There is something strange about the word sanity.
We use it as though it has a fixed meaning. As though there is a clear line between the sane and the insane, the rational and the irrational, the normal and the abnormal.
But who drew that line?
Who decided what a healthy mind is supposed to look like? What is sanity? And who gets to define it?
And how much of what we call sanity is actually shaped by culture, environment, expectation, fear and the systems we have created to interpret human behaviour?
For a long time, I accepted the idea that if enough people in positions of authority described an experience in a particular way, then their interpretation must be more accurate than my own.
If a psychiatrist called something a symptom, perhaps it was a symptom.
If an assessment described behaviour as unusual, perhaps it was unusual.
If a diagnosis was written into a medical record, perhaps it told the truth about who I was.
But over time I began to ask a different question:
What if being interpreted is not the same thing as being understood?
We rarely experience people without context
A human being does not exist as a collection of symptoms.
We exist inside stories.
We have histories, relationships, beliefs, losses, fears, spiritual frameworks, environments, identities and ways of making meaning.
Remove all of that context and almost anything can look strange.
A person talking intensely about something no one around them understands may be described as obsessive.
Someone questioning what everyone else accepts may be described as paranoid.
Someone who experiences reality differently from the people assessing them may be told that their perception itself is the problem.
Sometimes those interpretations may be useful. Sometimes a person genuinely needs support, protection, treatment or grounding.
But usefulness and absolute truth are not the same thing.
A diagnosis can describe a pattern without explaining the whole person.
An assessment can capture a moment without capturing a life.
And another person’s interpretation of your experience can never completely replace your own relationship with it.
Sanity is partly cultural
History makes this especially difficult to ignore.
Ideas about what is normal have changed dramatically across generations and cultures.
Behaviours once considered illnesses are no longer regarded that way. Spiritual experiences that might be respected within one community may be pathologised within another. Emotional expressions that seem excessive in one culture may be entirely ordinary somewhere else.
When we ask what is sanity, we also have to ask how much our answer has been shaped by our culture and the time we are born into.
Even our expectations around productivity, grief, sexuality, spirituality, relationships and independence influence what we consider psychologically healthy.
That does not mean that all definitions are meaningless.
It means they are human.
And anything created by humans deserves to be examined.
What if the question is bigger than “Am I crazy?”
For many people, the fear of being crazy becomes more powerful than the original experience.
Once you begin questioning your own mind, every thought can become evidence against you.
Why did I think that?
Why did I feel that so strongly?
Would a normal person do this?
What if everyone else can see something about me that I cannot?
It can create a strange relationship with yourself in which you are no longer simply living your life.
You are constantly observing yourself from the outside.
Assessing.
Checking.
Correcting.
Trying to determine whether you are still acceptable.
But perhaps there are better questions.
What am I experiencing?
What happened around the time this began?
What meaning am I giving it?
Is it helping me or harming me?
Do I feel connected to reality and to the people around me?
Do I need support?
What makes me feel safer, clearer and more grounded?
These questions leave room for complexity.
They do not require us to choose immediately between everything I experience is true and nothing I experience can be trusted.
There is an enormous landscape between those two extremes.
There is a difference between distress and identity
One of the most damaging things that can happen is when an experience becomes an identity.
You are no longer somebody who experienced psychosis.
You are psychotic.
You are no longer somebody who became deeply distressed.
You are mentally ill.
You are no longer a person whose mind responded to an extraordinary situation.
You become a diagnosis.
Language matters because identity shapes expectation.
And once we believe something fundamental about ourselves, we often begin organising our lives around it.
This is one of the questions I explore in Maybe I’m Crazy.
Not whether mental illness exists.
Not whether professional support can be valuable.
And not whether every unusual belief should automatically be accepted as truth.
The question is more personal than that.
What happens when the labels used to explain us begin to speak louder than we do?
Understanding yourself does not require rejecting help
There can be a temptation to frame these conversations as a choice between trusting yourself and trusting professionals.
I don’t think it has to be that simple.
You can value medical knowledge while remaining curious about its limitations.
You can accept support while still asking questions.
You can acknowledge that your perception may sometimes become unreliable without deciding that everything meaningful inside you is therefore meaningless.
You can recognise distress without reducing yourself to pathology.
The goal does not have to be proving that everybody else was wrong.
Sometimes the more important work is rediscovering your ability to participate in your own understanding.
To become a voice in the conversation about you.
So who gets to decide?
Perhaps nobody gets to decide alone.
Not the psychiatrist.
Not the family.
Not society.
And perhaps not even us, entirely, in isolation.
Maybe sanity is something we understand through relationship: with ourselves, with reality, with other people and with the world around us.
Maybe the question is not simply whether our thoughts fit within somebody else’s definition of normal.
Maybe it is whether we can remain curious about our minds without becoming frightened of them.
Whether we can recognise when we need help without believing that needing help makes us defective.
Whether we can listen to other perspectives without abandoning our own.
And whether we can build an understanding of ourselves large enough to contain both our most difficult experiences and everything else that we are.
That is the territory I explore in Maybe I’m Crazy — the space between diagnosis and identity, interpretation and understanding, and the question of what happens when you begin looking at your own mind from the inside rather than only through the eyes of the systems that have described it.
Because perhaps the most important question was never:
“Am I crazy?”
Perhaps it was:
“Who taught me what crazy was supposed to mean?”
