After Mania: A Memoir On Living With Bipolar Introduction
I’ve been writing a memoir, After Mania: A Memoir On Living With Bipolar for a couple years now. My progress has stalled as I took on another writing project, my book The Work Of Wrestling: A Book About Art. I want to get back into the groove of writing nearly every day, though, and I’m using this blog as an excuse. I figured it couldn’t hurt to give you a peak at the introduction of the book and see what you think. So here goes…
Introduction
Until the moment the doctor told me my diagnosis, Bipolar 1, I thought I was just depressed — a tortured artist with a dash of social anxiety, nothing worth naming or treating outside of traditional talk-therapy. Most people go their whole lives without knowing anything real about mania or psychosis or bipolar. We each have our preconceived notions about madness, how it behaves and how it’s treated. Most of our ideas come from film and television, and most of our ideas are wrong. We envision straight jackets, cock-eyed, drooling faces, and banging one’s bloodied forehead against a beige wall. Most of us don’t know that mental illness can be as subtle as it is insidious. It creeps up on you like a stalker in the bushes while you think you’re just having a nice evening stroll through the park.
Even as I experienced mania at its strangest, overrun by totally irrational and fantastical thoughts, vibrating at a cosmic frequency I can only describe as divine, I never once considered that perhaps I’d lost it. Everything that happened during mania and psychosis, which I detail in the pages ahead, seemed entirely real. In fact, the deeper I journeyed into my psychotic thoughts, the more plausible they seemed. And not in some grand, discovering the ultimate truth sort of way (though that also happened), but in the way mundane things are true — like how it’s true that Tuesday follows Monday.
I had thoughts like, “I’m being groomed to inherit the Star Wars legacy” or “The nurses are laughing at me, they’re going to poison me” or “There’s another reality lurking just beyond this one, like an empty room behind a curtain,” and they were experienced as absolutely true. Not a whiff of anything being “off.” These psychotic thoughts were felt as simple facts. That’s partially why it was so hard to come back from psychosis — the illusion it creates is incredibly convincing. I believed so many strange things throughout my manic-depressive breakdown, and when I reflect back upon them I can’t help but wonder why it took me so long to accept I’d gone crazy.
When stable, I’m a fairly rational person, mostly even-tempered, and painfully self-aware. So it astonishes me that I was capable of having a psychotic breakdown in the first place. Were the signs there, and I just didn’t know enough to notice them? Was this episode always a possibility or was there something now happening in my life that made it possible?
These questions hang over me, the mystery of my mental illness still largely intact, even as I talk with professionals weekly and take meds daily. The biggest question that haunts me is, why were aspects of my manic depressive breakdown demonstrably correct?
What do I mean by that? I mean that my balance noticeably improved while I was manic. My sense of smell improved, permanently (that’s right, I now smell better, to this day, following this event). All of my senses, in fact, functioned at a higher level, such that I was almost able to predict events before they happened (or so I thought). I wrote in my journal, while having this experience, that people mistake a deep understanding of the world with clairvoyance. That’s what I thought I had during mania — a deep understanding of the world. If only I could transport you to that place so that you might experience it for yourself and know, intimately, what I know. I felt powerful, supremely intelligent, funny, mischievous, and (something I’d never felt before) sexy. It was the highest of highs quickly followed by the lowest of lows. But more on that later. Before things get weird and dark, let’s journey back to a year before my episode, when I had just started therapy. I couldn’t have known the doors therapy would open in my mind, some of which I’d rather remained closed. Don’t mistake me, therapy was (and still is) incredibly helpful and I recommend you begin the process sooner rather than later, even if you think you don’t need it. I went through three before I found the right one, the exact one I needed.
As you venture on this road into madness and recovery, remember my point about how most of us have no idea how genuine “crazy” functions within the confines of human life on this planet. I reiterate this because the path to my madness was innocuous. I could not see the warning signs because the warning signs were invisible. In fact, I had several significant, positive psychological and emotional breakthroughs just before my breakdown. My life was headed in a good direction, and I could say I was finally mentally healthy. Then the world quickly fell away from me and I found myself suspended in a void, screaming nonsense into nothing heard by no one.
Some of you may be a little afraid to continue. Chances are, if you’re mentally ill, the descriptions ahead will trigger you. If you suffer from intrusive thoughts, thoughts of suicide, or depression, this will either hit too close to home or remind you you’re not alone. I’d like to think it will do both.
Lastly…thank you.
Thank you for buying or checking out my book or pulling it from a pile of take-a-book-leave-a-book. Thank you for your curiosity and thank you for reading this introduction (something I’m guilty of skipping in most books). Let’s go now, you and I. Let’s try to figure out what the hell happened to me, and why, at one point, I thought four divine mother goddesses were going to save me from the apocalypse. This likely doesn’t come as a surprise…but they never came.
