Exclusive Book Excerpt: A Little Crazy
A Memoir of Finding Purpose and Joy Amid the Madness
Hey Friends (and newcomers)!
In three weeks, my new book A Little Crazy: A Memoir of Finding Purpose and Joy Amid the Madness, publishes (Sept. 17). It’s about how those of us who are a little crazy, which is everybody, at some moments at least, if we're honest, can learn to manage distractions life throws at us to make them strengths, unlocking our superpower of purpose and joy.
For all who have signed up for my newsletter, below is as promised an excerpt of the book, a sequel to my bestseller Dear William. You will want to read this book because some special people appear as my angels, including my late son William and the father I never knew. They replaced the negative voices that tormented me for many years as angels in guidance and recovery—answered prayers.
Yes, this true story is A Little Crazy, wonderfully so, but it's one of faith, hope, resilience, love — it’s a love story, at heart — and finding the life we all want and deserve, something everyone can relate to. Please read, share, and join me in celebrating this meaningful September book release (and podcast by the same name, which launches on Sept. 10).
A Little Crazy
Prologue
Sanity, by definition, is considered an either–or scenario—we are rational (sane) or not (insane). One is viewed as good (sane), while the other, labeled with a severe mental-health issue, is not (insane). But most of us aren’t either–or.
Most of the US population with mental illnesses, some 25 percent, struggle with something mild, technically speaking, including ADHD, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance use disorders. But these so-called mild diagnoses, which many of us face, can and usually do significantly impact a person and those they live and work with, including family and friends. Divorce rates spike among sufferers, particularly among those battling addiction or depression, as do job changes and persistent feelings of dissatisfaction.
That’s how it was for me, battling most maladies on this list over the course of my life until I finally succumbed, breaking down in a midlife crisis and losing it all—family, career, and the little self-esteem I had left.
I considered giving up more than once. But something unusual, if not remarkable, happened as I slipped from mild mental illnesses amid that dreadful crisis into an experience that can only be categorized as a severe mental-health issue. I lost a sense of reality for a time and some might question whether I have ever regained it completely. But what happened in that experience, and the twelve-plus years since, changed my life, sending me in pursuit of purpose and joy—a quest that helped me to better manage and recover from the mental-health issues I’ve faced, unlocking the work and the rewards I’d desperately wanted and chased in all the wrong places for too many years until I crashed in middle age, losing it all. That’s why my memoir, Dear William, about individual and family addiction, was only the prequel to my story. Arresting behavior is only the first step, after all. Recovery from addiction, and all mental illnesses, requires us to dig into the root of the problem, and it’s never the drink or the drug. For me, that journey began in a fit of madness, when loved ones questioned if I’d finally lost it. Frankly, I wondered the very same thing. But losing it, I learned, is sometimes the start of finding it.
This book is that story.
Chapter One: Crazy Is, Crazy Does
My mind is playing tricks on me.
I have an idea for my next book that could take me from counting the cans of SpaghettiOs remaining in the cupboard before the next paycheck to dining once again in the buzziest restaurants on three courses. I’m crafting an email to my newish literary agent, Esmond. He’s a blue-blood Harvard Law School graduate from the United Kingdom who’s likely never eaten SpaghettiOs, much less from the can with a plastic spoon. But I’m hoping to sell him on the concept I’m feverishly hot about: I’ll write about my immediate family from a father’s perspective, including my wife and three children as subjects, a story of individual and family struggle and a path forward to redemption with faith as a foundation. Never mind that I’ve only been to church a few times annually in recent years. Never mind that only weeks ago I signed a final decree of divorce with Kent, my wife of two decades. She filed because I’d eaten turkey on Christmas Day with another woman, and different entrees in the past decade with other women. She filed because I hadn’t consumed fewer than four glasses of red wine in an evening the past two years, and she filed because I took all of my Adderall ahead of the prescribed time in the same two-year period, roaring like a hungry lion when it was gone.
