The world has often had me interrogate my own sanity, and with what I could find in the relatively new age of the Internet as well as a lot of reading, I believed I was sane. Self-diagnosis, however, is a bit of magical thinking particularly in this regard. If you’re not sane, you’re likely to believe you’re sane.

And of course we lie to ourselves. Sometimes these might even be good lies, where we push ourselves that much further than we thought, and sometimes they are bad lies, the ones that perpetually continue something that is self-destructive. Addiction is a good example of a ‘bad lie’.

I write all of this because my psychologist and I parted ways a few days ago, having met the goals originally set out. She told me I was sane, and that I seemed to be clear of any genetic predispositions I was concerned about. Of course, she didn’t say I was sane unprompted. I always joked about my sanity with her because, as above, the world makes you feel insane.

This is because the ‘civilized world’ is insane by itself, made up of a collection of seemingly sane decisions at varying levels that when looked at holistically… or, in the case of we lowly individuals, practically… make little to no sense at all, and these same things are repeated creating a pattern and that pattern demonstrates insanity by it’s recursiveness. I could add the Einstein quote cliche, but…

I feel like a fair amount of my life has been broadcast to me from whoever had the remote. It’s a strange metaphor because we never think that it’s probable that the people who have the remote are also the ones broadcasting only because our magical thinking makes us think it’s impossible.

Disney doesn’t encourage you to watch competing channels, do they? Do any channels do that? No, of course not. That’s why we need to turn off all that broadcasting that we’re on the receiving end of because there’s ‘nothing better to watch’.

We settle, and as we settle, standards drop, and as standards hit the ground like dead bodies in a video game, we wonder why people are accepting things as they are. Even as they were before they got to how they are. Often, the remedies are that of the addict: Short term solutions to long term problems.

I’ve stepped back from it increasingly over the years watching from further and further afar, not unlike the prisoner who finds freedom in prison and begins smiling and whistling while everyone’s grumpy. If you ask me a good question, I’ll give the honest answer which is not usually the polite answer, and can be so sarcastic that it impacts the gravitational field in the area. People have dropped things. Really.

There were so many times I interrogated myself before pushing forward on something that everyone else thought couldn’t work. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but whether it works or not while I’m off trying to spin the planet in the direction I’m choosing it will spin me right back in interesting ways. People talk about ‘getting caught up in a wave’, but I think that’s just a symptom of the friction that gives us that spin.

The world, as we experience it, is about how we live it, what we experience, and how that experience shades what we experience in the future.

The counseling gave me some new lenses to look at myself through. It will remain useful. I have no problem talking about it now, but I think a lot of that has to do with how I’ve been forced into shapes of what others needed by the people who had the remote by default.

What is crazy in our society – outright insane – is the stigma associated with seeking help with mental health. It’s availability, too, is a problem for many people.

There’s nothing wrong with going and getting a checkup, letting a professional peek under the hood and give you an unbiased opinion.

It seems sort of insane not to.