Global Madness

By my mid twenties I had recognized the pattern: every time I resurfaced from a depression it was accompanied by the same emotion: anger. I realized that if depression could be characterized as repressed anger, which is a form of powerlessness, then it only made sense that getting in touch with my fundamental power would catapult me out of this state. Despite my culture’s aversion to the mood, I began to see my anger as my friend and greatest ally.

At the age of thirty eight, I resurfaced from my last great depression. My decades of hard work went largely unnoticed, but I didn’t care. I knew well what I had achieved; basically what experts in the field of mental health told me was impossible.
But what exactly did I resurface into? I had imagined that I was about to join the ranks of the productive, the confident, the dare I say it, well-adjusted. But to my utter astonishment, I soon realized that while I was doing time in the therapists’ office and giving up one favourite vice after another, humanity at large was transmogrifying into the biggest shit show the race has ever seen.

Here are a few observations I had when I first emerged from twenty years of therapy:

For decades I struggled with my own destructive tendencies, only to resurface into a world where war is an ongoing reality, where technological innovations are used to destroy both people and the planet, and where addictions in the form of food, television, status and power are the norm.

For decades I was told that I was Bi Polar, that I was incapable of holding any middle ground, that instead I swung from one extreme of thought and action to the other. And then I resurfaced into a world where human beings are so politically and religiously polarized that fundamentalist sects are becoming increasingly popular.

For decades I fought my suicidal impulses, searched for meaning in a life that seemed to have none. And then I resurfaced into a world that by all measures is marching inexorably toward a meaningless annihilation.

I couldn’t help but wonder if people who are labelled mentally ill are simply those individuals who more strongly reflect humanity’s collective shadow. How else can I explain committing twenty years of my life to overcoming my own darkness, only to resurface into a world that can hardly be called enlightened?

It has occurred to me that I’m not crazy at all, but that I am being asked to adapt to a world gone mad. And the best antidote I have found to this madness is reconnecting with my fundamental power.