Accepting Our Inner Madness

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

~Mark Twain

What if there was a less physical explanation for the little aches and pains and twinges we get? What if the instances of annoyance we suffer were more a product of our inner disagreement? What if our anxiety or depression or doubting were, equally, the result of something we have, until now, never known about ourselves?

What if there is a fact about each one of us that stands to explain our confounding lives?

Of course, to entertain these questions there must be an openness of heart, and the preparedness to reason, sensitively, with the irrational. Perhaps only in coming to the messy inordinance of life—accepting our unacceptability—staring our despicability in the face—can we face our madness.

Can we agree that, in agreement with Twain, we are all, to a degree, mad?

But, first, we must get over our local default to deny our madness—for none of us wants to be identified for admission into the asylum. None of us wants to be imprisoned as a mad person. And because of this push to protect our madness, to somehow control it by containing it, it becomes dangerously dormant like Vesuvius. The worst possible encounter is that we might ‘blow’ our lava in unprecedented and unpredictable ways; making headline News.

Fearlessly Approaching Our Fear

The fact of approaching our inner madness in candour is terrifying for the average, sane person. There is no way we want to be seen as pathological, disrupted inside, given to insanities of thought and feeling.

But if we remember the Twain quote, we can begin to explore the fact that most people—generally all of us—have insane dissonances rattling around inside us.

When we get to thinking that insanity is insanely commonplace we don’t need to hide away our embarrassing tendencies from ourselves. We get to understand that others, also, have their embarrassing tendencies, too.

Only when we can appreciate the instances of madness, in truth, will parts of our lives begin to make sense. Only when we can appreciate our undoneness, accepting same, can we see ourselves as more done up—albeit imperfectly.

What Might Help Our Hidden Symptoms Of Trouble

We may be able to connect two thoughts; two phenomena that may, until now, have been hidden from our understanding. These two phenomena—our madness and our complaints—may be so connected it may astound us.

The repression of our madness may explain the exacerbation of our complaints.

What if certain irreconcilable issues (aches or pains, anxieties, fleeting mad thoughts, angering realities, etc) were linked with something, until now, we never knew, or found just so unacceptable that we repressed them from conscious thought?

The truth is, as ‘normal’ people, and priding ourselves as ‘normal’ people, we have repressed instances of madness and propensities of insanity to protect ourselves.

If we can grow in accepting more the unacceptable we may actually diminish the instances of certain aches and pains, anxieties, fleeting mad thoughts, angering realities, etc, and other problems.

***

There is much about us we do not accept. Some of this is too scary; hidden from every other soul. We keep certain things hidden from the world because exposure could prove devastating. The fact is we all have a little madness dormant within. The key is accepting it—not being afraid of it. When we can let it exist, life begins to make more sense.

As we accept more the unacceptable within, we may actually diminish our pain and live more contented lives.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.