On Mania

Authors note:

Years ago, just slightly pre pandemic, I started finally talking about my mental health outside of a therapists couch.  It started anonymously online, under fake names, and when I'd tell my story openly, the first response I'd always get was, "wow, I didn't know there was anyone else like me out there".  Fast forward a year, and I decided to do the same, but put my name on the posts, share them on social media.  The response was dramatically different.  I was told not to vent my "problems".  That no one wanted to hear that.  That I was risking my career and social circle by posting as such.  When I started my own company, based around mental health outreach, I was told these "overshares" would make it fail.  So I stopped being honest and hid my struggle.  But I couldn't stay silent, because these are real issues, serious issues that have effects on hundreds of thousands of people.  If me, being completely open, candid, and honest about my journey can help even one person feel not so alone, then any negatives I incur from my sharing is worth it.  Everyone, and I mean everyone has their freedom to their opinion on what I write and how I write it, but if the following post offends you, or you feel offended on my behalf for how open I have been, you are free to stop reading and walk away from this post, this blog, and me in general if you can't deal with the fact that this is gonna keep happening.

It's impossible for me to write in a blog about my "journey" without discussing my albatross, my great white whale, my elephant in the room. It’s the thing I carry with me always, sometimes strapped to my back like an overstuffed hiking pack, sometimes lurking just out of sight, waiting for the right moment to charge. Call it whatever you want—my shadow, my secret, my saboteur—but for me, it has a name: bipolar.

For the last 25 years of my life I've been in an existential battle with myself.  With faulty wiring and damaged circuits.  I didn't know it's name, or even know what I was fighting for the first 17 years of that.  And years of uncontrollable outbursts and dismissive doctors made me think I was just a shitty person, and this was just who I am.

I vividly remember, in college, being told by a therapist, "How do you know you're experiencing anything unique?  What makes you think what you're feeling is unusual?  What makes you think you're special?"

That night I started my self medication regiment of alcohol and other sedatives to prevent the "feeling" from coming back.  But it would, catastrophically, at the end of my senior year destroying my social and support networks.  This would be my first serious manic episode.

My second episode would happen seven years later, would nearly kill me, and would end in a hospital bed detained to a psych ward.

In the DSM-5, mania, in terms of Bipolar 1, is defined as:

"A distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood and abnormally and persistently increased goal directed activity or energy, lasting at least 1 week and present most of the day, nearly every day (or any duration if hospitalization is necessary)"

To be defined as type 1 versus 2, "The mood disturbance must be sufficiently severe as to cause marked impairment in social or occupational functioning or necessitate hospitalization to prevent harm to self or others, or there are psychotic features."

The symptoms are sometimes benign, always bizarre, and often baneful.  I wasn't born this way, and this condition of mine doesn't run in the family.  I remember the first feeling that something was off in the summer of 2000, shortly after recovering from a systemic infection that left me bedridden for nearly a month.  I didn't know what to call it, what it was, or what to do/expect.  I was hypomanic for the first time (mania, but not like MANIA mania.  The lesser presentation).  I struggled to sleep, I saw things and heard things that weren't there, I was quick to anger and always irritable, and I had boundless energy for anything unproductive.  I developed paranoid thoughts, most notably a year later when the Twin Towers fell, feeling an overwhelming thought that I was somehow to blame.  (100% true of 11 year old Matt).  When I burned all that energy up, I would crash into depressions.  To be honest, I fluctuate so much that I don't think there actually is a "real" Matt anymore, just the opposite poles fighting for supremacy.

In college, a worrisome pattern of fluctuating hypomania and depression started my junior year.  I took on more responsibility and coursework combined than I could reasonably handle.  When I wasn't in class or extra curriculars I was obsessively studying every resource I could get my hands on about Human Endogenous Retroviruses, thinking I had come up with a theory that would change the whole world (my exact theory had already been published years ago in Taiwan.  And it did not change the world).  I, however, was undeterred. Because nothing says "scientific breakthrough" like reinventing an already established theory during a coffee and Jack Daniels fueled all nighter, while listening to Brand New on repeat.

