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

by A. J. Mendez Brooks

  Like a movie montage, the events surrounding my stupidity began to flash in front of my eyes. I had fucked up monumentally. In a deep depressive state, I had overdosed on antidepressants and painkillers. I had almost died trying to make an inner pain fade away.

  So was this a suicide attempt? Was it a cry for attention? The doctors labeled it an accidental overdose and didn’t force me into a psychiatric ward like they had done to my mother. But was it an accident? Here is the truth. I have searched within myself for years for the answer and have come up with only this. In the weakest moment of my life, without emotion and without thinking, I tried to make the pain stop. It felt like a mechanical and rational decision. There is pain. I cannot handle it. This might help. This might help more. I never told myself I wanted to die, but I never told myself I didn’t. I just didn’t care. Searching for a solution in that instant, I made an idiotic series of mistakes. I believe I should’ve been analyzed in a psych unit. It should have been treated like a suicide attempt. Because something was deeply wrong with my brain, and I could not handle it alone.

  When Erica came to pick me up, she was warm and a bit nervous. It was as if she didn’t know how to treat me. She didn’t want to come off as judgmental, but she was also hurt. This poor girl had picked our mother up from the hospital a year earlier, and this was eerily reminiscent.

  “I hope you know…” she said, breaking the awkward silence, “you’re going to have to clean my car.”

  REBIRTH

  As we drove home from my shameful hospital visit, a realization hit me like lightning. It was all too similar. It was not a coincidence I was following my mother’s footsteps. She was diagnosed with depression. And so was I. She overdosed. And so did I. But what doctors realized in her case was that she had been misdiagnosed to begin with. She was not depressed. She had been mistakenly diagnosed during a depressive cycle of her bipolar disorder. The antidepressants had the worst possible reaction they could have. I knew then and there that was what had happened to me. I knew in my heart I was bipolar.

  For a long time I believed I was prone to depression when circumstances overwhelmed me. And so I thought, if I stayed happy enough, I could fight back the darkness. Essentially I was trying to put a Band-Aid on a festering wound. I thought if my erratic behavior had subsided for this long, it certainly meant it was gone for good. I excused my odd behavior as momentary depression. There were weeks I was incredibly, ridiculously happy. Getting to experience being inside of a wrestling ring had given me a strength and confidence I had never known. Having a full-time job, living as a proper adult, made me feel like I was on the path to success. So why couldn’t I sleep at night?

  Nights I did manage to get some rest, I would wake up feeling off—heavy and dazed, as if I were shrouded in a dense fog. I began calling these my “dark days.” Days in which I would mope around, dragging my feet. My appetite would diminish, and even if I tried to eat, I would taste nothing. Within these days, often midsentence, I would break down into tears—for absolutely no reason. But I wrote off all of it as moments of weakness. I didn’t respect the possibility of inheriting my mother’s mental illness.

  The hardest thing in the world is to accept that something is wrong with you, face the uphill road to recovery ahead, and realize that none of it makes you less than human. I had been so scared to end up as sick as my mother, I had refused to notice the warning signs. I wanted to think that I had little bouts of depression caused by the heavy situations in my life, but that was not the truth. The truth was, I was bipolar. And I had been for several years. The only difference between me and my mother was that I was catching the culprit early on. I had a chance to end up differently. And I would never take that chance for granted. The day I got home from the hospital, I cut the plastic hospital band off my wrist and replaced it with three thin black bracelets. One representing the life I had lived and the mistakes I had made, one representing the death I had escaped, and the last representing my second chance at life—my rebirth. I have worn them every day since.

  What comes next can be demoralizing for a lot of patients. I would eventually confirm my diagnosis with a professional. After that momentous occasion, finding the right medication and dosage can be a pain in the ass. Sometimes a treatment can take so long to produce any sort of result, you give up before you can get its full benefits. Oftentimes medication meant to soothe the extreme emotions ends up dulling all of them. I spent a few months feeling like a robot in a cloud of smoke. But if you stick through the highs and lows of trying to control your highs and lows, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

  I still wear these almost every day.

  My disorder is not something that can be cured, but its severity can certainly be controlled. The process takes guts. It takes a brave person to accept they need help and go get it. It takes an even braver person to not feel shame in the process. I understand psychiatry and therapy can be intimidating to a lot of people. After I found the right treatment, and took the time to attend consistent therapy over the years, I felt so silly for waiting so long to finally find peace.

  If you are sick, you get medicine from a doctor. When people can see an injury or hear a cough, they take notice. That ailment is tangible. It is real. But when an illness cannot be seen, when it is felt, however deeply, people tend to ignore it. My family did not believe in mental illness. They thought it was a creation of pansies who couldn’t tough it out when life got rough. And then it screwed us without even having the courtesy to buy us dinner first. My mother had a breakdown, I suffered for years, and even Robbie was extrasusceptible to PTSD, having a chemical imbalance already in his genetic makeup. We were forced to face how very real mental illness was only after it had had its way with us.

