We Need to Stop Calling Women Crazy
There it was, the C-word. Coming out of my mouth, before I had a chance to stop myself. “I’m so crazy.” I’d dropped an orange from my shopping bag that had rolled under the car, and had slunk down onto my belly and wedged myself into the dirt between the wheels to try and reach it with my fingers. I was late to get my son from school. I was now filthy, greasy. I was, well… what else could I be but “crazy”?
I stopped reaching. I listened to myself. Really listened as I put my forehead down on the cold asphalt under my car. Had I just called myself “crazy” for trying to capture a runaway orange? For feeling frazzled that the day had gotten away from me? For losing control of… my groceries?
A few days went by and I noticed the word came up a lot in my mind, and even as a standard in conversations with a few of my friends. “Oh yeah, the crazy girl.” Or often, “She’s nuts.” Or, “Oh her. She went crazy on me.” (Insert eye roll.)
This word seems to define… almost every woman I know. And suddenly, I’m just not cool with that. And you shouldn’t be either. It’s not funny, it’s misogyny.
Somehow “crazy” seeped into my own self-defining lexicon, which was even more disturbing. But I’m also not alone in that. I’ve heard various female members of my family also self-describe as crazy. Did we just pick this up through cultural osmosis? How is it possible that I’ve been sharing my sense of self with this word for decades and I didn’t even realize it until I lost an orange under my car?
We live in a culture where any so-called negative emotion in the near vicinity of a woman means she’s nuts. As I watched my week unfold, I noticed I felt “crazy” for trying to finish a work project on deadline while rushing to make dinner for myself and my child. I felt “crazy” for feeling sad while folding the laundry. I felt “crazy” for being awake at midnight, when I should be tired but wasn’t. And yes, I felt “crazy” for expecting the man I was dating to treat my vulnerability with respect.
Truth is, the symbolic annihilation of women’s emotions from the fabric of what’s okay or considered normal in our society is what’s crazy. We have one word that abolishes the feelings, needs, requests and existence of a woman. She’s “crazy.” Now she no longer exists, except as an abstraction of in-elegance. As a sub-standard species, a mere chit on the landscape of normality. Hurry up and flick her away.
It was especially hard realizing that even I, a feminist, side with my own sexist culture, and regularly employ this word against… myself. For having a normal range of human feelings, including rage, pain, ecstasy, fear and excitement.
The other implied feature of being labeled as “crazy” is it means you need to be controlled, or brought under control.
The word, hysterectomy is related to the word hysteria, and there was a time in our culture not so very long ago, when an unhappy woman was quickly labeled as a “hysteric” and locked away for electro-shock therapy treatments in icy institutions. Thousands of women on multiple continents. Cary Grant’s mother. Probably some women from your own family. This was the in-thing to do with difficult women. Label them. Then deal with them. Lock them away. Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire in one of these facilities.
Now, I’m not addressing personality disorders here. I’m not talking about individuals suffering with bipolar disorder, or borderline personality disorder. I’m not talking about depression. I’m talking about a woman like myself, a single mother who is juggling a lot of responsibilities at work and for her family, an insomniac and yes workaholic, who crawls under her car to collect a stray orange at 3:30pm on a Wednesday, and ends up calling herself “crazy” under her breath.
Many of us have come from families and histories of abuse, but does that give us any right to then eradicate our own right to feel our fullest feelings? No, no, no. If anything we need empathy. (Please see the book and work of Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.)
Sometimes those feelings are large and frightening. Sometimes those feelings are related to hormones, or excess responsibility, or a sense of feeling lost in a world that doesn’t support us because we’re women, and the world is statistically a dangerous place for females to live. Often, those feelings are related to unmet needs. A need for love, for belonging, for peace.
Does that make us “crazy”? Hell no.
I have a few friends (parents) who would prefer to keep their young sons away from dating who have told them, “Stay away from the girls. They’re all crazy.” In what culture is it okay to educate boys that girls are crazy? Or to educate girls that women are crazy? For any reason?
Please remember the danger of this label is that it not only trivializes, but invalidates everything a woman is thinking and/or feeling. Her entire experience now is irrelevant because she’s just “crazy”. All those feelings? She’s “nuts”.
I recall a very important job interview I had a few years ago, where the celebrity (a well known comedian) I had started working for called my reference and asked, “So is Kaia good crazy or bad crazy?” And the person who referred me, also a woman, said, “Don’t worry, she’s good crazy.”
The very idea that all women, ALL WOMEN, can be lumped into 2 categories: good crazy, or bad crazy, is at the very cold, dead heart of the patriarchy. Why? Because it is the ultimate estrangement from life.
And it is not funny. It is not a joke. And it is not something to toss around about women. It is an extremely toxic label that hurts people and needs to stop.
If you haven’t seen a storm lately, or a hurricane, or a winter sea pounding the shore, or a brush fire, please take a look at Mother Nature for a moment. We live on a planet that occasionally spews fire and erases numerous lives with wind and rain and flood. That we feel uncomfortable with these facts is inevitable, because it’s dangerous to be alive. But that we would then diminish the beauty, the glory and the majesty of being alive into a summary that invalidates the essence of another human being is a travesty.