And when I wasn't doing any of that, I was filling journals with an incoherent "code" I used to hide what I thought was "dangerous" information that couldn't get out.  Somewhere in a landfill there’s a moleskin notebook that would absolutely convince a documentary crew I’m either a genius or the Zodiac killer.  Just kidding, trash in Arlington gets incinerated.  A car crash and concussion senior year turned the hypomania into a full blown manic episode for the first time.  I heard voices.  I sometimes talked to or told said voices to shut the fuck up.  I became paranoid, erratic, and often believed I had special powers that just hadn't developed yet.  One night I became so oddly behaved, that it was deemed necessary to call the police for a welfare check on me.  That pushed me even further off the edge. 

I ended friendships, and damaged many others.  When the dust cleared, and I was back at home after graduation, I felt alone and like my life was over.

I slowly stabilized, but never really regained my center.  I struggled to make new friends or build a network I could count on, and I was alone most of the time.  I started to develop worsening psychosis, increase my drinking, my paranoia returned, and I started writing insane thoughts ideas and essays down, filling up nearly a dozen journals with incoherent scribbling.  

Things changed when, on Valentine's day 2015, I was attacked by a stalker, and sexually assaulted.  That's a story for another entry, but it left me catatonically depressed, hopeless, and for the first real time I knew my life was in danger from self harm.  I tried to go back info therapy, but every doctor I saw wanted to medicate me, and I was whole heartedly against that at the time.  I thought my problem was just mental, I didn't realize how deep in I was.

I wouldn't come out of that until I finally met a new friend.  One who would get me out of my shell and make me feel human again.  Things would go well for two years, though there were some major red flags that I chose to ignore.  Like when she told me not to trust other people, because she was the only one who would ever understand me.  She was the only one who would ever care about me.  She would leave after my second episode, calling me toxic in her final message.  And despite the many years that have passed, I still hear those words in my head nearly every day.  I still take it to heart, and it's hard not to see that in myself still.

I would lose my long time job near the end of 2016.  Trump would be inaugurated days later.  I found another job (that I hated from day 1), and opened myself up to medicine.  I was incorrectly diagnosed with schizophrenia, because the hallucinations were all I discussed with my doctor.  I was put on heavy antipsychotics that made me physically sick, and made my mental health worse.  After a while I couldn't bring myself to take them anymore, went cold turkey, and cancelled my psych appointments.

I don't know when the mania started, likely around mid 2017.  All I know is that suddenly, I stopped sleeping.  I just didn't need to anymore, maybe an hour or two a night.  I started to withdraw myself, because I believed everyone was conspiring against me.  Except my new friend, she was the only one I could trust.  I resumed my paranoid writings.  Sent long winded rambling emails.  I started having messianic thoughts, like I was supposed to save the world from something, I just didn't know what yet.  When I did sleep it was full of nightmares, and near the end I started seeing demons and figures outside, trying to get into my house.  I started dropping large sums of money on tattoos, even getting a matching tattoo with my friend.  I still can't decide whether to get it removed or not.

After one night of particularly bad hallucinations and stupid decisions, I went to work confused and incoherent.  I was speaking too fast, uptight about every little detail in the store, and weak from 72 hours of no sleep.  I crashed in the bathroom, blacked out, and came back into full consciousness in a hospital room with a guard at the door.  I heard someone saying my name as I stared at him.  The voice got louder and louder, more irritated with each call.  I broke free and turned to look, and on a rolling table sat a laptop on a Skype call with a social worker.  She explained, again, that I was to be committed to a psych ward, and I could either volunteer and spend probably 72 hours inside, or be forcibly admitted, spending who knows how long.  Confused and crying, I signed my consent.

One of the EMTs in the ambulance that took me wanted to talk my ear off about the upcoming Infinity War movie, despite me having not seen a single Marvel film.  The other had stood me up on a tinder date (yes, this really happened), and I prayed to whatever agnostics pray to that she didn't recognize or remember me.  Richard Dawkins?  Do we pray to him or is that atheists?

The stay was uncomfortably religious.  The first therapist I saw asked if I might want to consider a relationship with Jesus.  Again - that really happened.  I started crafting origami lotus flowers to steady my mind and pass the time, but every time I was caugh my supplies were taken away, and I was told "it's not crafting time yet, you need to wait.".  All the books in the "library" were either religious texts or WWII history.  And my roommate was a paranoid schizophrenic who kept telling me all the ways he was going to rape and murder me.  He was harmless though, the nurses told me when I asked for another room.  

