I also want to thank Pagan Sphinx for the post about The Mad Pride Movement. I wrote this comment. But I wanted to foreground it so as hopefully offer more space to the topic of "madness".
Who is mad?
I'm fairly certain that the people who make the decisions for us in various government houses all over the world are mad. Yet they will never have to be worried about being discredited or found out as fucking completely insane.
What is mad?
I'm also fairly certain that mad people are among the most sane people on the planet and that they are less insane and more oppressed because what is commonly defined as sane is so fucking over the top constrictive and merciless.
Who gets to decide if I'm mad?
I've been called crazy or insane by people who were taught to live in a dissassociative state since they were children. When they here my thoughts so completely grounded in my intuitions, perceptions, reality, core, they are confronted with a choice of defining me as in/sane or themselves as having been profoundly fucked over. Guess which one they usually prefer to choose. (laughter of the damned.)
Why does the concept of madness exist?
In a world where human beings have been taught to only believe what they've been taught or what they've been told, binaries abound. This or that. Me or them. Here or there. Out and in. Top and bottom. We've been taught to rely on the existence of binaries rather than continuums. It's how we code and categorize what we know of the world, of ourselves and of each other. From this place it becomes pretty easy to construct any experience or set of perceptions that presents on one extreme of a binary or completely outside a binary as in/sane.
Most people who experience oppression, who rebel or resist or who just roll up in a ball and wait for the psychic beatings to stop are considered in/sane. Wimmin, queers, sexual deviants, people of colour, poly people, trans and intersexed people, youth, old people. All in/sane.
If they openly display evidence of this in/sanity for all to see they risk medication, incarceration, violence, death...for their own good. It's all for their own good.
This doesn't sit well with me. It hurts my head, my spirit and my heart. The hurt shows on my face, bends my back and slows my stride. My eyes are wild with the hurt. My face can frown more than considered womanly. I worry about being caught showing too much hurt, confusion, rage, disgust with the way things are.
I worry they'll come for me. I wonder why they haven't yet come to medicate me. I sometimes pray they'll hurry up and medicate me. Feeling this much sucks. Feeling nothing, being comfortably numb seems so seductive on some days. Biting the inside of my cheek numb. Twitching and drooling numb. Able to function robot like as a contributing member of the hell also known as society would seem like an endearing thought...if I didn't have recurring dreams of burning the whole thing down.
anyhoo...
here's the comment I wrote about the Mad Pride post...
Dark Daughta said...
Hi,
Thanks for this. As someone who usually defines as insane, not jokingly, but seriously, I realize that the society is so profoundly diseased and disassociative that it's almost impossible for those who live in it, maintain it and rely on it for sustenance and a sense of validation to be anything but mad.
Madness is ubiquitous, not rare. Because the society is hierarchical and power based it becomes necessary to single out some people and label their perceptions and reactions and ways of being as "mad". But in truth they're the sane ones in that they have, whether by accident or through design, to get a grasp of how profoundly fucked this place actually is. There is no way to look around at who we are as a species, what we've done to the planet, how our families function and how we lie, lie, lie about every aspect of our lives without going irrevocably mad. It's the only truly sane response. I'm still learning to live with what I see and understand. On good days I feel crazed and defiant. On bad days I participate. Mad Pride for us all. Long live Mad Pride.
