Perpetrators and Lunatics

The Empty Tunnel

1993

At this moment in time, my life feels like an empty tunnel. It is dark and lonely and quiet in the tunnel; one could hear a pin drop. I feel naked and exposed, and vastly alone.

I feel naked and alone because I have been peeling off, layer by layer, my safe, warm blanket of insanity. The creative product of my early childhood, I developed it out of the need to keep myself alive in the wake of the brutality that enveloped me. My insanity was my mother and father, my family and friends. It was a self-contained unit, like scuba diving equipment. With my insanity I could go anywhere and always survive, it was the air I breathed; my life force.

Being insane is like being fed through IV tubes. Although it sustains life, it is wholly unsatisfying. Life as an insane person is not much better than no life at all. Because one really does nothing more than watch; one is not participating. As an insane person I have gone through many of the motions of life, but I have experienced them only in a detached sort of way. It has been as if I were in a small plane flying above; I had an excellent view of everything, but I was not a part of it.

Being crazy is a living hell. It gives one the false sense of feeling insulated from pain; but in fact, it creates an unending pain. Every second you feel the pain of not being able to enter the world, of feeling like the door is slammed in your face a million times.

My life has been spent in the presence of insane people, people more out of control than I. This served to further isolate me from reality, as these people always treated me as an absolute nothing. Most of the insane people in my life have been perpetrator people; those who were driven by inner compulsions to inflict pain on others. I have been drawn to these types always; people who are cold and brutal, people devoid of the human qualities of warmth and compassion.

Although this has been a facet of my sickness, it is also what will bring me back to life. For the unmerciful poking and prodding of these lunatics is triggering such a violent anger within that it is causing me to blast myself out of my stupor.

It seems as though one of life’s ironies is that the very thing that forced me into insanity initially is the same thing that will rouse me out of it; those violent, reckless lunatics for whom I hold such contempt.