When a receiving public does not value nuance or context, a person’s complexity can be boiled down to their most readily visible, most extreme, and most obvious parts. The “limit” of you becomes the all of you…we fail to consider what it might do to those defined by their worst qualities or most spectacular risks.

 “Crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering.”
 — Rebecca Solnit

If my singular body experiences conflict alone, I risk madness. If I notice it privately, I risk madness. If I notice it as part of a collective relegated to the lonely and private and disempowered margins, I risk madness. Even more so if I struggle to look away from the thing that threatens to place me there, if I insist that I look on regardless, while the powers that be remain shuttered. You can prove you didn’t see something much easier than you can prove you did. Let’s pause on that sentence for a moment or two before moving along.

See, for example, “I Live in Fear” (Kurosawa, 1955). In the film, the head of the household, Kiichi Nakajima, is hyper-focused on the possibility of another H-bomb. His suffering is part PTSD, part inability to bear the reality of war. The attention he pays to this reality leads his family, then their community, then the various institutions around them to interact with him as if from across the divide of sanity. His hyper-vigilance, rather than framed as a natural result of global trauma, is framed instead as unnecessary excess and unattractive fretfulness. In other words: madness. Until he is in fact insane—either truly, or marked as such by the walls of the asylum he finds himself housed by in the end. Either way, the container proves its content.

All this in response to the “reality” of war. The rationality of war. So that one’s inability to bear it is defined as the place where sense turns sour.

*

From a handout received during a de-escalation training at the mental health agency where I previously worked:

Primitive Brain vs. Evolved Brain

Primitive – punitive, survival, emotional, fight, flight, freeze, reactive

Evolved – learning, relationship, not reactive but responds, strategic

I wrote in various margins along the two-page handout, “bad?” “good?” repeatedly, my question marks sincere, and I wondered about things like usefulness, or necessity. Seated casually in a large conference room, a tray of bite-sized muffins sat between me and my closest peer, all of us awash in fluorescent lighting. “Rational rational rational,” said the man, who works closely with law enforcement, instructing the group.

In the mental health field, clinicians discuss client care in terms of “best interest” and “desired outcomes.” But with regards to the individual iteration of one’s mental health—I’m talking here about experience and personhood—a demand for rationality can sometimes paint more complex experiences invisible.

Like the complexity of having an experience that occurs in more than just your learned brain.

Or the experience that doesn’t lend itself to simple sentences, experiences so full of emotion that it’s as if language has refused them. Experiences that leave a deep impression on the vulnerable self.

When exploring what it means to be a good person, philosopher Martha Nussbaum distinguishes between one who is like a jewel and one who is like a plant, and the ways that our human fragility, emblematized through the latter, is in fact inseparable from our goodness. She writes: “That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed.”

In this sense, exposure is also the vulnerability of wanting to avoid that which threatens to harm you, of admitting the possibility of harm in the first place.

And in this sense, the ethical life is also the one that confesses its leafy green precariousness, the life that does not refuse delicacy for the sake of outward composure.

“What’s the metaphor?” a friend of mine, also in the mental health field, reminds me to ask myself when interacting with a paranoid client. So that, yes, even the experiences built of delusion and fear might also be viewed as experiences nonetheless, as part of the reality one moves through.

Some of the most emotional reactions I’ve witnessed in my personal and professional life come from Rational Men. Rational Men who are so rational that they’ve amputated emotion and all its corresponding vulnerabilities. Men who don’t know how to account for anything with outer layers that don’t make immediate sense (to them).

What they amputate, I would argue, is context, and I can’t think of anything more emotional than pretending not to see something that’s right in front of you because you don’t want to account for it or you don’t want it to matter as much as the things in life you’re more comfortable looking at and accounting for.

When mental health and wellbeing are staked on the poles of rationality, even the most natural and normal emotional responses to this frightening world become opportunities for diagnosis and dismissal. “I didn’t mean to dysregulate you,” a co-worker once said to me when I reacted with appall after they described an appalling situation. As if I’d birthed the disruption myself.

