Anathema to My Madness

I thought I knew who I was, what I wanted. But then my job exploded, my sanity imploded, and I found the prison of hope.

Structure is madness. Madness is structure. This ouroboros is suffocating. Photo by Armin Lotfi on Unsplash

I have never found my rhythm with routines.

It’s why I found it unconvincingly tiresome to stick to schedules. I still do, to some extent, but I’ve been weathered medium rare at the ripe age of thirty-two.

Still, my hatred for sticking to a time-bound process creates an intense physical repulsion from within that’s akin to dry-heaving but only lost in the subtleties of objection that shadow my face.

And yet, it’s these cyclical traps that I just cannot get out of. If I spot the mundanity of a schedule, a routine, or a scheduled routine coming my way, I want to turn on my heels and flee. But sadly, life seldom lets you abandon your responsibilities posthaste. It even predicts my movements, sees me getting placidly comfortable, and pulls the rug from underneath.

All it does is force me into a routine to destroy my routine.

A wise man, though an utterly deplorable human and a fictional character in a headlining video game franchise, once said, “Insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again, expecting shit to change.”

Nearly eight months ago, life found my sunken claws into a job I very much loved and adored to be a bit lax. Lax enough that it only took a gentle push for it to send me tumbling down into chaos.

“That’s a change for you,” Life probably said to itself under a smirk, as it neatly folded the rug I was sat on and continued to knock on someone else’s door. I, on the other hand, was flat on the floor. Heavy. Pallid. And frankly, alone.

Alone, even though I had family. But how do you explain to your parents, who were career government servants with stability, your wife, who’s got security (in some way) of a megacorp behind her, and to your daughter, who is only five months old?

And so began a downward spiral of coping, clawing, and attempting a climb out of a pit. I could not see any light teasing the hint of an exit, nor feel the lick of the wind reigniting my pulse. Yet that clingy, devastating sister of a sleep paralysis, Hope, bent me into a rhythm of sorts…

Wake up.

Seek out job openings.

Apply on company websites.

Wade through LinkedIn’s mucky, often AI-generated, and very likely ghost jobs.

Send Upwork proposals that shoot into the dustbin the moment your connects get deducted.

Wait.

Breathe.

Survive.

I don’t know what I was doing. But I kept doing it. For a chance to scrape my undead body out of the never-ending pit. It wasn’t always abysmal. There were chinks within the walls, intermittent breaks hinting at the twilight rays of a sinking sun. To be honest, I’d have taken the moon’s reflections, too, if they were plated to me with a promise of seeing in the dark.

But no matter what I clung to or locked my eyes on, Hope kept Life’s work brand new. I’d make progress on the spiral. I’d see the light. I’d fall.

What was it? That definition of insanity?

Through all this time, I found myself failing as a son, as a husband, and as a father (though she will never know that, but the guilt of failing to provide for her lives even stronger than Hope). I lost taste in my eyes, smell in my ears, sight in my tongue, and any sense of what it meant to live.

But the spiral was ever so Sisyphean in its ordeal, with Hope taking the rear and the limitless applications with rejections and ghostings piling up behind the rock I kept pushing.

I don’t really know how to put it into words how I actually felt. Or rather, I don’t know how to put it in prose. Poetry has always felt a better outlet for the steam that accumulates within under pressure. Steam that overwhelms every sense I have. Steam that discombobulates every orifice. Steam that boils the instruments of my survival. And I fall into syncope.

I tried my best
to submit the syllables of sensible sacrifice
but I might as well
have been talking to a clockwork device.
Articulation, it seems
eludes me from my suit of skills
and punctuates life
with earworms of admissible advice.

I wanted to break
into the shatters on a stained glass window
separated then broken
but the edges kept me from falling apart.
Preservation, it seems
is the missing card from my suite
but I do remember
leaving a fold of revisiting on its memory.

I held my worst
from exploding like the tears of Prince Rupert
but at the tail end
my suffering was shot with a sharp look.
Indignation, it seems
lurked in the folds, untouched by light
and I roam blinded
by the lighthouses of stark promises.

I felt my pigs
stymying the salacious filth of the sty
but come what may
the pigs drove their heads into shame.
Provocation, it seems
is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg
because the floods
drown me with the subject of my annoyance.

I tore the gauze
of the tourniquet bleeding my senses dry
but the wound
gangrened on the cavities I vacated.
Consternation, it seems
breaks bread with my blood’s boredom
and, when they spill,
paints vermillion the canvas of my emotions.

It was hard to find even a broken ladder to rest my foot on. Lately, though, I’ve been turning the pages of The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. These short stories circle around a fictional play of the title’s eponymous entity, a play that, when perused, brings madness. That’s a fantastic reduction of everything that Chambers’ characters undergo, but it beautifully mirrors what I went through.

I am glad the end result was not how things usually go in his stories. But I also think that I am not who I was last year. I don’t know if I ever will be. Some part of me, in his attempts to make it through the spiral of joblessness, has been lost. Or rather, replaced. I don’t know which is true.

Did I ever read the play? I don’t know. How can I? Do those who go mad remember why they went mad?

I do find myself strangely attached to the stories. It’s become a ritual of sorts these past few days to unwind myself in those pages.

I do have an undying hate for the madness that was. My essence was anathema to structure. Any structure. The spiral of routine that was my Carcosa, praise be, has faded into obscurity. At least for now.

But what about the madness that is? Or will be?

Will spilling these words out into the world suffice?