Drivers Who Don't Know Where They Want to Go
We have many vehicles on the streets of our cities, but many vehicles have drivers who don’t know where they want to go. They are not just confused; they keep changing their minds, turning left when yesterday they swore they’d turn right. They do not have stable minds, yet somehow they navigate infrastructure designed for unwavering certainty. How do they manage amongst the steadily directional? It is difficult to live with an unstable mind in a world that rewards consistent navigation, so they learn to hide it.
Hiding your unstable mind and showing only a fake supposedly-stable mind is traumatic, and it takes its toll. Over the years it slowly wears us out, like an engine running a gear it wasn’t designed for. Eventually, it might lead to becoming a “cranky old man”—someone who stopped pretending but paid the price for decades of performing certainty. Many do not manage to maintain this facade forever; the mask cracks, and what emerges is damaged by the translation between authentic and performed selves.
The idea of Queer Pride is well-understood. But Mad Pride remains elusive, peripheral, uncomfortable. Most people who do not have stable minds treat their mental instability as handicap rather than variation, as deficit rather than difference. But what if the infrastructure itself is the problem, not the driver?
Instability might not be a failure of mind but a different way of encountering possibility. A stable mind commits to a route and follows it; an unstable mind sees the route as provisional, subject to revision based on information the stable mind filters out as noise. This creates chaos in a system designed for predictability, but it can become a superpower once we stop measuring it against stability as the standard.
How? By building infrastructure that accommodates multiple navigational styles rather than punishing deviation. By recognising that some minds operate like weather systems—variable, responsive, atmospheric—whilst others function like railways—fixed, scheduled, predictable. Neither is superior; both are necessary. By reframing instability not as brokenness requiring repair but as sensitivity requiring calibration.
Can infrastructure that insists on stable minds accommodate those who navigate by constantly revised coordinates? Does celebrating mental variation threaten systems built on behavioural predictability? What happens when we stop treating unstable minds as faulty ones and recognise them as their own navigation category?