Never mind that I have no job, or prospects, and I’m living alone in a no-lease, monthly-rent, one-bedroom guest house in Southern California where I don’t know anyone and I’ve got less than $1,500 in my bank account. Never mind that back at home, my former home, my two teenage boys smoke marijuana from pipes nightly in their rooms, alone, and binge on alcohol on the weekends with friends, or that my youngest child, a teenage daughter, follows up most every meal in a bathroom, shoving three fingers into her throat, producing one big and another small splatter in the toilet. And never mind that each of my three children lets my text messages linger and my calls go to voicemail.
My wife is done with me, my children won’t pick up, and I am unemployed. I’ve just lost the small, national cable current-events TV show I’d hosted because I saw myself in the monitor and didn’t like the view. I’ve never written a book like the one I’m proposing, Still, my mind races with assuredness about this fatherhood-and-family book I’ll write, most certainly my first bestseller. That’s because a confident voice inside my head I’ve known since middle school as the Dreamer delivered the vision as clear as the outline of birds flying against the backdrop of the bluest skies on a low-humidity day.
The Dreamer had spoken clearly before with a big idea here or there, but nothing as far-reaching as deciding to write about family strength at the very moment mine has withered.
“I’ve got it,” I write to Esmond, my agent. “My next book. A winner. The latest bestseller out, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, reminds us there’s a substantial market for books on raising children and families. My book about the role of a father . . .”
I type the message on the Mac computer that I plan to sell on eBay in several days to gather short-term funds for meals, because so many SpaghettiOs have turned my digestive system into a faucet of red dye and put my Honda Insight on a short list for repossession. I look at my fingers before hitting send to make sure they are real, to confirm I haven’t finally gone completely mad because I know how this will look on the receiving end: a crazy email from an alone, middle-aged man who’s just lost most everything he had, thinking he’s got the next hot book about family.
I’ve been called that before, crazy, since my teens, and it always feels like a bowling ball dropped on the inside of my stomach, whether heard in person or via hearsay. But it has happened enough over the years that I’ve come to understand that, yes, that bowling ball belongs in my stomach, and I’ve learned to live with that label like a visible mole one is chronically self-conscious over, though not so self-conscious as to have it removed. But in this moment, emailing Esmond, I wonder if that mole has become cancerous. I pause and consider, but I can see that, yes, my fingers are real. Yes, this is my next book. I’m thinking clearly enough to understand that where I’ll fail the clear-thinking test is when I actually share the idea with my agent, or anyone.
A normie wouldn’t do that. No.
A normie might have a far-fetched notion, because who doesn’t, especially in stressful moments like this? A normie would have the sense to keep it to themselves, however. A normie wouldn’t broadcast it in an email to a blue blood with a Harvard Law degree. But here I am, emailing Esmond, risking the alienation of one of my only viable lifelines remaining for a decent meal.
I understand the risk.
I do.
It’s just that the Dreamer’s plan has landed and lingers in my mind with the clarity of a January sunrise, bold in appearance and equally stunning in refraction. I see clearly in the fresh light, my future dancing before me as colors electrified by glorious song, the chords beating with my heart.
I’d identified as a person of faith in my earliest memories, not because I had joy, joy, joy down in my heart. No. It’s because, growing up in small-town Mississippi in the 1970s, there were two things a boy couldn’t be—gay, or an atheist, and for Heaven’s sakes, not both. I’d known I liked girls since the fourth grade when I sat in class behind Lynn, mesmerized by her shiny blonde hair that flipped at her bony shoulders. She sat in the row before me, and in the fortunate moments when she turned and looked my way, I’d see a hue of blue from her eyes and pearl drifting from an easy smile, and my palms would sweat. She loved reading, so I loved reading. She loved math, so I loved math. She didn’t talk much, so I didn’t talk much, focused instead on her Marcia Brady locks that smelled like Breck Concentrate. It all felt so manageable—the time, the place, and the simple relationship that only required periodic shampooing and occasional glances to feel whole, to feel worthy.
