My Life in Crazytown
What They Called Wrong With Me
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This is not a redemption story, because I was never broken BUY FROM INGRAMSPARKAMAZONKOBOREAD A CHAPTERTABLE OF CONTENTS 322 pages · Paperback ISBN 978-1-946458-53-7 · ebook ISBN 978-1-946458-15-5 |
| 322Pages | 19Years in Crazytown | 16Chapters | 0Redemption arcs |
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 navigate the chaos and then recreate it, because it is 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.
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 honoured. The college dropout who could not sit through a class became the executive who could hold a complex problem for hours.
I did not overcome any of it. I weaponized it. This is a recognition story rather than a recovery one: the moment you work out that the thing everyone said was wrong with you is the most right thing about you.
What is inside
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The place itself
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Outside the house
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Getting out
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Afterward
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Who this is for
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Worth your time if
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Not for you if
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Why me
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 at Trader Joe’s, all of it running on traits my family treated as defects. This is my account, and it is not flattering to anybody in it including me.
Questions people ask
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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.
A chapter
My Life in Crazytown
This is not 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 navigate 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 is not 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