On Madness
Illness, wellness, and welcoming yourself home.
Madness is not necessarily an illness. It can lead to deeply meaningful experiences that transform one’s understanding of self and world in positive ways. It can be a gift, just as any bodymind trait might be socially or personally considered as such. Deep sadness or laser-focused anxiety can grant you a sharp sense of realism cutting through complacency and denial; euphoric highs can free you from the fetters of convention and the “real world” and give you a flexibility and openness to access truth and beauty beyond. Being absorbed in a reality of your own is accessing a piece of our physical and philosophical multiverse from which only you can unearth the deeper meanings.
Madness can also just be neutral, just a way of being. But it is always judged as negative and abnormal from the vantage point of capitalistic, colonialist society. They define generalized norms from pseudo-objective measurement; they say you are ill and lacking, out-of-balance and out-of-line. You must either recover your functioning and worth as a slave of capitalism; otherwise, you are invalid, to be disappeared behind locked doors and under powerful drugs.
“Mental illness” is a label of control; “Madness” is to be uncontrollable. Indeed, you may suffer much under its might. When you first discover it within you, you may be shocked, disoriented, in deep pain. You may be led to take actions that you’d never previously imagine yourself doing, that might be thrilling, calming, or otherwise purposeful in the moment but which ultimately cause harm, to yourself or others. Yet you may have no idea what else to do in such states, so you begin to dissociate yourself from them. That’s not me, that’s “crazy me.” I need to avoid it as much as I can. You may begin to wonder, even believe, that you are indeed as ill and broken-brained as they tell you. The feeling of illness, of brokenness is real. You don’t want to live your life out-of-control, suffering.
But if you look closer into your intense experiences, perhaps with the help of a therapist or spiritual guide, you will discover something more. The boundaries between states of “sanity” and “insanity” may not be as clear-cut as you think; to strive to be “sane” after insanity could be to sanitize the germs of insight into self and world that your “episode” of Madness has gifted you. It is not easy to discern what these insights precisely are; indeed, if you interpret them incorrectly, take your mind-messages at face value, and act upon them, you may harm yourself or others. Romanticizing your experiences will not help either; it is not your wild thoughts and feelings and sensations that you must love, but rather the continual Seeking that must accompany them.
But once you embark on this journey of Seeking, you welcome yourself home. Nothing may yet be clear to you, yet so much is becoming. You start to reimagine what Healing actually means for you and looks like for you. You chase your self-actualization and learn the patterns of your bodymind, slowly figuring out what you need in each moment. You will define your own psychological sense of balance, not in reference to a social norm, but what you need to survive and thrive. You will not want to be alone, so you reach out to people: people who can support you, people who understand you.
The world is scary for we who experience Madness. A visible slipping-open of ourselves in public may have dire consequences, worsened especially by other social marginalization we experience. We must support each other, care for each other, especially when “the system” fails to care for us.
But we are beautiful, powerful, and worthy, and you will come to know it. I just hope that the rest of the world will, too.
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