We traded school portraits, Lynn and I, the tiny ones you’d cut from larger sheets to give to classmates. Oxford, my town, was a small university community without major industry, so most of us couldn’t afford to get more than two or three sheets of six small photographs. I was left-handed, making school scissors a backwards fit, so I’d lose a photo or two as crooked-cut casualties in the effort to share my mug, which meant selectivity was required on who got the handouts. The handful of doctor’s children in town, perhaps, or my friend Burt, whose father owned the local cigarette and smokeless-tobacco distributor, would get enough sheets of mini photos to cut up and pass around to all twenty-one classroom mates. But numbers were limited in Lynn’s and my households, where the same four or five outfits ordered from the Sears catalog had to endure throughout the year, so gifting one meant the receiver was highly admired.
When Lynn turned back from her chair in the row ahead, handing me hers, I noticed first her straight cutting skills, which cropped the small photo close to the edges, unlike mine, with borders that looked like broken teeth, never repaired. In my hands, her tiny image handed over had looked directly at me, eye-to-eye, and my face turned bright red, burning like a candle flame running from the top of my ears down my neck.
“I have one for you, too,” I managed to say, somehow. I remember reaching under my desk, into its storage bin, and pulling out my jagged-edge photo, delivering it with a red-faced question.
“Will you go with me?”
I’m not sure when this line originated, or how we fourth graders inherited it, or why I didn’t simply ask, “Will you be my girlfriend?” No matter. With several older sisters, the language was one she knew. Lynn took the photo from my hand, looked down at it with a quarter-blink of her lids, her snow-white cheeks reddening to match mine, and said, “Yes,” before turning back around.
We didn’t speak again that semester, that I recall, despite sitting less than two feet apart. My confidence and joy beamed in the space of that nothingness, though. I knew I belonged, in that classroom, in the fourth grade, in Oxford, Mississippi, and that I was okay, because Lynn, with her golden locks and mesmerizing smile, accepted me, acknowledged me, and made me a notable citizen in our cozy learning community.
Christianity wasn’t so simple. I’d professed believing in God to my parents or friends for the same reason I’d claimed to like root beer despite never finishing more than half the bottle. That and on Sunday mornings most everyone I knew in town got dressed up and went to church, and in ours, the preacher said hell was a hot, horrible place, and I didn’t want that.
Church never felt comfortable like Lynn, though. I’d wait to get dressed on Sunday mornings until my adopted mom and dad made me, and I’d drag my feet, acting like it took a long time to button my shirt, comb my hair, and tie my shoes. They’d drop me off at a Sunday School class that served orange juice, saltine crackers, and Jesus, all in limited amounts, no sense getting too full. When the bell rang, I’d meet up with Mom for big church, listening to Dad play the organ and the preacher fuss like he was arguing with somebody. When he’d ask us to close our eyes and pray, I’d close my eyes but think about anything but God—Lynn, the weather, the next meal, how I could become a superhero and save the day. I didn’t understand how something I hadn’t seen, that nobody I knew had seen, could be real. I’d pretend to pray, but, frankly, it seemed a little crazy, this following of something nobody had tangible proof of that I could see.
Nonetheless, I’d told my friends, and Mom and Dad, the few times it came up that I was a Christian. I carried that same profession of faith into adulthood, despite the fact I’d still never seen God, or heard God, because I wanted the normality from what ironically looked more like insanity that came with that statement.
Yet I sense something like faith in the voice of the Dreamer, as if he’s been taken over by his more confident, focused father, if not Father. And I wonder if this is that thing I couldn’t see as a child that got everyone to church praying and praising in the first place. The Dreamer’s words about writing a book for struggling fathers and families entered my mind like an invitation, and I saw myself so many years before, when I’d merely professed a faith of convenience, seated on a wooden church pew, beside Mom, wearing a floral-print dress, with her decoupage purse wedged between us. The preacher, at the end of a sermon lasting so long that I’d stopped thinking of lunch and was now dreaming of dinner, held his right hand in the air, tightly clutching a Bible, with eyes closed as the choir in the background tenderly sang, “Jesus is tenderly calling thee home—calling today, calling today!” while the organist, my adopted father, repeated the keys as the cadence bellowed from the silver pipes anchored along both sides of the sanctuary.
