Madness is insidious. I used to think that it was the preserve of the elderly or the homeless, but I was sorely mistaken. It’s not that an orderly procession towards neurosis is ever apparent; otherwise you could do something to stop it. It’s much more subtle than that, beginning deep inside your head; a tiny little bird that incessantly warbles to your inner ear, confined and contained within the thin veneer of your skull, until, at some awful appointed hour, it escapes. At this point, you get one of those instinctive urges to vocalise everything. You feel a sudden desire to say it, as if that gives the discussion more credence and the answers, to whatever questions you’d posed, a higher authority. Things do tend to go downhill from there. By and by, you’ll develop an inclination to echo everything over and over, a truly nightmarish reflex. Easing into one of those supposedly quiet, thoughtful dialogues, safely girdled by bone and grey matter, you’ll run through the argument a second or a third time, just to be sure. Then, just to be really sure, you’ll articulate the whole thing, a spontaneous soliloquy, in front of the bathroom mirror (although, I’m certainly not so vain as to take things that far).
A rational but secret conversation within yourself about the most mundane thing develops into a full-blown habit, creeping up on and possessing you until it is no longer latent. You’ll catch yourself mid-sentence, in a supermarket aisle or in the surgery, when you’ll suddenly understand why people have been looking at you with such peculiar expressions. Sometimes, it’s pity they exude but, mostly, they’re either disgusted or faintly amused by your unnerving recital. Duly embarrassed, you’ll slink away; until the day comes when you no longer care, happy to hold court with inanimate objects or your pet Labrador.
That’s the time to worry; but by then, you may be too far gone to pay any heed. And so it goes on, one echo after another, a ricochet that builds to a crescendo until it shatters your mind, eventually.
By the beginning of the nineties, at the tender age of twenty-seven, this was my sorry mental state. Even when I moved out of the lab and into rented accommodation, the situation didn’t improve, though I can’t say it got any worse, either.
Is it any wonder, isolated as I had been for so long? How much frustration can one man endure, before he goes quietly off the rails?
Copyright © David Thomas Cochrane 2011
