Possibly About To Experience A Precipitous Drop In Sanity
I often judge the level of my sanity and despair based on whether I see things that aren’t there, like scary, angry faces in the wallpaper of the men’s room at work when I am standing at the urinal.
Lately I’ve seen many scary, angry faces.
I suspect a slow slide to insanity manifests its early symptoms as many optical tricks and corner-of-the-eye mirages. Or maybe what I thought I saw was just an eyeball floater, a tiny biological bit of something drifting happily past my cornea, something innocuous that just happened to look like a dark, shadowy, wrath-like entity trying to sneak up behind me. Constantly. To do what? Strangle me? Possess me? Tickle me?
The sad part is that I don’t believe in demons and angels, at least not in the biblical sense. I don’t believe in the fairy tale simplicity of ghosts and devils, doubtful that any physical manifestations of such non-existent entities exist.
So what am I frightened of?
I am more afraid of losing my mind than I am of seemingly scary, imaginary beings with magical powers. And I am afraid my sick mind concocts such illusory apparitions simply because it is sick, so the fact that I don’t believe in demons means nothing to a slowly dying mind that makes its own choices beyond my conscious control. It forces its host to see such imaginary things that he doesn’t believe in.
This then begs the question as to whether I am my mind and is my mind me, that conscious part of who I am?
Or does the conscious part of my existence, my being and personality, live somewhere beyond my brain? Is my brain just the physical address and my mind the thing I think of as “me”? Can my brain be sick independently of my mind? Can my brain make me see and hear things that aren’t there while my mind stays sane?
The faces in the bathroom have yet to actually twist and snarl at me. When that finally happens I’ll know I was right and that my mind—or perhaps my brain, really—is falling apart, bit by bit, slipping steadily into insanity.
I watch the faces carefully every time I pee.
