UNEVEN

Let me tell you a kind of story. This reflects my understanding of how I came to be labelled as bipolar — a slightly more polite way of saying I am insane or crazy or mad. It’s about thinking differently and why that can be threatening to others.

When we start to think that other people think differently from the way we do, it is worrisome. Why? Because our ability to cooperate with others depends on our ability to trust others. To trust others, we have to believe we can predict their behavior accurately. To predict behavior accurately, we have to believe we understand the way they think.

If you believe you think differently from others, and worse, if you don’t think you can either pretend to think the way others do or learn to think the way you think others do, then you can begin to worry that others will figure this out and will not want you around, any more. This tends to create stress, which makes you worry even more about what might happen to you, which eventually can cause you to start acting in ways that make it clear to others that you aren’t the same as they are, which means they can’t trust you.

If others don’t trust you, then they stop wanting you around and they stop being willing to cooperate with you, and that is very dangerous for human animals. Humans are at the top of the food chain because even though we aren’t the biggest or strongest, we make up for that by cooperating with each other. Working together, we are much stronger and better able to compete than on our own, as individuals.

So being able to belong in society is very important. Society can tolerate a bit of difference, but at some point, it gets to be too much, and then they feel they need to protect themselves from you. They might lock you up, or they might shun you or kick you out. In the US, they mostly put subtle pressure on weird people, which is all it takes for people to shut themselves in; isolating themselves from society, and keeping society from being bothered by them.

If you feel like you are going insane, it probably means you are seeing a growing difference between the way you think and the way you think others think. Perhaps you are finding it more and more difficult to pretend to be like others. You say your thinking has not yet appeared in your behavior, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that you are worried about that, and maybe you are getting some reactions from others that indicate to you that you are not passing as well as you used to.

Once you start thinking this way, you essentially put yourself under more stress. You become hypersensitive to the way others treat you and relate to you. You start to notice more and more situations where you wonder what others are thinking. The pressure builds inside, and this is what some people experience as starting to go crazy/insane/mad.

Personally, I think of it as being different, mentally. If we had faith that society was more tolerant of different ways of thinking, it wouldn’t cause so much stress to be different, or to think you are different.

Parenthetically, I want to point out that we can never know if we are thinking differently from others because we can’t be in any consciousness other than our own. We can only notice how our behavior compares to others. If you think you are on an “odd wavelength,” it probably is because you see differences in behavior, at least on the level of conversation, if not in other more physical ways.

However, society always has a range of normal behavior. This is the set of behaviors shared by around two-thirds of all people. Anyone who is in the one-third who are observably different will be perceived as being different, and if they are different enough, they will be perceived as possibly being unsafe to cooperate with. If you are in the five percent who are quite different, you generally get labelled as mentally ill, which is a slightly more polite way to say, “insane.” If you are labelled as mentally ill, most people will expect you to make some effort to conform better. However, many who try to conform find that they have to tie themselves in knots to so that, raising their stress levels, and making them feel like they might “break” at some point.

This may be why you feel you are going insane. You’ll have to let me know if this story resonates with you. There are things you can do about it, if you want to.

I live in long trips in my head. I always keep traveling in a ship, sometimes I travel on a bus, sometimes on the top of a plane, just me alone, I visit my thoughts. People were never of one type. We are many. Writers are one type and still not necessarily right. Writers could be of many types. But it goes like that. Your job is you. And then your social class is you. It is who you are. 

Again! There are the people who think and the people who do not. Simply people who do not think are the people who can not write or rather travel in their thoughts. 

Maturity is when you believe that everyone does not think like you. So their actions can be different. Know that people can not do things because they don’t think like you. Mostly every single action is logical to a certain level to its doer. 

To me every thought makes sense because I want to do it. To others it would not make sense because they think differently. And in there we clash. And there comes the role of maturity. Where is maturity there is acceptance and tolerance. 

There are many things you probably do not understand and that will tire you until it males sense to you, or you can just make your piece with it and think less about it.