Descent Into Madness

First of all I want you to get really worried about that title. It is about me. I feel like I am going mad.

Do you feel a little thrum of panic? A moment of worry? That's good that you got it, thanks for caring, and it was designed to get you to have a little feeling of what it has been for me this week. Repeatedly I have felt like I was going mad this week, and a big part of that is the thrum of panic from considering my oncoming madness.

I think my intellectual faculties are still fine, I'm not going mad from obvious delusion. I am going mad because of feelings. I have too many feelings, and many of them are too strong. It has been difficult to do anything, or more accurately I am protecting myself from myself by not doing anything difficult. On different nights over the last week I have slept four hours or twelve hours, depending on my mood. I have choked down tears while doing dishes and stalked through blustery winds with my mind racing through vast fields of thought, the very image of a madman.

The great concern of course is whether this will stop, will it worsen. Almost everyone at some point uses the words, "I think I'm going crazy" but most people are talking about something else. They are talking about the strain of their mind when faced with difficulty. I have basically no difficulty but I can sit here and watch my mind doing strange things. Why am I sometimes frightened of people in a general sense so that going outside to get the garbage can feels like something illicit, and then whenever I actually talk to people it is easy? The impression of everything is so much harder than the reality of it.

I don't know how much of this shows up. My wife has said that home is a nice place to be, and that I am a good husband, so either she is being fantastically nice during a very hard time, or it's true. It's probably true that for most of us our internal world seems much more frayed and difficult than our outside appearance suggests. In the end this isn't really very much different than being seventeen again, but I already managed to get over the fact that no-one will ever really understand me once in my life, twice seems so unfair (ah, the wail of a teenager again).

Of course, the ironic thing is that by the end of the writing of this post my mood has changed from worry and concern into a desire to giggle at the humor of it all.