Phobias Two

*msn: Everything’s eventual

Some days I worry, I really really worry, that I’m really just insane, that nothing I see, that no one I know, or “know”, is really there.

Crazy people, they say, live in a world of their own, peopled with strange ghosts from their past, or fantastical wisps of their imagination. Travel the world in a bed with crispy taut white sheets. Dance away the time in straps, in a dream-soft white room, within hard-white greying walls, in a forgetting and forgotten bubble of time and place.

They’re living a life that isn’t really one at all, but they don’t know it.

Some days I can almost, in a on-the-tip-of-your-tongue kind of way, feel myself sitting in a corner of all that whiteness, laughing, smirking, crying, singing, talking, feeling, all alone.

Madness, it seems, is seeing the world in a way that others don’t.

But then, if you think about it, we all see the world in a way that others don’t. Even the smallest and simplest of things isn’t safe – if I asked you to think of the colour purple, if I asked a thousand other people, and if I could see them all, I might get a thousand and one different shades. If I was happy and you were happy and everyone else was happy it doesn’t mean we all feel the same.

Crazy people, they say, live in a world of their own, but so do all of us. Perhaps it’s just that our worlds are smaller, maybe, less different, perhaps.

But where, then, does individuality end and insanity begin? And how many million lines between the two would I have to draw before the world agreed?

It is disheartening to think that, to someone out there, I might be the very definition of certifiably insane.

Then again, it is decidedly heartening to know I’m probably not alone.