The mind is a labyrinth, twisting and turning in ways that make you question its very nature.
How do you know you’re sane? If you were losing your grip, would you even notice? Sanity, insanity – they feel the same in the moment, don’t they? It’s not about preservation or evolution or even humanity. It’s just the maddening mind, doing what it does best: spinning stories we can’t quite unravel.
Take Purple Rain, one of my favourite colleagues, someone whose wavelength hums in sync with mine. Not because we’re cut from the same cloth – barely.
Purple Rain is a genius, the kind who topped their class without breaking a sweat, a mind so sharp it could slice through the toughest problems in our field.
Me? Wueh! I was the poster child for average. I was those kids who anaona kitabu anakua mgonjwa ☹. Scraping by with just enough to get through.
But Purple Rain? They’re different.
Ask them about their brilliance, though, and they’ll shrug it off. “I’m just average,” they’ll say, eyes glinting with something that’s not quite humility.
At first, I thought it was self-doubt, a crack in their confidence. But after countless coffee breaks and late-night work sessions, I saw it for what it was: restlessness.
Purple Rain wasn’t plagued by insecurity—they were brimming with belief in themselves.
They just couldn’t sit still.
Give them an assignment, and they’d tear through it like a storm, delivering work that was polished, precise and done in half the time anyone else would take. Then they’d move on, already chasing the next challenge before the ink dried.
Supervisors hated it.
That kind of speed? It screamed sloppy to them. “No one can work that fast and do it right,” they’d mutter,
tossing Purple Rain’s reports back with a demand for revisions.
Most of the time, the work wasn’t even flawed – it was just too quick, too effortless, for their liking.
So Purple Rain would grit their teeth, redo the assignment, and hand it back, only for the cycle to repeat. Frustration doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Eventually, they’d had enough.
Purple Rain quit, trading cubicles for freedom, diving headfirst into their own ventures. Biashara hapa pale—a little business here, a little hustle there.
But the pale outweighed the hapa, and the setbacks piled up.
Ideas that sparkled in their mind, bold, brilliant concepts, fizzled in the real world.
It’s a cruel kind of unfairness, isn’t it?
You pour your heart into something, only to watch it flop, while someone else takes the same idea and
turns it to gold. Purple Rain felt that sting, over and over.
So, they adapted.
They stopped sharing their ideas, hoarding them like treasures in a vault. They’d map out every detail, from the first spark of inspiration to the final product, all in their head.
Then they’d set it aside and move to the next idea, and the next, a restless mind spinning endlessly without an outlet.
In the end, Purple Rain went back to the grind.
They took a job, learned to slow down, to play the game. They became similar, common, blending into the rhythm of expectations.
Life did get easier, steadier paychecks, fewer battles with bosses. But every now and then, they’ll lean in and tell me about an idea they’ve been turning over in their mind.
Their eyes light up, a flicker of the old wildfire.
And in all honesty, ile ya ukweli, it’s truly heartbreaking to see.
It is a first-hand experience of the beginning and the end of a dream and the conformity that catches up with all of us as we age.
And now, if that is not a maddening mind, then I do not know what is.
The Maddening Mind is an attempt to scribble my life, specifically through my experiences in the different work spaces I have been in, with some lessons, somewhere in the stories.
