It is the strange that stands out.
And the strange that makes a good story.
It is the strange that we remember.
And the stranger that unites disparate people.
But so many people will tie themselves into knots to NOT be strange. They will hide their humanity, bury their quirks, push aside their idiosyncrasies just to NOT be strange.

If everyone is mad, then is it really madness or just the way things are? If, say, everyone in Minnesota heard voices – and were basically schizophrenic…are they really mad? And would a state of schizophrenic people find ways to manage their idiosyncrasies? If you were schizophrenic it might be really comforting to go to a place where everyone shared your illness. Perhaps we might no longer even consider it an illness but just the Minnesotan way of doing things.

Context really is everything. The place I went to college was full of individualists, non-conformists and freaks. The out of the ordinary was the norm. It wasn’t the goths all in black that stood out. No. Where I went to college, there was a guy who wore a jacket and tie fairly regularly. If you were trying to tell someone else about him, you’d say, “You know, the Republican” and they’d nod and say, “Oh yeah. That guy.”
Turns out he wasn’t even a Republican, he just looked like one on our campus of freaks. If he’d gone to another school, he’d have fit right in, never made a wave, but at ours, absolutely everyone knew who he was.

There are places where a little madness can fit right in – where it might not be as obvious. The theatre tends to be one of those places. Behavior that would get you thrown out of an office is perfectly placed on a stage. The strictures of a theatre life are less confining.

But…in a lot of cases, some folks suffering from some madnesses do better in an office. They will cope better with clearly defined rules of behavior, with narrow lanes. Those lanes are easier to stay in. It’s sometimes easier to drive down a road with no choice about how you do it.

Actually, it’s probably better to send your mad friends and relatives to another country than the usual alternative in history. At least a change of scenery gives a person something positive and a degree of freedom. The “cures” for such things could be brutal and violent and most likely did more harm than good.
Later, institutions for the mad were such places of horror, it must have been like giving your loved one a death sentence to send them there.
Lord knows that foreign travel does wonders for my mental health.

We romanticize so many things about the past. We imagine how much more simple things once were, how poetic, how full of vitality. And the dresses were so pretty.
But there are things that remind us that it was a terrible time for a lot of people. Those women who had no choice but to wear those dresses, for one. But also, anyone with a mental illness. There was no therapy, no helpful medicine, no understanding.
They’d just send you away. Just away. Or lock you up in a horrible place. That’s it for you and your glitchy brain.