The Normalization of Insanity
How do we cope when everything is absurd and nothing makes sense anymore?
It must have been the beginning of an autumn evening when, arriving home from school, I dropped my backpack and saw a strange pen lying on the dining table. The fireplace was already lit, the wood crackling as it burned fiercely, and its flames, lighting up the room, made that odd new object shimmer.
With the typical curiosity of a little girl, I picked it up and — within mere seconds that would never leave my mind — I dropped it.
The pen broke the moment it hit the floor, shattering above all some curious mechanism that, in addition to serving its usual purpose, also told the time. Imagine that.
As luck would have it, just as I picked up the pen to try and fix what was already beyond repair, my parents walked into the room. There, they saw me, hands stained with blue ink sinking into my skin, trying to undo the mess I had caused.
I had broken a pen — in a completely innocent act, just sheer bad luck from someone whose hands tend to let everything fall. And although it was a shame to break something that wasn’t awful, I thought it was just a pen, and surely the sky wouldn’t come crashing down over such a heinous crime.
What happened next remains inexplicable to this day. There’s much I don’t remember — what exact words my parents used, or what led them to start shouting at me, calling me an ungrateful daughter.
I only remember my mother sitting at the table, right in front of me, crying intensely, my father angry with me, and I unable to understand how breaking a pen could have been enough to drive my mother to sobs, to tears, to a red, distressed face — and still call me ungrateful.
From that night, beyond the sudden frenzy, what I remember most was my overwhelming confusion and how I kept asking the same question again and again: “Are you really this upset just because of a pen? Damn, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to!”
To this day, I still have no answers for what happened.
Maybe they had thought the pen was a gift — for me, or them-or perhaps they had received it as a gift and I, the terrible teenage daughter, had destroyed it without giving it a second thought.
I’ll never know.
But the more bewildered I became, repeating the question over and over, the more my mother cried, and the more my father got angry with me for upsetting her.
That moment lives only in my memory. My parents still claim I must have dreamt it, because they don’t remember a single thing. But I can touch that memory.
It’s there, in the bag of living memories, and it lives — and will continue to live — because that tiny moment in time, almost as insignificant as a tacky pen, made me start to see both my parents and the reality around me as potentially absurd. Nothing in those minutes made any sense.
The crying, the shouting, my father’s fury, and my own bewilderment defied explanation. I felt confused, as if for the first time I could step outside my body and watch the whole scene as a spectator rather than a participant.
It was absurd, ridiculous, but I learned that continuing to ask the question wouldn’t get me anywhere — it would only make the shouting worse. And the crying. And the lack of explanations that were never given to me.
The absurdity of that moment, mixed with a hint of insanity my parents must have been going through in that strange time in their lives, taught me something about life. There are moments for which we will never find an explanation, and because they are so senseless, the best thing is to let that strange fire die out on its own.
Fortunately, that moment was one of the few absurd ones that ever happened in that house. Certainly, there were others, but none I recall with the intensity of that night.
That strange moment is seared into my memory: my mother’s screams, the broken pen in the middle of the table, the fists my father pounded, my mother’s flushed face, the dim light coming only from the fireplace, the thick tears soaking the old tablecloth, even the backpack that remained on the floor until the next school day.
It looked like a madhouse, and I was the only person who just wanted an explanation for that unprecedented overreaction.
Life went on, with ups and downs, and with much louder cries and screams than that night. But in all of those moments, I knew why they were happening.
There were reasons, justifications, and more than enough motives for outbursts. In all of them, there was understanding and reason behind the anger. When everything made sense — even if the causes were also strange — there was no room for my confusion in the face of absurdity.
But now imagine if that absurd moment became a monthly occurrence, then a weekly occurrence, and eventually a daily occurrence?
What would become of us?
What would become of us if, every time we tried to make sense of a conversation, we were met only with shouting, crying, and unbridled hysteria?
What would become of us if someone made a storm in a teacup over something meaningless, yet refused to pay attention to what actually mattered?
Thankfully, it was just that one night.
Any resemblance to the present time and the world out there may just be a strange coincidence.
Everything is fine. Nothing is absurd.
The confusion running through my head in the middle of the night — who knows, maybe I dreamt those too.
Tomorrow I’ll wake up and see that even this, someday in the distant future, will be nothing more than a strange — though still vivid — memory of a time I’d rather, truthfully, forget.
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Thank you so much.
I had more than a few of the “pen” moments when nothing made sense. I gave up asking, still remember them, but they no longer live rent-free in my head. Thank you for this.
Oh my, isn’t that experience the perfect metaphor for our world at this moment! 🤪
I can’t but think of the constant hysteria of the current US regime over immigrants, the previous administration, Democrats, etc.