Why We Can’t Do Crazy

Thomas Fiffer practices patience, but he has zero tolerance for crazy: here’s why.

Insanity is impossible to fight.

You engage, you lose.

Insanity can only be endured.

And unless you join it, endured only so long.

Insanity is slippery, like a snake.

You try to grab hold, and insanity eludes you, slithering away, shifting positions, hissing at you with glee.

Insanity knows it is indefensible and so pretends to be defenseless, acting as if it’s under attack while actually attacking you.

And when you fight, insanity counters with a blast of self-righteousness, exploding the foundation of logic, crumbling the solid footing of equilibrium, vaporizing the sense on which sound decisions are based, and moving the battle to shifting sands.

Insanity wins by undermining, eroding, imploding, engineering collapse from within.

Insanity glories in its victory and tramples you with spite, spiking the ball on your head, not caring if it cracks your skull.

Insanity is always itching for a fight and always out for blood.

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One of insanity’s most successful tactics is biting the root of confidence, injecting the paralyzing venom of doubt, causing us to question ourselves, our own sanity, to reconsider our healthy choices, to feel that illness is a normal state, to begin to believe that we are crazy.

Insanity lies to gain a foothold.

Insanity dips the knife in guilt before the twist.

Insanity wounds us grievously yet always plays the victim.

Endlessly patient, insanity waits for us to grow weary.

Because the more we fight insanity the more we exhaust ourselves, and the more energy insanity seems to gain, feasting on our fruitless effort, draining all our vital juice, as we try to convince it that sour is sour and sweet is sweet, recoiling its snakelike body into its trademark twist, a sneer curling the lips, as we recoil from the visceral blows of hatred, as we gag, breathless, from the sickening odor of contempt.

And insanity wins when we give up, tired, frustrated, beyond pain, when we slide into the stoop-shouldered posture of “whatever” and stop caring, not only about the fight but also about ourselves.

The only way to beat insanity is to walk away.

And when necessary, run.

To call crazy crazy.

To call a spade a spade.

And to place crazy in the hands of professionals who do crazy for a living, who get paid to do crazy, who’ve been trained to detox, depersonalize, and decompress at the day’s end, taught to leave crazy at the door.

♦◊♦

There will always be storms.

But life deserves to be lived in sunshine.

Sanity craves light.

And the soul . . .

The soul craves peace.

This post previously appeared on the Tom Aplomb blog.

Top and middle photos—Wikimedia Commons

Bottom photo courtesy of author