"They never tell you how crazy you are. Just that you have lost it, that you're beside yourself... out of your mind."
I have a few favorite foreign short films, and this is certainly one of them. It’s an interesting take on the concept of how to measure
a person’s sanity, or lack thereof. Or more, how it feels to be in the midst of
losing your sanity, and how you are supposed to adjust to life as an insane
person, while trying to find out exactly just how insane you are.
I could never imagine what it would be like to be clinically
mad. I know that I am not fully right myself, and doctors have been telling me
so from a very young age, but nobody is fully “right” anyhow. I have been
diagnosed with a few disorders, but they are slight and do
not inhibit my ability to function in society as a normal person. I don’t hear voices,
I don’t see things that aren’t real, I don’t have multiple personalities, and I
am not paranoid or schizophrenic. Everyone has a disability of some sort, I believe,
and that might possibly be what gives us humanity; the capability of knowing
and understanding that we are not perfect, and are all flawed, and persevering
with that as a social and empathetic species in our environment. I suppose you
could say I am less insane than most people. If measured, I’m sure I am only
2.7 centimeters insane.
I have always wondered what it would be like to be crazy,
truly crazy, and know that I was crazy. I often see people downtown talking to
themselves, or at a wall. I have seen a woman walking down the street with
three old, tattered dolls in a stroller, and taking care of them as if they
were her own children, and it reminds me of an old horror movie called “Don’t
Look in the Basement” about a mental facility where one of the patients in the
institution has a doll that she cares very deeply about and thinks is her real
child. But none of these people I see actually know they are crazy, or at least
I don’t believe they do. I think their insanity could be measured to be approximately
124 centimeters.
To be insane, and know you are insane, could be a terrible
thing. Not only would you have to learn to re-adjust to the world around you,
but you’d have to learn to juggle both your insanity, and the knowledge of your
insanity. I’m most certain that understanding you are insane would drive you
even more bonkers, especially after finding a way to measure it. Exactly 91
centimeters. And you can't possibly do anything about it because you are insane and incapable of grasping the sanity needed to change it.
Do people committed in institutions know they are deranged?
You’d have to know something was wrong with you when you realize you are being
given medications every day, and have to ask permission to go outdoors only to
be kept under surveillance in a closed area. Wouldn’t you have to realize
things were a bit off when you watch movies and the television and see that
nobody else has the same restrictions as you? Or is the mind of a crazy person
similar to an elderly person that has become senile? They don’t know they are
senile, they just ARE.
If my mentality were ever to be derailed, I wouldn’t want to
know it. People look at the touched differently, and treat them differently
than they would a normal person. Relationships change when you are crazy. I
wouldn’t want to become crazy and know it was happening to me, and see the way
the world changed around me because of it. I’d rather it happen without my
knowledge. Perhaps it already has, and if that is the case, then I am pleased with
the outcome, and I am pleased to not know how many centimeters I am from
sanity.
Sometimes there are some that know. There are some the realize that their connection to reality is slowly evaporating like so much morning fog. Sometimes they can have an overpowering epiphany where they think to themselves "This can't be right, I must be going mad." They realize that things are off kilter and they are standing on the edge of a precipice from which even if they manage to claw their way back to solid reality there will still be plenty of people that would still see them as lost.
ReplyDeleteMan is a poor judge of sanity. We live in a world where the words 'socially acceptable' and 'sane' are interchangeable. But one does not necessarily mean the other. And therefore many are perceived as being insane by others when they do things that are socially inacceptable, but even then most times they would not see themselves as one who had lost their mind.
I think that too be truly insane you would have to have the complete and utter destruction of the ego and the self. You would have to find yourself adrift in an abyss where you could not rationally say to yourself "I think therefore I am." No thoughts, nothing but complete and total nothingness.
That level of madness and insanity would be far truer to the definition of both of those words than any casual label applied by the informed, the uninformed, or even the misinformed. And to stand there fully and very rationally knowing that everything was slipping away, would more than likely terrify any human being beyond all imagining.
Beyond all rationality.
From my experience of such things.
But that's the thing to remember, any time when you fall even if it is into the most abysmal of hellish descents the choice is always to linger there for all eternity...or pick yourself up and claw your way back to the light.
And oh let me tell you, very few things in this modern day world are so empowering as to manage to pull yourself out of such complete nothingness one inch at a time. And to be standing there once again on solid rational ground with the sun on your face, that is to fully understand the true potential of man.
...And especially of self.
But it is not an easy thing to do.
And the world does not create many that can do it.
So if you ever find yourself in a predicament where you too feel yourself starting to slip away and becoming just a tad too hysterical, just let me know and I would be glad to apply my experience in combination with the fully sanctioned and socially acceptable for many many years la titillation du clitoris to make sure that you don't fall too far too fast.
Sanity is simply a facade; a lie society makes us believe. The feeling you are feeling isn't you going insane, it's literally your brain being rewired to see things that you formerly couldn't or wouldn't. Quantum physics and science are beginning to understand this concept; when we begin to understand just how "insane" our internal worlds are the physical one follows suit. Maybe trying to claw our way out of this realization is actually fighting what our bodies already know: if we allow ourselves to continue the fall down the rabbit hole, inevitably we land directly where we began. It's quite possible that the fighting itself is the very thing that drives us mad.
ReplyDeleteThe thing about insanity is: a person can never be insane unless they conform to the title given. Psychology is fascinating, and one of the most interesting facets of psychology is conformity. If you got a person who was for all intents and purposes "sane" and then got a bunch of doctors, and psychologists to tell that person that they were not psychologically normal or that they had a specific mental illness, would that person then act differently. Experiments have show that, yes they would. It's interesting that there still exists a stigma for the afflicted though. WHy should someone be persecuted because their illness originates in the brain when it's the most complicated organ in the body with the most chance of developing problems?
ReplyDeleteThen there are the hypochondriacs that will think they are insane no matter how many people or doctors tell them they are not. Either way, you bring up a good point, Aaron.
ReplyDelete