HOW TO GO MAD WITHOUT LOSING YOUR MIND!

5/27/2026....HOW TO GO MAD WITHOUT LOSING YOUR MIND!

This is the name of a book I discovered somewhere within the last two or three years. When I first saw the book and read the title, I felt that someone had reached into my soul, found me, and was laughing at me. I was amazed that I had been found out. All this time I had been hiding, thinking no one saw me, and here it was — the truth — that someone had been watching me, seeing me, living the same lie, suffering from the same disconnection, hanging on, like myself, by a pinky, a strand of hair, an eyelash, whatever was left to hold onto.

And suddenly I realized I was not alone... I was not alone... I was not alone…

I looked up the author and, from what I gathered, he seemed to be West Indian like myself, and that made the madness even more frightening. I sent him an email trying to make some kind of connection, but never got an answer. What mad person would want to connect with another mad person anyway?

When I was in the mental hospital where my parents had placed me as a teenager, I had the same feeling there. I was in a ward with only women, and all the women were either Jewish or Native American. Yet even there I could not connect with any of them. I felt they would not want to connect with another person who had been diagnosed as mad. So we all floated around the room inside spaces we carved out for ourselves — movable room spaces. Some of us spoke to ourselves. Others looked suspiciously at the rest of us. Others were there, but not there.

I just looked around me and wondered how all these women had ended up together in the same room. Had their husbands put them there? Their children? Their mothers? Their lovers? Someone had put them there. No one comes to a mental hospital and signs themselves in. No one would do something so foolish unless they were truly “mad.”

So here I am with this book called How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, but the funny thing is I had already lost mine. I was only holding onto it as it hung by a thread from the window of my body.

Yes, I have been mad. Mad all my life, from the moment I came out of my mother’s womb. She knew it the moment she saw me, the moment she realized I could not nurse, could not feed from the breast she tried to press into my tiny mouth. She knew it from the tears I cried as I twisted my head from side to side, unable to take hold of the nipple being forced between my lips.

Something was wrong. Something was wrong.

And I knew it long before anyone else did.

So now I am 81 and still mad. I will die mad and maybe I had better learn to love it in the short time I have left. I am no longer afraid of going mad. I admit it.

I am mad.

TBC — Living With Madness.