  What I wish for anyone reading this who feels even the slightest worry that something could be wrong inside of them is that you find the strength to talk to someone about it. Get advice from someone who has experience. Talk to a friend who you know will support you. Or really sac up and go to therapy and bare your soul. You might just find exactly what you are looking for. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become less tolerant of closed minds that think psychotherapy and psychology are tantamount to weakness. Being proactive takes a lot more strength than hiding.

  I know a lot of secure women and men who go to therapy. They don’t see it as an admission of a flaw. They see it as a luxury, serving their minds the way a massage spoils the body. Some of the happiest couples I know go to couples therapy weekly. And that’s why they are the happiest couples I know. Because they take the time to check in with their emotions before a problem arises. And if modern medicine isn’t your deal, then try homeopathic methods. Try meditation, anything. Just taking the time to put your mental health first, acknowledging that it deserves respect and care, and accepting help when you need it, can save your life. You are worth saving. And you are not alone.

  Growing up next to another set of blossoming ovaries will undoubtedly create some friction in your life. My sister and I have had a love story more tumultuous than Sam and Jason on General Hospital. She has been my surrogate mother, my best friend, and my worst enemy. We have made each other laugh almost as much as we have made each other bleed. We are complete opposites, and yet, the perfect match. There is no relationship that has hurt me or healed me more.

  So here is my guide to surviving sisterhood. Boyfriends and girlfriends will come and go. Friends will try their best. But there is no bond more sacred than the one between two sisters who have been cursed with the same chubby nose.

  1. Do your best to avoid fighting about:

  • How long it is still age appropriate to play with Barbies. A two-year age difference is enough to ensure one sister will spend half an hour setting up an elaborate Barbie playdate, complete with makeshift Ricki Lake talk-show set, only to have the other sister bounce within five minutes to walk around the mall with her stupid, stupid friends.

  • Clothes. My sister and I shared a handful of clothes for o
ver a decade. When we eventually got our own jobs and could buy our own stuff, the blood feud began. Your sister is going to want to borrow something you own. That plain black T-shirt will then suddenly transform into something so appealing you will protect it like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Just share it. It’s not worth losing wads of hair over. Unless it still has the tags on. You might as well be asking for a kidney.

  • Boys. There was a boy in high school who, when dumped by my sister, tried to move in on me, in a pretty twisted attempt at revenge. That is how stupid boys can be. In general, it’s a good rule to just avoid fighting about guys altogether throughout life—with friends, other women, etc. Most guys are not worth fighting over. Trust me. The good ones will fight for you. The rest can kindly fuck off.

  • Money. I always felt bad that my mother and her sisters were divided over money and promised myself that Erica and I would be different. And for the most part we have done a stellar job of not letting money come between us. Unless you count that one time I didn’t pay my half of the rent six months in a row. Or that other time when she secretly drained my bank account to buy shoes.

  2. Stay on her good side, because you never know when you’ll need her:

  • To pay your half of the rent for the many years you are kind of a mess.

  • To not secretly drain your bank account to buy shoes during the years she’s kind of a mess.

  • To loan you her bra in the middle of a school day because you forgot to wear one, because your boobs are nonexistent, but you have to change in front of the other girls in gym class, and they actually have boobs, and those boobs are inside of bras.

  • To let you know it is time to start plucking your eyebrows.

  • To let you know you have grossly overplucked and can’t pull off the chola look.

  • To read your shitty screenplays.

  • To secretly buy you tampons.

  • To describe in horrifying helpful detail how to use those tampons.

  3. Remember, at the end of the day, only a sister would:

  • Shave your legs for you when you are a crying, hairy nine-year-old who is too terrified to hold the blade for the first time.

  • Buy Johnson and Johnson’s No More Tangles detangling spray and comb the knots out of your hair when you are a lazy, disgustingly unkempt fourteen-year-old.

  • Let you sneakily borrow her makeup when your mom thinks it’ll just make you look like a “cheap painted whore.”

  • Work overtime to make sure you get at least one Christmas present.

  • Help plot bloody revenge on a boy who breaks your heart.

  • Take turns writing only “You are one year closer to death” in each other’s birthday cards. Every year.

  • Have a massive blowout of a fight and act like nothing happened the next day.

  • Forgive you every time you are kind of a dick.

  • Blindly believe you are capable of anything.

  • Encourage you to chase even the wildest of dreams.

  Thank you for being my sister, Eri. You’re kind of okay. Shut up, don’t make it weird.

  Hitting rock bottom set me free. I felt like I had been given a clean slate, a second chance at life, and I sure as hell was going to make the most of it. When you are at your lowest, there really is nowhere else to go but up. My foundation was cracked. The whole building needed to be torn down and reconstructed. Every day felt like knocking down walls and gathering bricks. But brick by tedious brick, I would rebuild and become someone better. After taking the time to heal and learning about proper treatment, I was refocused and ready to continue the upward trajectory.

