The nice thing about being crazy is that you stop trying to fit in. Really. You understand you’re a nut and that the sane world and you are two separate things, so all your efforts to re-shape your square-peg-self into a round, curvy world gets dropped by the wayside. You stop pretending. And it’s such a relief. It took so much energy to try to round those corners.
It is painful at first. It’s one thing to be an outsider, another to be relegated to it, but it does offer a unique perspective. “Sane” people do a lot of crazy blank. And you see it better from the outside.
That transition period from sane to crazy, though, is not a straight line. It’s a process. I am so comfortable with the things that don’t make sense that I forget how hard it was to get from seeing it to accepting it.
(Blank. I didn’t know this was how I was writing this. It’s going a little deeper than I intended.)
I spend a lot of time in a coffee shop, in the midst of what I call “wounded children”. Mostly young folks, they come from the kind of dysfunctional, unstable backgrounds I came to terms with long ago. I guess what I’m trying to say is that their pain is still fresh to them, and they’re avoiding it heartily.
I’d forgotten.
I don’t particularly like them, but they’re so familiar I gravitate to them. I don’t hate them, it’s just that there’s this thing about living in denial — there’s a host of behaviors which go hand-in-hand with running from those eternal internal demons. For instance, non-confrontational behavior is taken to the extreme, not just when it comes to exploring yourself personally, but especially when dealing with others. (Except, of course, when it comes to demonstrating that evil capitalist corporate structure. Then, any kind of confrontation is acceptable.) Great care is taken to not disturb someone’s universe, lest you turn it turn upside down for them and they waft into the abyss, never to return.
The line between sanity and lunacy is very fine to those dancing on the precipice. Until you cross it. Then you realize the line never existed. You have to be willing to cross it in order to get better. There’s a lot of people who don’t know that, and so, they’re afraid.
I’d forgotten how scary that dance is.
I haven’t been playing by the rules. The rules are that you aren’t supposed to dig. The rules are that it’s too easy to break things so you should keep your hands by your sides the whole time. The rules are that you should keep your explorations superficial and inconsequential.
Which I find pointless. If I wanted constant superficial inanities, I’d talk to sane people. I’d find the Brady Bunch and we’d discuss the mall and what Cathy wore to school today.
It’s also hard because I’ve been through this stage and I’m unwilling to go back into the closet, as it were. Stuffing myself into small spaces so I don’t take up too much room. Keeping the topic of conversation small and safe. How is the weather there, by the way? Much rain?
I find myself having to shake up my own world a little. I’ve outgrown my social circle. To be honest, I’ve known since the first week I met them where they were in their journeys, but I’d forgotten how long the process took. And I was too lazy to get up and find those people who’ve decided that their pain isn’t the most special thing on earth, to find the ones eagerly beating a path to their interiors to find out what lurks there. It’s just been much easier to sit on the periphery here, waiting for someone to cross over — if only for a little while — so I could have someone to talk to.
I’m not going to find it here. Everyone here is lugging their VSOP Black Label bottles of suffering around, occasionally offering glimpses into who they are, and then quickly extinguishing the light lest anyone see.
How to find the fearless explorers? That’s a good question. I don’t have a map, not sure where they’d be. I have been watching The Secret. “The Secret” is a short-ish (hour and a half) video which talks about the law of attraction. In a nutshell, what you focus on is what manifests in your life. So I’ve been envisioning the kind of people for whom conversation is a chance to explore anything and everything. I’ve been imagining and experiencing how that kind of interaction would feel.
It’s funny. As I trace my steps back to when I first started hanging at the coffee shop and with this particular group of people, I see that I was focused on the lack of people to relate to. And that’s what manifested. Where the mind inclines, the feet will follow.
It’s going to be interesting going another way.