*

Nakajima is the emotional protagonist, looking with specificity and care at a reality that doesn’t make sense to him. The reality of war doesn’t make sense. In the film, the nonsense is transferred back onto his own body, society gazing at him through the lens of unwellness. Contributing to this diagnosis is the fact that he wants to spend his family’s inheritance on relocating them out of harm’s way, ensuring their safety regardless of the state in which it leaves their bank account. He measures their safety as something worth spending the family’s considerable wealth on. By establishing a sense of worth that challenges their sense of monetary value, he cleaves just enough space between those two words to seem disruptive—crazy, even. Nakajima is labeling something of the world as out of place, something the majority (or at least those with power) has decided it will tolerate, and by doing so effectively exiles himself to an outer place, marginalized and then locked away.

By the end of the film, after Nakajima has virtually destroyed his family’s wealth and is incarcerated, he comes to view his place in the asylum as a refuge. The movie ends with his deep expression of concern for those “back on earth,” with Nakajima feeling safe but worried, fiercely curious about what’s happening back home. By escaping reality’s terror for fear of the very real and rational possibility of war—of murderous implications born of human invention, and their likelihood to repeat themselves without the interference of conscious social decisions made otherwise—Nakajima wanders into the arms of insanity.

Or to say it another way: when terror and inequality and warfare are normalized, one must seek the abnormality of madness, must escape the burden of complacency and complicity by going against common sense. If war is the habitat, we’re forced adapt in unpopular ways if we prefer biodiversity to genocide, if we view ourselves as animals and plants worth protecting. The singularity of combat does not hold space for the fruitfulness of diversity and context, and it forces a bold line down the middle: reasonable militaristic support on one side, irrational dissent on the other.

“Common sense”: the act of not worrying about things which the majority refuse to worry about. Worry and attention, after all, are mad. Sensitivity is mad; at its best, excessive and embarrassing. Emotional responses to an emotional world are highly irrational, says the status quo, staring through tunnel vision with critiquing eyes at those who seem constantly affected. And the lack of space afforded to someone with such concerns, the limited and decreasing chances of that person retaining their normalcy (to be seen as normal when responding in big ways to the world’s gigantic consequences) further drives the attentive individual toward madness.

“Anticipation conjures its object,” writes Judith Butler, so that difference becomes protest becomes anger becomes insanity, easily, a boulder set loose down a steep hill by a disinterested party; a party that sees your concerns as a threat to their ability to remain disengaged, and that can only maintain their seated outlook by sending the other person running. There are many different ways to live a life in fear, but those of us who tend to unravel in the face of this traumatic world sometimes end up, in more or less significant ways, unraveled people.

I’ve joked to my partner on more than one occasion that the quickest way to make me angry is to tell me to calm down. I turn to smoke in the face of such patriarchal commands: the suggestion that my protests or my visions or my bountiful experiences with healthy anger are automatically relegated to stormy seas, that there can’t be good calm valuable iterations of objection. So that I am, in the end, everything but calm. Or consider Rebecca Solnit’s joke that the most significant pastime of her youth was “not getting raped.” What these jokes highlight is the unfortunate tendency for one’s fear—and the consenting personhood it’s sometimes trying to protect—to be dismissed as made-up shadow, as absence on the gray ground, while those with whom we plead refuse to look up and acknowledge the temporary expanse of clouds.

*

An essay on madness and reality pivots easily toward an essay on authenticity. About Don Quixote and its eponymous main character, a teenaged Diane Arbus wrote: “His ‘madness’ is a way of being himself to the limit. You feel that suddenly and deliberately he threw off his already limited awareness of the conventions of the world, and threw himself in the world’s face defiantly.” Not quite a century later, in an essay exploring the subtle relationship between her brother’s poetry and her own photographic work, Arbus’s nephew, Alexander Nemerov, surmised that his aunt’s own madness was also “a way of being herself to the limit, of refusing to believe that the real world is not also the basis for a revelation lurking in the appearance of things” (emphasis mine).

