We are always a few steps away from losing every thread with reality. By reality, I mean a specific perception of the working world—that memorized and rehearsed navigation model that consistently gives you the ability to interpret and engage with it: an understanding of people's identities, their beliefs, their empathy, and their images. The sounds of reality, the meaning of the cashier at a till, the generic social conversations featuring the general public carrying out their general roles, the schedules of the public's working hours, the opening and closing of shops, the memory of your identity, and the pleasures and pains that give you some sense of your past, future, and present.

We have a lot to memorize and a lot to engage with at all times. Our capacity for memory is what makes insanity so easy to obtain, and it can arrive in the strangest of times—during the most complete moments.

Madness begins with curiosity, curiosity about anything—an obsession accompanied with a self-consciousness about the inner world. First, we seek answers from experiences. Secondly, we seek justice for these answers and their ability to transform some essence of ourselves in the moments we understand something. The seeking begins with an eagerness to establish some meaning from the inquisition—so much so that the drive to search for meaning becomes an aggressive motivation that, amongst the friction, prevails, and casual conformities are sacrificed. One travels into the labyrinth he has spawned from an instinct to secure some finite life within. Seeking something entirely intangible.

The Poet
The poet may seek an image: the gathering of strangers in a public park, the frenzied parties of the elites, or the beauty in the stillness of a mountain range—a journey in search of the ideal, picture-perfect moment to discover something pure. Yet, in this relentless pursuit of perfection, madness seeps in. The poet becomes trapped in an obsessive quest, where each fleeting moment feels just out of reach, distorted by an unending search for meaning that can never fully be grasped. The ideal becomes a haunting specter, driving the poet deeper into isolation, as the real world pales in comparison to the visions in their mind. The poet's madness manifests in the dissolution of boundaries between reality and imagination, where the poetic ideal begins to consume their ability to engage with the ordinary.

The Schizophrenic
The schizophrenic may wander around streets under the guide of his inner ghouls; he may stay at home and draw endless hieroglyphs on his living room walls, in some esoteric rhetoric—his constant chatter and torment. In his world, madness manifests as a distortion of reality so profound that it creates a parallel universe of symbols and voices only he can interpret. The schizophrenic’s madness thrives in the gulf between the tangible world and the invisible forces that govern his thoughts, where every symbol, every sound, carries coded meanings. His attempts to communicate are misunderstood by the outside world, reinforcing his isolation and deepening the divide between his reality and the collective one. The schizophrenic’s madness is a continual unraveling, a labyrinth of thought where even the familiar becomes alien and threatening.

The Scientist
The scientist, on the frontier of unveiling a cure for a disease, may stay awake for nights on end in his lab, once again abandoning his personal maintenance, which in time may lead him to psychosis. His madness emerges not from a lack of understanding but from an overwhelming need to understand—to control nature through reason and discovery. The further he pushes the boundaries of knowledge, the more he becomes consumed by the quest, losing sight of himself in the process. His mind fractures under the weight of endless hypotheses and experiments, as the line between discovery and obsession blurs. Madness, for the scientist, manifests in the collapse of balance between intellectual rigor and personal sanity, where the pursuit of a singular truth blinds him to the cost of his own disintegration.

Madness, in these moments, induces self-degeneracy—it is part of the deal. To seek, one must flee and abandon the previously known and sworn material callings of self-preservation, exchanging them for the scaly touch of specifics in a quest that, by default, makes one appear disheveled. During this time, one finds a reason to justify their actions, abandoning the norms and entering a world strictly of their own.

Engagement with the world becomes entirely skeptical; one cannot be certain of anything. This means everything that occurs during the day becomes a point of judgment. The senses slowly begin to derange, and the phases of this derangement are limitless. When one becomes aware of a thing, it can be understood in one way, but the next time that same thing comes into awareness, its appearance changes, and the understanding shifts entirely. This is the endless torment delivered by walking down the road of madness.

When one is resting in mind, solitary, in the company of themselves, the skeptical coloring of the world makes everything overwhelming. The distance between what is truly the reason for a thing and what has been understood as the thing is vast, yet strangely close. The ability to talk ourselves into believing things—this tool, when applied during these moments, becomes a great enemy to the processes taking place. It adds more logs to the fire, and the fire is an attraction—a crippling habit is formed, one that makes the madness of the world the place they wish to permanently inhabit.

It does not take long to steer focus, attention, and perception far from what is normally considered real and present. Consistent living in the world of madness creates confusion about one’s racial historical facts, species understanding, and the nature of being a conscious animal is disturbed. Phantasms and cognitive distortions frequently arise as daily thoughts, and dissociation becomes the bridge between the shifting spaces of perception one travels through. Dissociation is induced by the friction between the reality we have built—our self-made prison—and the newly formed world we are flirting with.

The split between the two is where paranoia is conjured.

Thinking during episodes of true madness is strange. Thoughts may appear as entirely abstract images, and the relationship one has to these thoughts cannot be understood rationally. One begins to view thoughts as allegorical shapes, stretched and coded with specific information that only the thinker can comprehend. When these allegories present themselves, it is as if the thought physically pierces the body—the shock and influence become strictly physical, and the body is compelled to move. This is why those deemed mad are often distracted by eccentric movements and can be noticed from a distance; they appear "out of touch" because, in those moments, they exist in a different universe from the one we inhabit.

The internal world of madness is impossible to articulate to the "normal" person, which is why we have archetypes like the wandering madman at night, always alone and apart, or the maniac in the asylum, so far gone that he must be tamed by medicines. We attempt to tame these individuals not only because their behavior deviates so drastically from the familiar expectations of human interaction, but also because we sense that their ethical and moral awareness lies outside the boundaries of the "reality" we recognize. It is a solitary affair, and rightly so. Liberating oneself from madness is no easier than returning home after war. Both are similar in that one has experienced a place entirely unique and distant from the normal, routine life recalled from memory.

The difference with the madman, however, is that his location is within, and so his outward relation to the society is always considered a threat. He has traversed no external terrain, and yet he bears the burdens of his own being as though he has journeyed across vast, unseen landscapes that he cannot share, only through art is his life justified.

The paranoia that arises comes from the calculations of the senses and the haunting truth of society’s established frameworks for treating those deemed mad. Sensory experiences can lead one to forget that he is a conscious being engaged in an experience, rather than the one creating it. The very utility of the senses becomes both his greatest tool—driving the waves of his madness forward—and his greatest obstacle, prohibiting him from seeing what he wishes to see. The disintegration of his connection to the 'correct' way of using his senses is not enough to ground him, and it fails to restrict the madness from taking hold, as if it were something as simple as "just catching a cold from a spot of bad weather."

The steps into madness surround you now; they are always with you. When you choose not to strive forward to improve some faculty in your inventory—some skill or ability—or when you choose to rationalize something non-trivial, when you entertain your thoughts to their end or the thoughts of others, the pathways are always entwined. Your awareness is always, at all times, on the threads of insanity. It is our commitment to some driving force—going by many different names, but you’ll figure it out—that will pull you away. It’s very easily done, very easily obtained.