There’s a drive to madness, an impetus to keep going so you don’t fall back and dwell on what’s happened to you. What keeps happening to you. What you’ve done. If you’re constantly stimulated then you don’t have to question anything beyond the immediate. It’s living as flow.
Everything is a challenge to you. Every interaction doesn’t have to be merely negotiated, but conquered. When your mind can twist anything to a meaning that condemns you, you take every opportunity to keep moving. Words are fast, handed out to deal with the immediacy of the situation, to move it forward, and so present a new challenge without the old one embedding and occupying you. You keep pressing forward because you know if a thought sticks it will wrap around you and tell you every way you’re wrong. It will find new ways to show how you’ve failed, how you’ve not cared for others, not cared for yourself, why you’ve been hateful—because it tells you deep down you are hateful—and why you don’t deserve the only thing you want in the moment: peace. You can’t stop because you know you are not what you need, you are not peaceful, you are not ease, so you can’t live with ease. You don’t deserve it.
It’s a life of constant change because to stop, for a moment, is to become swamped with fear and being surrounded by your own fear is to torture yourself.
Such living is invigorating. There is always somewhere, something to move into. You never let up because to do so is to give up, and—in some ways—to punish yourself, which would be true madness; a giving into madness.
You convince yourself of the allure of progress despite you never considering where you will come to. You only know—or at least hope—that you will run out of your own hell, eventually. You feel like you have no choice, that this is the sane response to your insanity.
Looking back on such times it’s easy to see what you achieved as a something akin to success. If you are sane, then you escaped, albeit with scars. If you’re still mad you’re still running. If neither of these, then, well...
You turn to appreciate your constant going forward, as meaning in why you travelled, somewhere, anywhere, to new places, new insights, but mostly new contentions that give you the possibility of ‘understanding.’
You had adventures that in hindsight tell interesting stories. It’s raw material but the emphasis should be on ‘raw.’
With no time given to the history of anything, the lessons learned in the past, or what a considered response could provide you with, you had run on pure instinct.
During those times you may appear mad, you may appear foolish, you may not have the ability to cover yourself in the politeness of every day life, and you almost certainly can’t conceive of the ability to construct lies to cover your frailties. You exist with vulnerabilities to the fore; behind you, with you, but maybe—just maybe—not before you.
If time was taken to look at your life you would find an honesty within it. However you can’t disentangle the honest parts of yourself from the manipulations madness entwines with them. You don’t have the quiet to hear yourself think; madness is the roar of life far too loud.
The desires you had were acted upon, and were no less real for the hasty decisions you made, it’s just that they may not have been approached in the most constructive way.
In times without this lust for life, without this whole-hearted, headlong sprint into every moment, it can be difficult to appreciate what your concerns are. You might find it painful to reach for what it is you want from life. Addressing yourself you see hardships standing in your way: reasons-to-not.
You might not imagine you can achieve what it is you want, but the truth—or at least some portion of it—is available by looking at what you hoped for while you were mad.
You hoped for sanity, in many ways, but sanity to achieve what? You wanted to understood why this had been done to you. You wanted to know what this was.
I wanted to be seen, to understand myself and to be understood, now I am doing so.