When I finally saw a psych, I was on four days without sleep.  I tried my best to sound sane to get out, but I spent nearly 10 minutes breathlessly answering questions I was asking myself, while he just wrote on his note pad.  When I stopped (because I made myself dizzy), I finally got the diagnosis of Bipolar 1, and started Lithium and Lamictal for the first time.

And despite having a diagnosis and finally a proper treatment regiment, I was still off the wall.  I went into the shower, and scrubbed until my skin was raw.  When I ran out of soap, I got out and did the same for my hands and arms in the sink.  I began obsessively washing, returning every 15 minutes to clean up again.  I went into my room and was able to get an hours worth of sleep, as my roommate was trying to order fifteen pizzas with complicated topping ratios on the phone, stopping only to inform the person he thought was on the other line of all the violent things he would do to him.  He hasn't dialed anything before picking up and talking.

Two friends of mine from college came to visit day two or three.  For some reason they thought I had gone vegan.  I had to explain to them the cheese pizza they had brought me though was not vegan anyways.

My new friend did not visit.  She was spending time with my cousin, doing a photoshoot.  When my college friends reached out to her, begged her to visit, explained how much it would mean to me, she told them no, and that I "belonged in there".  A friend would reluctantly show me the text exchange a year after this happened.

The mania turned to depression violently midway through my stay.  My roommate was released, or moved, or idk what, so I had a room to myself.  I slept about 16 hours a day, only getting up when forced to for meals, medication, and blood work (they did SO MUCH blood work).

When I was released, no one could come to pick me up.  So I had to call an Uber from the hospital.  I went straight to the liquor store, got a bottle of Evan, and drank until I was sick, while popping the Klonopin they had inexplicably given me for "anxiety".

I stayed depressed until the pandemic, when hypomania became my life again.  Never as severe as before, as my heavy regiment of medications smooths out the peaks, preventing the mania or depression from getting too bad.  But it's still there.  It's still lurking.  And I know it's a part of my life that isn't going away.

The other day I found myself really stressed out.  And since drinking (or Klonopin) isn't an option for me anymore, I had to think outside the box.  So in my dominant hypomanic state, I thought the best thing to calm my nerves would be building a $100 Lego set.  With some peppermint tea and stand up comedy in the background.  I put on my favorite comedian, John Mulaney, and made it through two of his specials before deciding to pick Baby J.  I don't know if you're familiar with this particular work dear reader, but it's a show all about his rehab from cocaine addiction.  I put it on - and I'm relating maybe a bit too much with his stories of substance abuse.  And then he tells one joke - one I seem to have missed my first time watching the show.  You can hear the audiences discomfort with it through their nervous laughter, but he pushes through.  And it spoke to me way more than it really ever should have:

"It's strange sometimes, you know, like I'm doing great. But when I'm alone, I'm with the person that tried to kill me. Sometimes I walk past a mirror, I'm like, 'Oh great, this fucking guy again. Jesus.' That is kind of a creepy feeling sometimes, but it's also a nice feeling. It gives me a strange kind of confidence sometimes. 'Cause, like, look, I... I used to care what everyone thought about me... so much. It was all I cared about. All I cared about was what other people thought of me. And I don't anymore. And I don't because I can honestly say: What is someone going to do to me that's worse than what I would do to myself? What, are you going to cancel John Mulaney? I'll kill him. I almost did."

I'm finally at a point in my life where I can say I'm okay.  I feel stable, secure, and coherent.  And the shit my mania makes me do is really annoying at worst.  Mostly involves spending money I don't have, or writing super TMI posts like this.  But there's still that demon out there following me around.  And if I let my guard down, who knows what episode 3 could bring.

I've been asked before, "you know you're manic, you know you're bipolar.  Why don't you just, well, not do these things?"

Yeah.  That's a real question.  I've gotten it more than once.

Because manic decisions are more than just an idea to do something, or an urge to do them.  It feels like someone has climbed into your head, ripped the controls from the homunculus steering the ship that is you, and is steering you straight for the rocks.  When I feel manic, I feel like I'm doing everything in third person.  And if I say no my body just does it anyways.  Some days I wish I had someone, anyone around me who understood this condition, as I feel like from the outside I just look like an erratic jerk.  But I am trying.  I take a lot of solace in my favorite Motion City Soundtrack lyric, which I actually have hanging over my bed,

"For the first time in a long time,

I can say that I wanna try

To get better and overcome each moment

In my own way..."

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.