Instanity

I keep spelling it wrong on purpose. Insanity is a courtroom word, a movie word — straitjackets and screaming. That’s not this. This is something smaller and closer, so it gets its own word. Instanity. The feeling of being insane without ever doing anything insane.

It’s quiet. That’s what nobody tells you. It’s not a break, it’s a drift. You’re mid-conversation and you realize you have no idea what was just said, including by you. You walk into a room and stand there like the reason evaporated on the way. You read the same sentence four times and it never lands. Little things, each one explainable — tired, stressed, distracted. But they stack up, and at some point you stop explaining them and start quietly asking a different question: is something actually wrong with me?

The worst part is you can’t check. Sanity doesn’t come with a gauge. You can’t step outside your own head and look at it from a distance to see if it’s running right. The only tool you have for inspecting your mind is your mind, and that’s exactly the tool you’ve stopped trusting. So you run these little tests all day — did that really happen the way I remember it, did I already say this, is this a normal thing to think — and the tests come back inconclusive, every time, because the thing grading them is the thing on trial.

And then there’s the question underneath all of it: is it me, or is it everything? Because some days the world genuinely does not make sense — the things people care about, the things they ignore, the way everyone just keeps going like the whole arrangement is fine. Some days I feel like the only one seeing it clearly, and I can’t tell if that’s clarity or if that’s exactly what it feels like right before you’re the crazy one. Both feel identical from the inside. That’s the trap.

Meanwhile, from the outside, nothing. I look fine. I sound fine. I answer emails and make dinner and laugh at the right spots. Nobody watching me would clock a single thing, and there’s something extra lonely about that — losing your grip in a way so tidy that no one will ever ask about it. You almost want to slip visibly, just once, so somebody would notice. You never do. You’ve gotten too good at fine. I’ve written that sentence before about other things. It keeps being true.

I’ve noticed the one thing that helps, a little, and it’s the thing I’m doing right now. Writing it down. Something about putting the feeling into sentences proves the machine still works — a mind that can describe its own slipping this clearly probably hasn’t slipped as far as it feels like it has. That’s not a cure. Some nights I don’t believe it at all. But it’s a handhold, and I’ve learned not to turn those down.

So no, I don’t think I’m insane. I think I’m exhausted in a place that sleep doesn’t reach, and instanity is what that exhaustion feels like from the inside. But I’d be lying if I said I knew that for sure. If you’ve ever sat there running quiet little tests on your own mind, afraid of the results — you know. It doesn’t look like anything. And it’s the loudest thing in the room.