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Lived

My Life in Crazytown

What They Called Wrong With Me

This is not a redemption story, because I was never broken

I spent the first nineteen years of my life somewhere I now call Crazytown, a place where nothing made sense and the rules changed depending on who was in the room. Most people who grow up there become permanent residents. They learn to handle the chaos and then recreate it, because it’s the only architecture they know.

The same traits that made me a difficult child made me an exceptional problem solver. The intensity my family spent years trying to suppress turned into the engine behind decades of work. Words tripped me up all the time. My dad told me I needed to be smart, then told me to stop being a smart ass, and I didn’t know those meant different things. Wait, I’m supposed to be smart?

The kid who collected everything became an adult who saw patterns other people missed. The teenager who exploded when touched became a man who set boundaries and expected them honored. The college dropout who couldn’t sit through a class became the executive who could hold a complex problem for hours.

What Crazytown built, and what it became
Childhood trait What it became
Collected everything Saw patterns other people missed
Exploded when touched Set boundaries and expected them honored
Couldn’t sit through a class Held a complex problem for hours as an executive
Hypervigilance An edge in reading complex systems
Predicting his father’s explosions Designing software solutions
Emotional distance Objectivity as an editor and ghostwriter

I didn’t overcome any of it. I weaponized it. This is a recognition story instead of a recovery one: the moment you work out that the thing everyone said was wrong with you is the most right thing about you.

Recovery story or recognition story?A comparison of the traditional recovery memoir with the recognition story My Life in Crazytown tells. The recovery arc offers forgiveness, reconciliation and healing. The recognition story finds that the traits called defects were strengths, used on purpose.Recovery story or recognition story?Recovery memoirOvercoming adversityForgivenessTearful reconciliationA healing arcRecognition storyNever broken to begin withTraits weaponized, not overcomeWeaknesses turn out to be strengthsWhat was wrong is most right
Recovery story or recognition story?A comparison of the traditional recovery memoir with the recognition story My Life in Crazytown tells. The recovery arc offers forgiveness, reconciliation and healing. The recognition story finds that the traits called defects were strengths, used on purpose.Recovery story or recognition story?Recovery memoirOvercoming adversityForgivenessTearful reconciliationA healing arcRecognition storyNever broken to begin withTraits weaponized, not overcomeWeaknesses turn out to be strengthsWhat was wrong is most right

Why My Life in Crazytown is a recognition story instead of a recovery one.

What is inside My Life in Crazytown?

Who should read My Life in Crazytown?

Why did I write My Life in Crazytown?

Richard Lowe, the Writing King

I lived there for nineteen years and spent the following decades working out what it built. Thirty-three years in enterprise IT, twenty as Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, all of it running on traits my family treated as defects. This is my account, and it’s not flattering to anybody in it including me.

► Behind the Book: My Life in Crazytown
How this one got written, what went wrong, and what got cut.

► The Hypervigilance That Ruined My Childhood Made My Career
One story from behind this book.

What do people ask about My Life in Crazytown?

Is My Life in Crazytown a traditional recovery memoir?
No. There’s no forgiveness, no tearful reconciliation, no healing arc. This memoir explores how survival skills developed in a dysfunctional childhood accidentally became the author’s greatest professional assets. It’s about discovering that apparent weaknesses were marketable strengths.
What is “Crazytown”?
Crazytown is the author’s term for the first nineteen years of his life in a dysfunctional family where rules changed without warning, where the people meant to protect him were often the ones he needed protection from, and where surviving each day required developing sophisticated mental defense systems.
How do ADHD and autism factor into My Life in Crazytown?
The book covers the author’s late-in-life ADHD, autism, and C-PTSD discoveries, revealing how traits that made him feel broken in social situations made him exceptional in professional ones. The hypervigilance, systematic thinking, and emotional distance that complicated personal relationships became professional advantages.
What career success did the author of My Life in Crazytown have?
The author was promoted to Vice President of Consulting at twenty years old, spent two decades managing critical systems at Trader Joe’s, and built a ghostwriting practice helping executives and entrepreneurs organize their thoughts and find their own voices.
Who should read My Life in Crazytown?
Anyone who suspects their childhood struggles might be hidden strengths, anyone with late-diagnosed ADHD or autism trying to make sense of their past, and anyone interested in how trauma and neurodivergence can combine to create unexpected professional capabilities.

Also in Lived

What they called wrong with you may be the whole point

The exit is closer than you think.

BUY FROM INGRAMSPARKAMAZONKOBOREAD A CHAPTERTABLE OF CONTENTS

Paperback and ebook.

Filed underMemoirPersonal GrowthMental HealthADHD

A chapter

My Life in Crazytown

This isn’t a story about overcoming adversity. It’s not about finding inner peace or learning to forgive. It’s about something far more practical: how to turn the worst things that happen to you into the best things about you.

I spent the first nineteen years of my life in what I now call Crazytown, a place where nothing made sense, where the rules changed without warning, and where the people who were supposed to protect you were often the ones you needed protection from. It was a landscape of emotional warfare, silent treatments, and violence both threatened and delivered.

Most people who grow up in Crazytown become permanent residents. They learn to survive the chaos, to manage the damage, to cope with the ongoing effects of trauma. Some become casualties. Others become survivors. A few get therapy and learn to heal.

Not the kind who designs buildings, but the kind who designs solutions. I learned to take the wreckage of a dysfunctional childhood and build something useful from the debris. The hypervigilance that trauma creates became my edge in reading complex systems. The systematic thinking I developed to predict and avoid my father’s explosions became my ability to design elegant software solutions. The emotional distance that complicated relationships became my objectivity as an editor and ghostwriter.

This is the story of how a scared, awkward kid who couldn’t make friends and didn’t fit anywhere discovered that being different wasn’t a bug. It was a feature. How the same traits that made me a “difficult child” made me an exceptional problem-solver. How the intensity my family tried to suppress became the engine that drove decades of professional success.

The kid who collected everything became an adult who could see patterns others missed. The teenager who exploded when touched became a man who set firm boundaries and demanded respect. The college dropout who couldn’t sit still in class became the executive who could focus for hours on complex problems.

This isn’t a redemption story because I was never broken to begin with. This is a recognition story: the moment when you realize that what everyone told you was wrong with you is what’s most right about you.

If you’ve ever felt like you don’t fit, if you’ve ever been told you’re too much or too little, if you’ve ever wondered whether the things that make you different might make you valuable, this book is for you.

Table of contents

My Life in Crazytown

  • Prologue: Welcome to Crazytown
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: First Blood
  • Chapter 2: Systems Emerge
  • Chapter 3: Extended Family Toxicity
  • Chapter 4: Family Life
  • Chapter 5: Institution Failures
  • Chapter 6: Childhood Friends and Fears
  • Chapter 7: Family Business Hell
  • Chapter 8: Little Mountain
  • Chapter 9: High School Hell
  • Chapter 10: The Day I Almost Died
  • Chapter 11: In Between
  • Chapter 12: College
  • Epilogue: Building a Life
  • Breaking the Mold: From Victim to Victor
  • Acknowledgements
Categories and tags
CategoriesMemoirsPersonal Growth
TagsADHDChildhoodMemoir WritingMental HealthReading LifeWriting Craft
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