Mad World

"I don't go crazy. I am crazy. I just go normal from time to time."

If 'normal' is going about your daily life without the harsh realities of the difficulties you personally face preventing you from functioning, then I guess I can do normal. I think what most people call 'normal' though is being satisfied with an ordinary, humdrum, banal existence. It is not having high aspirations or lofty goals or daring to dream big. It is being content never to ascend from the station in life that you have been born, raised and (sort of) educated into. It is staying inside your box and being happy to be there. Two words spring to mind - fuck that.

At 41 years of age there is so, so much that I want to accomplish. There are so many places I want to go and people I want to meet and experiences I want to have. There are opportunities out in the world that, up to now, I have barely glimpsed. I want to go for any and every one that I can. It has taken me until now to get through the cards that life dealt me, and they were pretty rotten cards to be fair. Add to that the time I basically wasted trying to fix myself in all the wrong ways, and I arrive at the here and now with the same burning desire to achieve, the same ambition and the same drive I have always possessed, magnified tenfold by the awareness of years lost and of finally arriving at a moment where I feel capable of taking it all on. I am ready at last!

Normal was never even a possibility for me, and now I see just how great that fact really is! Having a major psychiatric illness thrust upon you your whole life is a very heavy cross to bare, but in carrying that weight you become extremely strong. It makes you super-resilient, hyper-aware and capable of depths of understanding way beyond that which perhaps a person without such a burden could ordinarily reach. Amazingly, the fight one is constantly engaged in with one's own illness has wonderfully beneficial 'side-effects' - chief of which is that one finds it is easier to keep growing and changing and developing one's thinking throughout life.

“Only in the darkness can you see the stars.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

Also high up on that list is that creativity knows no bounds and comes much more easily, limited only by the nullifying effects of the daily dross mentioned in my opening paragraph. It is dawning on me that all the years of my youth that I so readily label as 'wasted time' could well have been an essential part of my journey. What a wealth of experience that time has provided, which proves the old adage - 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger'. Yes indeed, and in my case it has made me way more interesting, more engaged in the world, much more aware of what is important and what is not, more determined than ever to succeed and above all, much wiser.

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

You've had my personal take on normalcy. The quote above encapsulates the massive problem we have in the wider world due to what can be termed abnormalcy bias. Aldous Huxley had much to say on the phenomenon. Think about it a while. We witness daily atrocities, through one form of media or another, humanity's utterly inhumane treatment of itself, the natural world and all life on the planet, and many of us seem to barely blink an eye. Acts of evil occur with regular frequency the world over and become normalised into our combined consciousness, our culture and our whole way of thinking. TV shows and films glorify violence, destruction and death and hero-worship characters with no morality or humility and we lap it up and even praise it like it's virtue. If that's normality then I want no part of it. I'm tuning that shit right out of my existence.

Maintaining a life free of abnormalcy bias is difficult, but whether one is blessed with the empathy, compassion and humility necessary to acknowledge the suffering in the world, or one chooses to learn it from scratch, it is always a step on the path to being a better human. Standing out from the crowd, putting your head above the parapet and getting over one's fear in order to blaze new trails is even harder, but finding that inner strength and conviction only ever leads to success by the best measure - creating a richer life and becoming a more authentic human being. A bonus then, when that path also coincides with earning enough of a living to support you and yours.

“Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.” - Kathyryn Schulz

I'm nowhere near to fulfilling my potential yet - but small moves make for big changes. The right kind of changes. One thing I know for sure - crazy or not, this is the right path.

This mad world better be ready to make room..


Copyright ©2018 Richard C. Greenlow. All rights reserved.