the bicycle bells of choice

further thoughts about the world we create

photo by I D E Macintosh

I've written a piece for Unpsychology about a recent experience of mine, whereby a single choice reverberated back through the years to reveal an ugly truth. A compassionate impulse, an instinct to connect, was blotted out by a moment of hesitation and the louder squawking of my rational mind.

It sends me back to hospital, that first night I was there after being sectioned. I wandered throughout the ward, deeply ensconsed in a moral struggle between rational thought and existential flow. Every step I took, every choice I made, was leading me into damnation. It was incredibly frightening. I felt that my every move was wrong, and that every action was a regrettable mistake. Opening a door would allow demons into the room; shutting the door would lock angels out. I came across an empty pair of shoes, talismans of safety, and put them on; then winced with each step as they brought me closer and closer to a fatal cliff edge – always impending but never actually reached. I came across a bed and lay down, telling myself that this would protect me, but then realised with horror that I could hear cries of distress from the next bed over – cries intended for me.

Years later I found myself in another spell of psychosis, again navigating the space between rationality and impulse. In this case, as I walked through the streets of Amsterdam, I surrendered my choices to the ringing bells of passing bicycles. With each chime, I would turn and take a different direction. This call and response approach to decision-making felt sacred, as I set logic aside and put myself into the hands of fate, swept along in a current of senses.

We create our reality, we spin it like golden thread out of the empty air. Anything is possible. Our rational mind tells us that there are limitations, restrictions – that society will whisper behind its hands, that judgment will fall upon us from an unseen jury. Our rational mind says to us, 'this is the real world, you must cut off your beautiful corners in order to fit into it' – but our rational mind lies to us. Our beautiful corners, our unshapely curiosities are valid and worthwhile expressions of our being. We diminish our world considerably when we squeeze ourselves into smaller spaces and when we justify it as a necessary compromise.

In psychosis, one often finds connections and patterns where others cannot see them. There is even a term for this: apophenia. Please notice: I wrote 'connections and patterns where others cannot see them' – not 'connections and patterns which are not there.’ How is anyone to declare so definitively what is or is not there? The psychiatric approach claims that its perceptions of reality override the perceptions of the psychotic; psychiatry declares that its version of reality is real, while madreality is not. I fundamentally disagree: in my experience, madreality is as real as consensus reality. It's just hidden out of sight, behind those beautiful corners.

The rational mind, in any case, is a myth. We like to imagine the rational mind as some clean and tidy realm, like the mental equivalent of a Georgian terraced house with its square white stones and black iron railings, neatly perpendicular and upright. Less appealing is the rubbish on the pavement: the messy, emotional, hormonal, relational, contextual, instinctual, confusing and circumstantial mental jungle which constitutes our minds – even within the the most clinical state of sanity. We may just as well follow the chimes of bicycle bells.

If madness has taught me anything, it is that the world is ours for the making. Heaven or hell, we create them both in even our most prosaic choices. Yet even so, I am still learning this lesson. There is still so much to learn.