As a child, I hadn’t understood the lyrics, much less their call to action. Most Sundays, I’d only heard my stomach growl. But as the Dreamer speaks, pronouncing my destiny with beaming confidence, I find myself so thirsty for that hymn, and its saving grace, because I’m not whole, because I’m not healed, and because I’ve wandered, lost, for so many years.
Demented?
Perhaps.
If so, that’s better than prematurely turning into ashes, where I was headed, weeks before, when I’d mapped out my end of life in intricate detail before aborting because the negative voice in my head I call the Doubter, who likes to verbally beat and lash me with negative talk I can’t help but embrace even though I know better, suggested I’d mess it up, an end-of-life attempt, leaving myself in purgatory, half dead, half alive, which scared the hell out of me.
So, yes. It’s decided, my future.
I’ll write my next book about family, fatherly leadership, and healing—answering the Dreamer’s call to action.
Send.
If Esmond thinks me crazy by virtue of the email, he doesn’t say. Too well groomed for that. Instead, he suggests in a courteous but brief reply that I give the concept more consideration, the sort of patented response agents deliver a writer when a project holds zero interest but they don’t want to cut the author loose because, you know, maybe one day, in the future, that writer will present a gem worth taking to publishers. His passing on the concept should have deterred me. Weeks prior, days prior, I would have pivoted, listening to the contrarian cries from the able-voiced Doubter, causing panic for showing foolishness to my agent, forcing a quick backpedal with immediate diversion.
Psyche! That’s not what I meant, Esmond.
That’s what I could say, dreaming up another business book to write with a half-attentive effort just for the paycheck, proving I am not delusional at all.
I’ve written half a dozen business books in the past seven years with moderate success, explaining in one why John Deere’s quality is so-so but its price in the marketplace preeminent, and how Toyota went from making looms in Japan to become the world’s largest automaker. I could offer to write about Ford’s successful CEO Alan Mulally, who I’ve known for a few years.
Bingo.
But, no. I’ll not fall for the fool’s gold diversion this time.
The Dreamer has called my attention elsewhere, and I’m listening.
It’s early 2011. I’d recently stopped taking my prescription Adderall, a stimulant, because I’d been misusing the medication. I’d take two on many days instead of one until the thirty-day supply would run out. I increased alcohol consumption from a few drinks a day to five or more daily beginning in the late afternoon to help alleviate the draining feeling that attacked my mind and body when the stimulant pills began to wear off. Now I’ve quit drinking alcohol because I had misused it with Adderall, and with life. In the aftermath, I’ve been sleepy like an aging tomcat who’s chased too many mice, taking morning and afternoon naps as my scorched adrenal glands rest along with my frail psyche. My dreams have been vivid, blurring into waking moments, providing a path to my healed future, since it’s not just plans for my next book I’m hearing so clearly, so convincingly.
Beginning my third and fourth days of AAA (After Adderall and Alcohol), the Dreamer erupted in my mind like a miscast performer who’d adopted a new costume and enhanced persona, emerging as the most central character on the stage after so many overshadowed performances. I can’t look away.
With eyelids closed and a hypnotic, beating heart, my mind illuminates like a crystal ball in the glare of a shining full moon. I see leaves on trees in the season to come, as if I’ve just gotten glasses correcting nearsightedness. I see faces I’ve never met, and tears well in my eyes for the pain they will suffer. I want to help them from the storm.
I must help them.
You will, the Dreamer explains, as long as you don’t let the Doubter regain control.
Thank you so much for reading, and engaging with this post, including liking it, and sharing it, if so inclined.
What happened after the voice telling me I’ll write my next book about family, faith, and healing, is this — we faced unspeakable tragedy, losing our son William. But, a decade after this vision, my next book was published. And it was, as I’d told my agent, about family, faith and healing.
It was Dear William. It was always Dear William — destiny.
And here, now, with this book, is the rest of the story — the part you don’t know, about how and why it’s all happened, through the William Magee Center for AOD and Wellness Education and the William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing at the University of Mississippi that’s been created and more.
It’s — A Little Crazy —the story of love, and the answered prayer of how I turned a little crazy into purpose and joy.
To order a signed copy purchase online here from Square Books in Oxford. To order from other vendors including Barnes and Noble and amazon, order here.