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Sometimes, like when I can’t remember how stairs work or I don’t recognise my own name when it’s called out in the waiting room or I cry because I don’t know if it’s “specially for you” or “especially for you” or I get on the bus going in the opposite direction of where I need to go and stay on until I’m in the depot 15 miles away because I believe if I leave my seat before the end of the line then something bad would happen to my sister’s unborn baby or I set a newspaper on fire in the pub because there are too many 5s in the sudoku and I don’t like 5s or I wake up with a bread knife up my sleeve and a vague memory of deciding that if my boyfriend touched me I would stab myself wherever he had touched or I feel uncertain about whether I like milk or not or I see the faces of dead soldiers in the net curtains, I think to myself, “Oh my God, I must be going mad!” And then I remember that that ship has sailed and I’m already mad so I laugh and laugh and delete the idea from my mind that it is even possible for me to become madder than I already am because this madness is enough, this madness is plenty, this madness is too much. If I don’t believe that I can get any madder then it can’t happen. It will not get any worse if it actually cannot. It won’t if it can’t. Madwoman logic. Coping logic. Ill logic. Illogic. Survivor logic? Mad logic. Logic all the same.

TL;DR There is no point in me being worried or frightened about seemingly “going mad” because I’m already mad. I will never know the fear that people have of losing their mind because I lost mine ages ago. So that’s nice. A sick perk. A dark silver lining. Can’t lose your marbles if you never had them in the first place. One less thing to worry about.

Don’t need to fear being struck down by mental illness if it’s already fucking struck.