I could decide what to obsess over. So I redirected. I picked up habits. If I started to obsess about the event, I’d refocus on something else. Something relatively harmless like song lyrics, or the history of a game console, or the movie career of an up-and-coming actor. Or washing my hands.

Only later did I realize that maybe aversion therapy was about more than snapping rubber bands.

That was how I fought. That was, over time, how I got better.

But it’s not like I got OCD from an insect bite and it just had to run its course. It’s part of my life. I deal with it every day. It’s part of who I am. I look back and I see the telltale signs of where OCD had always been part of who I am. What I thought of as quirks were symptoms.

And while I am very aware of the state of my hands’ cleanliness and I tend to anthropomorphize inanimate objects and I replay conversations in my head over and over again, I am very happy to say that I have survived. I am surviving.

I went crazy. I fought to get better. And I’m winning.

I take medication for anxiety now. Which is a very smart thing for me to do. It helps with both my OCD and my depression. I still get some flare ups now and then, under times of high stress, but nothing like I went through back in 2004 and 2005. Not even close. I sometimes wonder if medication would have helped me, would have shortened that year and a half into something that wasn’t so scarring. But I suppose it doesn’t matter. I went through it. It’s my past.

Ten years. I remember thinking back in 2004 about what my mind would be like in two years, five years, ten. Would I still be crazy? Would I be okay?

I am okay. In fact, I’m great. The ten years since I went crazy haven’t been all peeled grapes and sunshine but they’ve made me so much stronger. Going through crazy fundamentally altered my personality. It took years to get back to a place where I could find humor in anything. But I got there. Time moves on.

I don’t know exactly why I felt like commemorating the tin anniversary of the worst time of my life. I suppose I just wanted to share it. To let folks know at least one other person has gone through it. That if you’re going through crazy, you can survive. You can get better. You can regain control. Don’t be afraid of medication, of therapy. Don’t be afraid to make the choice. The choice to fight. The choice to win. The choice to live.