Why Don’t We All Go Mad?

We know the scene well enough. A supermarket aisle; a three-year-old, a stressed mother, and a conflict. He wanted a yogurt, he remembered its silky, nourishing density, he had one a little while ago before leaving the house – but now mummy is saying no, not now, we have six more things to get on the list. At first he tried to repeat the request: yogt, yogt, yogt. But no, mother did not relent. She didn’t even do it especially nicely. A rather brusque: ‘Come on, poppet, maybe when we get home, but not now…’ The verdict feels too awful, hope too absent; there is a gnawing pain in his stomach and, more than that, a sense of the unbounded misery and injustice of not being able to have what one yearns for, of not being given what it seems so logical and so kind to have.

Therefore, as one might and does at three, the little one goes mad. Stark raving mad. He starts to scream, he throws himself on the floor, he kicks at his mother, he pushes away the shopping trolley, he tears at his own coat, he tries to take off his boots; he would take off his own head if it wasn’t so firmly fixed.

The Feelings We Learn to Suppress

We call it a tantrum, we – the normal ones – walk on by, it’s dinnertime soon, we need two chicken breasts and some parsley. We feel sorry for the poor mother. We are grateful for not having a small demon like this in tow.

But really we’re being disingenuous in pathologising the demon and holding ourselves up as paragons of good sense by comparison. What we’re not focusing on at that moment is how the conditions of life actually more than have the power to drive us to the very sort of feelings on vivid display in the supermarket aisle – and do on a fairly regular basis, when we can bear the truth. The toddler may show its feelings, but we – in the more honest parts of ourselves – have every reason to be just as incensed, furious and crazy, and essentially are.

After all, we don’t just have to deal with losing the odd yogurt. We may be much bigger and more in control of ourselves, but the challenges that befall us are correspondingly more intense.

A person we’ve been hopeful about for three months has just told us they’d rather be friends. A deal we were chasing has fallen through. An employer won’t extend our contract. The boiler has broken. Our tax form has been rejected by the website. Our hair is thinning. There’s some kind of mole growing on our back. The new concrete floor is starting to crack, and our partner doesn’t take us seriously.

Why Adults Hide Emotions

All the sensible advice urges perspective, meditation, mindfulness, Stoicism, Buddhism, psychoanalysis, or a visit to a doctor – and may help to explain why adults hide emotions. It makes complete sense. It is an apogee of serenity and adulthood. Most of the time we manage it, or something resembling it; we smile, we say we’ve had a pleasant weekend, we keep going.

But what if – for once – we gave voice to and honoured the other side: the side that is fed up with having to be so sensible all the time and wants an occasional chance to throw ourselves on the ground and try to eat our hand while wailing a low, moaning ‘nooooooo’, ‘noooooo’, ‘nooooo’ like a walrus in trouble.

What if we sometimes wanted to grow impatient with our patience and surrender instead to untrammelled rage, undefeated anger and limitless sorrow? Why must all the rage be allowed to the very little, when we – the very big – have just as much on our plate, if not a lot more? The recommendations for wisdom come at us from all sides: might there not be a degree of wisdom too in honouring our right, or at least extremely strong temptation, to be very unwise and, frankly, a bit crazy?

Is it not, in some ways, a proper miracle that we have not (this week at least) yet thrown ourselves on to the floor in public and tried to rip off our own clothes?

Don’t we deserve some recognition for all that’s roiling inside us and the limited number of options for handling the material?

Maybe our chances of true serenity and resignation come not only when we reread Marcus Aurelius, but when we at least acknowledge that there is a small person inside us who would, right now, like to destroy the universe because so much eludes them. We perhaps won’t ever be really wise if being wise is all that we’re ready to be.