Unusually personal

A glimpse into my mind….

I’m not sure what prompted me to write this. I think, perhaps, that it has been washing around inside my head for a couple of weeks now and seems to get more agitated when I’m walking around. So here’s my attempt to drain out some thoughts on madness. This is my experience of (officially) having bi-polar disorder, or manic depression, or simply being quite, quite mad (sometimes). If you’ve spend more than a few weeks in the same little goldfish bowl as me the outward behaviour won’t come as a huge surprise.

Lets start with the ‘up side’. The manic phases often feel quite disconnected from real life. For me, it is often a mix of physical and mental energy. It feels like an adrenalin shot to the heart. I want to run, jump, fly, anything, just to move faster. Life feels turbo-charged, I imaging this is how Superman felt when he was acting as Clark Kent, huge amounts of strength and speed all wound up and it takes concentration not to release it. Often combined with this is a strange feeling of mental acceleration. The rest of the world seems to drop into slow motion, not very slow, but enough to feel like it can’t quite keep up. There’s a huge rush of ideas, thoughts and raw creativity, often completely random in direction. It can be an amazing feeling, its like my brain is actually working properly, as if the rest of the time I was half asleep. I end up sitting around in the middle of the night scribbling the outline of a project, drawing strange contraptions or thing that I would like to build, but probably never will….

….and here’s where things usually start to dip. These huge bursts of activity and planning tend to create piles of plans. Most of these bursts seem to involve projects which can’t be achieved with the things I have, so I end up ordering strange tools, bits of electronics or other gizmos. At work I’ll set up a pile of experiments that I realistically could never deal with at once (in a weeks time when they are ready). I find myself surrounded by so many examples of things I have failed to do. Its an icy shock back to reality, then usually a bit further. The low side often starts like this, or as a huge overreaction to something minor, the kind of thing that would normally bother you for a few seconds, then you would forget about. The sinking continues and expands into a more physical sensation. I walk around drained of energy, feeling like someone has turned the gravity up. Lifting my head up takes noticeable effort and simply moving around becomes almost painful. Emotionally I end up surrounded by either intense grief and hopelessness or just completely numb. The numbness is in some ways harder to understand, it is quite distinct from sadness, it is a complete disconnection from the world. I end up in glass tank, able to see and hear the world, but separated from it somehow. Everything feels relayed or processed, in the same way that the watching the world on television doesn’t feel like being there. The hardest part is to explain to everyone else that it isn’t rational, it isn’t personal, it isn’t that I don’t love you all, I’m just numb.

The low points often last longer and fade away, rather than simply stopping. The local anaesthetic wears off and I start to feel things again. Simply clicking out of it happens much less often, whereas when I’m flying it usually ends with a quick, hard crash. After the lows, normality re-grows.

This isn’t intended to worry, more to try and explain.

A