It is true that certain authenticities are more validated than others, despite the near paradox of this sentence. And it is therefore also true that when a receiving public does not value nuance or context, a person’s complexity can be boiled down to their most readily visible, most extreme, and most obvious parts. The “limit” of you becomes the all of you. We assume this works in favor of the celebrity, or the successful capitalist, and we fail to consider what it might do to those defined by their worst qualities or most spectacular risks: the schizophrenic, the suicide, the addict, the panicked dissident afraid of war.

In what situation can we envision encountering the mad person in which they are not framed by their madness? Their perceived obviousness is what marks them, much in the same way we expect authenticity to manifest: so authentically real as to not ever be anything other than what it is, specific and definable and, perhaps most of all, apparent. By this logic, a person’s real self is not what’s been measured or thought through, nor is it the selfhood that stretches so far along a given spectrum that it maintains its capacity for contradictions and, as Whitman famously said, multitudes. What if the authentic self were always and only a lurking revelation, something not readily or consistently accessible or, my goodness, something built through time’s gift of reconsideration? Instead, we learn from within the confines of American culture that authenticity is easily accessed, obvious, blunt, and constant. (Common sense). The quality of authenticity is suspended mid-air much in the same way as insanity: here exists a thing that, once witnessed, will remain permanently seen and forever known.

Our lack of imagination when it comes to lives not our own is nothing but a mark of society’s stuntedness, our constantly dwindling archetypes, and does not reflect the true possibility of there being more out there worth imagining and discovering, a place where our capacities could be larger than the frame through which we tend to view them.

*

We all carry the weight of influence, and we all owe each other, in constant turns, space in which to be big and different and overly concerned. “Overly,” yes, because historically and too often, “underly.” Moments in which to scream against injustice while sorting out how to best function despite injustice’s continued presence. Moments in which to react publicly and resist the homogenization of progress. And then, because we must: to begin the work of de-normalizing the existence of certain tyrannies, the odd and necessary requirement of highlighting a thing not to freeze it in place, but to eventually make it smaller: hatred, inequity, marginalization, the bomb.

To pretend away the existence of injustices carves a fatal distance between the one aware of the injustice and the rest of the world. But the world is not far away from anyone! Nor is it unfeeling, nor does it ask to be defined by the worst things transpiring on its slowly heating surface. In fact, the world is full of empathy and emotion: there is wind, there are animals; and the sun comes back each day despite everything we say about its temperature; and the plants grow despite our often careless intentions. And when I say the world is balanced, I mean “balanced” in the true definition of the word: taking all things into account, the stillness and the excess, reacting in ways that accommodate each. Not balance that is middle, but balance that is both. The Earth is a model of resiliency, that quality defined by its insistence despite trauma. Resiliency itself, now that I think about it, is a little mad: to survive the things we’ve already collectively survived, how could we call it anything other than an abnormal feat of strength?

Spaces in which to collectively process the most inhumane hardships of the daily world are endangered spaces. We are all expected to move along move along move along move along, begetting idle neglect and invalidated emotions, and Diagnosis as Dismissal, and rooms full of men teaching us how to evolve our brains toward complete, calcified composure. I sit in the back of the room, feeling and snarling and wondering why all my ideas seem to conflict with all of theirs. I stare at a problem so long that it’s as if I’m begging someone to mistake me as the problem itself. Nakajima pleads: “War can break out any time. If it does, it will be too late.” So that the choice sometimes feels boiled down to either being crazy, or being dead.

*

It is a sensitive apprehension of the world that recognizes many feelings and many actions and many subconsciouses; many purposes, metaphors, accidents and organs; and even more possibilities than all of these words combined could suggest. Who gets to say what is or isn’t a real threat? Who gets to define such significant boundaries for a whole populace? And what makes one reality or justice or lack thereof crazier than another? No, you calm down!

To remain undisturbed about an injustice, which I must pretend doesn’t affect me immediately or directly or at all—I’ll go to my grave seeking the application of an adequate diagnostic term for such disordered apathy.