Mad

Visions. Voices. Voluptuous sums of experience come to me continually. They are seemingly beyond my willing them. And I wonder, how much, or if at all, this is also the experience of others. Privately, they are lovely. More than this, they serve as a compass within the uncharted waters of my own unfolding, helping me to get my bearings beyond any well-intended advice I might glean from external sources unfamiliar with the intimacies and particularities of my inward channels. What is “normal” and “abnormal,” I confess, I do not really know. And publicly a person is wise to share such things sparingly. But at the end of the day, one must trust oneself. The alternative is to live a surrogate life watered down by alien opinions, that is, a life no longer one’s own.

Michel Foucault believed that proving the limits of reason, i.e., exploring madness, will reveal truths not rationally accessible. The extent of an individual’s willingness to explore the possibilities of learning and unlearning, beyond the bounds of reason, is like a lead line fathoming the depths of that intrepid spirit within us all. How much do we miss by never dropping the line? What depths do we forsake by incessantly dwelling in our heads? When I sit at the bedside of patients with dementia who are in a way “out of their minds”—the literal meaning of dementia, from the Latin demens—I meet a person with a deconstructed self, deeply saddening to their family and friends, usually, and, on occasion, creative and liberating to the patients themselves. Past trauma, vile thoughts, and vexed spirits that once painfully defined a person’s sense of self are gone, and instead, there is sometimes a smiling, childlike new creation, engaging the world simply with a levity and lightheartedness previously unknown. I have come to see that dementia is not always, or only, disturbing, but also a looking-glass through which we glimpse something true and telling about our humanity. We are more than the rational constructs we cling to. Freedom and joy are closer than we think. The so-called mad may have much to teach us if we are pining for a personal rewilding. As Lewis Carroll wryly wrote, we are all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. But be wary of the maddest of all—those who believe they are not.