  Wrestling school was my primary focus. I trained for about a year before actually getting paid to wrestle. There are small promotions all over the country, and the world for that matter, that run wrestling shows in high school gyms, bingo halls, state fairs—basically any place you can build a ring and gather a crowd. Together these promotions make up the “independent circuit,” pretty much any wrestling that is not a part of the bigger promotions on television. The rings are more of the makeshift variety, the crowds can sometimes consist of less than ten people, the pay is practically nothing, and the wrestlers can be dangerously undertrained. But getting any opportunity to live out the childhood fantasy of performing in front of a crowd made me unbelievably happy.

  Unfortunately, women on the circuit are not as plentiful as men. It was difficult to find companies that had any possible opponents for me to work with. The owner of my own training school didn’t like the idea of having such a tiny, inexperienced woman wrestle on his events. “You’re just so small, and these other girls are so much bigger than you. I’m scared you’re going to be too fragile to handle it.”

  There was that goddamn word again. I had proven my grit for a year now, and I was still being judged by my size. I knew he was concerned for my safety, but doubt coming from my own training grounds was demoralizing. I wasn’t going to learn from people who were better than I was without getting the chance to enter a ring with them, so I looked to other promotions for work.

  A few companies gave me great opportunities to gain some experience and make a few bucks. And I mean a literal few. The most I ever made in one night was forty dollars after wrestling four different matches in a tournament. One time a promoter let me know the show didn’t sell enough tickets to actually pay any of the wrestlers at the end of the night, but he was kind enough to offer one free snack from his concession stand. Essentially, I was paid in french fries. Dream big, kids.

  It wasn’t much of a profitable career, but I still felt like I was doing something worthwhile and important. I started to make a small name for myself on the independent circuit (eventually, in early 2009, I became a tag team champion in a badass all-women promotion). When one of the company’s shows took place in a twenty-degree movie theater, with a ring that had tire-sized holes in it, only two working ropes, in front of a crowd of four men who just spent the evening touching themselves underneath their winter coats, I still went to bed with an accomplished smile on my face. Not because I was accidental spank material, but because I felt like I was doing “IT.” I was actually becoming a wrestler, though the “professional” part was still a bit debatable. I had set a goal, and each day I was getting closer to achieving it.

  In 2008, one of the wrestlers from my training school mentioned the WWE was holding open tryouts. At first this sounded like a glorious opportunity to get a contract with the biggest wrestling company in existence. The WWE had multiple shows on television and was known all over the world. I was excited until some of the other guys made it seem like a big scam.

  “You have to pay two thousand dollars and get your own flight and hotel. I heard it was just a way to rip off suckers and pay for a new ring for their developmental team,” one of the guys said, scoffing at the idea.

  But I wasn’t quick to write it off. Sure, the WWE was certainly going to make a lot of money off any indy wrestler with two grand to spare, but it was still an opportunity.

  The tryout was a full-blown, three-day camp at the WWE’s developmental facility in Tampa, Florida. This facility served as the company’s minor leagues. New signees would move to Tampa and train at the school until they were promoted to a main roster spot on one of the company’s network shows.

  WWE writers, producers, and agents would attend the tryout camp and watch the prospects train and put on matches. Whether or not it was just a cash play, there were going to be very real eyes with very real authority watching. Even if it was just a sliver, there was a chance. The problem was, I was working my butt off to barely make rent every month and didn’t have that kind of extra cash lying around. If I did, I would’ve surely been using it to “make it rain” on my sister while she tried to sleep. There was absolutely no way I was going to be able to afford two flights, four nights in a hotel, and two grand to enter the camp. But rumor was the tryout camp would be made into an annual occurrence. I was determined that the next time
the opportunity came around, I would make sure I was ready for it.

  I decided I would need a new, better-paying job. Making six dollars an hour fetching coffee for pervy misogynists at the calling card company for the last year had helped me pay for wrestling school, but I needed to start doing better than living paycheck to paycheck. I also felt like the calling card company had run its course of survivability. Having under twenty-five employees, it was legal for the bosses to smoke indoors. And smoke in my chubby-cheeked asthmatic face they did.

  When I had broken my foot, I was still not excused from carrying boxes up and down stairs into storage or fetching coffee whenever my boss snapped. And he literally snapped his fingers to get my attention. When I would bring the coffee behind his desk, more often than not I would catch a quick glimpse of porn on his computer as he rushed to minimize its window. I envisioned throwing the scalding coffee all over him while I snapped a thousand times in his now deformed face.

  I tried to deal with the grossness I could not shower off me at the end of the day, but the day he snapped his fingers and smugly called me “baby” I told him I would be moving on. Though I wasn’t qualified for much, I borrowed my sister’s clothes, typed up a malnourished résumé using a really big font, and went on interview after interview. After a few weeks of searching, I was offered a job…as a secretary. But this time I would have a sick view of the Hudson River from my desk, be treated with respect, and make enough money to afford cable, so it was a total upgrade.

  My new gig was at a beautiful day spa directly on the river in Hoboken, New Jersey. The manager liked my personality despite my lack of experience and hired me to man the front desk. If I wasn’t thanking callers in a tranquil hippie spa voice, I was staring out onto the water while listening to a nature sounds CD on loop. I was making enough money to not feel guilty about buying a morning coffee to drink at my desk with a view, engulfed in the scent of lavender oil diffusers.