Show Notes
This is part two of a two-part series on madness and the performance of sanity.
Most people are mainly just acting “normal” all day. We put on our work voices while we’re screaming with existential misery inside. We all know what it feels like to say “I’m fine” when we’re decidedly not.
In part one, we looked at who gets to define madness. In part two, we begin after the rupture, when someone has seen too much and still has to return to ordinary life.
This episode moves through the aftermath of extreme states and what they do to the person who survives them. We discuss how fear of the mind can soften into familiarity, and why “recovery” so often means learning how to speak about what happened without identifying with it forever or allowing it to swallow the whole Self.
Modern culture just loves a clean recovery story. Breakdown, treatment, lesson, comeback. That’s how it’s supposed to go. Real return is usually much stranger and messier than that.
This is the second half of our exploration: how we come back from the borderline, and the parts of us that refuse to come back unchanged.
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More from Back from the Borderline
For seven conversations, Anne Baring and I have been investigating the forgotten feminine face of God. We’ve explored Sophia, Mary Magdalene, the Grail, and the religious traditions that preserved aspects of the sacred feminine. Now, in our eighth and final conversation, we’re asking what all of that knowledge is supposed to do to us.
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