meetup part 2

“I think that the earth is a very nice place to be living on,” he said to her, “and I never felt that by going one step too far I was going to fall off it either. You can always do things two or three times on the earth and everybody's plenty patient till you get something right. First time wrong doesn't mean you're sunk.”

Yesterday at the meetup group someone declared madness a curse; someone else insisted that the world is a terrible place full of violence and injustice and destruction.

I prefer to think of madness as a gift; and that the world is a difficult place but also filled with joy and love, in the most unexpected pockets and places. I guess that makes me quite naïve – but I don't care; it's the only way I can get through the day without crumbling. Madness took me a step too far but still, I didn't fall off the earth.

The mad experience can be terrifying, disruptive and even disgusting. It can also be exhilarating and redemptive. No matter the flavour of the experience, there's something to be learned. Why does it need to be contained and eradicated?

When we frame madness as illness, it removes the potential for reading joy and learning from the experience. It becomes 'awfulised', as someone else in the group pointed out. When we're told that our experience is indicative of illness, we are left feeling both diminished and stymied, both unwell and unfit. We twist ourselves into pretzel shapes, trying to fit back into the mold of expectation, of an imagined ideal of health that simply doesn't reflect the peaks and troughs of the human condition.

There's room for wobbles, for sure: those two or three times – or more, frankly – of getting things wrong. In fact, life seems to be full of getting things wrong. So what? Why not take it in our stride, with good grace, with mirth?

“People don't murder as easy as that. They do a lot of hitting around, but not so much murdering. I've had some murders here, but not many. I've discovered that most things turn out all right. Of course some of them turn out bad.”

So yeah, it's all relative really. Madness is a curse if you allow that to be the lens through which you perceive it, or it can be a gift of both suffering and insight. It can be a rich resource, a thread in the tapestry, a note in the song – there are so many ways really to frame it, other than illness.

(Quotes from Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies)

(Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash)