By Jilliane Gumban

What is Insanity?

I took the effort of trying to find a dictionary inside my drawer. Unfortunately, there was none. I couldn’t define insanity for you then. Oh no, I can’t, but I can set an example. I know that there is no dictionary inside my drawer but still I expected to find one. That’s an example of insanity in its simplest form.

Love and Insanity

Within the few months of my being hooked-up with a certain text room, one of the many things that I have learned is the parallelism of Love and Insanity. I came to realize that these two words are somewhat synonymous. This is manifested by the countless stories of experiences documented by different individuals there in that website. Love life with a plot a la telenovela, with a complete casting from supporting actors to the usual protagonists and antagonists - peers, parents or classmates to name a few. What do I see? I see insanity in a broad daylight. Love life recycled from one generation to the next. Insanity inherited by yet another group of people in the same environment at a different time. I find it insane considering that our way of life has indeed made a giant leap into what we call the future and yet the same old pains, troubles or problems haunt people’s love life.

Define Love. Love is this. Love is that. Love is here. Love is there. There isn’t a single definition for love. Worst is, one definition conflicts with the other. No, conflict is an understatement, contradict would have been better. In binary, a “1” is never a “0” and vice versa. Treating one as the other is insanity. Love bringing either happiness or sorrow, or sometimes both, is insanity. Does insanity define love? Or, is insanity love, in a negative form?

Let us get back to my previous example. That is an analogy illustrating insanity. Now, let’s take love. We know that our love will get to nowhere but we take the risk of gambling with love. The result is we get hurt. And that is insanity. Foreseeing darkness ahead but still taking the courage to step into the dark. The result is disaster. In real life, it’s like you know that he’s married but what the hell! And that is love. Or, you can feel she cares for somebody but still you convince yourself that she loves you, because you love her. And again, that is love. And what about this latest crap? When you love someone you gave that someone the opportunity to hurt you. Isn’t that insanity to the max or just plain masochism?

Do I speak justly then when I say that those who love are insane? Would you still love?

I assume that our answer to both questions is a unanimous “Yes!” with a capital Y and an exclamation point choreographed with a clenched fist and an authoritative facial expression to stress our certainty, unaware that we are already despising the word “logic”. And again, that clearly manifests insanity.

We are used to saying the phrase “falling in love” to mean “being in love”. Isn’t it “to fall” connotes a negative meaning? Isn’t it insanity then that we allow ourselves to “fall” in love? But wait, others say, “high with love”, to mean addicted with love. Just the same, and addiction is even worse. To let our selves get “high” with love is again an act of insanity. To fall is to go down contradicting the word high. With these two contradicting results associated with love, setting love in front of a well-polished mirror, love vividly reflects insanity.

But despite this shocking analogy, I would still say, “If to love is to be insane, please, take all my sanity away.” It is with pride that I’ll shout to the world, “Call me insane because I am in love!”

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