by Kevin Nye

Created on: January 26, 2009

Sanity is overrated.

The old adage goes that there's a thin line between brilliance and insanity, and if you take a look at the facts, it's hard to argue. Crazy people have done great things, and great people have done crazy things - that's just the way it works. But the point is that sanity is overrated.

I myself have dealt with times where I was sure I was going crazy. I'd go as far as to say that I'm confident that I'm slowly slipping into insanity and I'm making peace with it as time progresses. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it has its perks. For instance, when someone is three rooms away and you can hear them speaking so loudly that you can't hear your own television, you can walk right down and just yell in their face. They justify it by simply shaking their heads and thinking "man...he's freaking crazy!"

On the other hand, it's got its downsides. For instance, it can lead you down a dark path, wondering if you're crazy or not...wondering if everyone else has the same slightly disturbed feelings that you have...wondering if anyone else has strange urges to do bad things at random times.

Sanity can be ignored if you can control it. It's not that going crazy always makes you a bad person, it just means that you can be a loose cannon, so to speak. I'm not saying that crazy people are supposed to be trusted, but there are a lot of people who would surprise you if you could take a peek inside their heads sometimes. Take a look at anything Dr. Seuss ever wrote: the man is, by all accounts, a genius. he's creative, he's funny, and he's incredibly amusing to multiple generations, but he made his living off of completely and utterly nonsensical phrases.

There are tons of examples of people like this: authors who write about fantasy worlds and fantasy characters - these things seem absolutely absurd, but they're thoughts running through the author's head at a given time. Someone like Stephen King writes about some pretty disturbing scenes which run through his head, and no one takes any issue with that because he's writing horror stories: this is something I completely understand, but there must be a little bit of crazy in there to dream up such twisted situations.

Sanity is a touchy subject. It can be the motivation of a psychopath or it can be the inspiration for a genius. It's not something to hide behind, nor is it something to proclaim to the world; in a word, it's overrated.

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