I can tell you for certain, that even as recently as last week, I’ve experienced my entire spiritual existence as a human being questioned because I acted out of emotion. I can pretty much guarantee that if you’re a woman, you’ve been abandoned by at least one person in your life who put this one label on you and used it as an excuse to avoid taking self-responsibility for learning the wisdom of an action which hurt you.
Read that last sentence again.
Women are not crazy. I am not crazy. Neither are you. In fact, having a natural flow of emotions in your body is one of the ways you stay healthy and vibrant and connected to the flow of life that is inside you, for as long as you’re a breathing member of the human race.
Day by day, I’ve begun to collect my feelings, like little adorable lost baby dragons, and put them back into the basket of my body with the appropriate language for them. I’m learning to say instead to myself, I’m feeling “frustrated” or “tired” or “irritated” or “flustered”. I’m not “having a tizzy fit”. Neither am I “losing my marbles” or “going nuts”. And neither are you.
There are whole, complete, gorgeous words for the full spectrum of emotions we feel, even when we experience more than one of them at once. That’s also part of the experience of living in a female body. And it’s glorious.
In fact, anyone who seeks to invalidate your authentic feelings by labeling you as a problem, with any kind of label including “crazy”, is gaslighting you. That’s what gaslighters do. They convince you that you’re crazy, when they’ve done something to legitimately upset you. (This term has entered the cultural narrative by way of the 1944 film Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, where Boyer’s character successfully convinces his sane wife that she’s out of her mind.)
And so many of us take the bait; I know I do. There have been numerous times in my life when I found myself apologizing for something I didn’t even do. Or for something I did do, like stand up for myself when I had every right to, and this didn’t go over so well for the egomaniac I was confronting. So we as women often apologize, and internalize, “What if they’re right? Maybe I was too emotional. Too erratic. Too… crazy.”
We must stop calling women “crazy”.
We must stop calling ourselves “crazy” for being women and having and expressing the full range of our feelings in our hearts and spirits and flesh.
We must stop using this word on our female relatives. We must stop using this word for our female friends or women we are dating. “She’s great, but she’s a little crazy.” No, she’s not, thank you.
If you hear this word come out of the mouth of someone you love, referring to another woman, please take one step further forward and ask them to improve their vocabulary and rethink this subtle misogyny.
Women are human beings. Full stop.
We have feelings, needs, desires, challenges and hopes and dreams. The last time I checked, very few of us are out there claiming to be enlightened. In fact, among the women I love and call friends, many of us are out there self-policing our own emotions so that we can be taken more seriously in a world that doesn’t give us the parity in our careers that it gives to men.
Let’s also take a moment to acknowledge how much more frequently our culture refers to women of color as “crazy” than it does to white women. It’s so easy to label a Latina, or a black woman “crazy”. It’s so easy to whip out that term on any woman of color who shows even the slightest disapproval at how she’s being treated. In fact, even worse, I’ve heard the term “bat shit crazy” thrown around for women of color. Excuse me? Bat shit? This is the most racist, bitter, misogynistic slur, and it must stop immediately. THIS IS NOT OKAY.
So, please, let us all as mature adults make this agreement now, together, to stop calling women “crazy”. We must now as women, come together in solidarity for our own parity, and stop calling ourselves “crazy”. We must reject anyone from our lives who uses this word to cage us, control us, diminish us or eradicate the validity of our experience, emotions or existence.
Let’s also stop using the word “crazy” to describe ourselves, internally, or to anyone else.
Have you ever, under your breath, muttered the words, “I’m just crazy”, when facing an uncomfortable feeling or situation?
When I asked some of my female friends under what circumstances they’ve used this word to describe themselves, it seems for most of us, we think of ourselves as crazy multiple times per day. For dropping a cell phone, for falling off the bottom rung of a ladder, for being late to the airport, for forgetting to call back our mothers, for leaving the ice cream out on the counter… the list goes on and on!
The biggest one, of course, is we are crazy for crying. Crying in movies, and at weddings, and in the car, and over coffee, and when we’re pregnant and when we’re ovulating, and when we’re, basically anytime we’re awake and crying, we’re definitely “cray-cray”.
Ladies, you are not crazy.
Women. We are women. We are feeling, breathing, dancing, opening, closing, crying, laughing, feeling it all.
Because the option to feeling is numbing. And if you one day feel so “crazy”, that you choose numbing over feeling, the world will lose you and your gifts along with you. And that is a loss that none of us can afford.
So let’s side with Mother Nature here. Let’s side with sunny days, and days that pour rain. Nights that let us sleep sweet, and nights that torment us with howling winds. We are her children, and we are the full spectrum of experience.
We are human beings, and we are part of the fabric of this world, with all its beauty and complexity.
Please, take the pledge with me.
We need to stop calling women “crazy”.
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