As most of you recall, I had a pretty full-blown mental breakdown about 7 or 8 months ago. At the time, my doctor tripled my dose of anti-psychotic meds — treating me for bi-polar II disorder — and I’ve been on that dosage ever since, despite the fact that it makes me sleep 12 hours of the day and eat eight times my weight at night and is in the process of giving me diabetes. I was just happy not to be crazy, to always feel firmly planted in reality after the terrifying period of mania that preceded it.
Starting about that same time period, I’ve been creatively frustrated. I haven’t really felt inspired to do anything, not even my normal day-to-day job. I usually have a new project or a new idea or just something I want to work harder at and longer at and really sink my teeth into. I get obsessed with a project and I obsess on it constantly until it has the outcome I want. I used to call that goal-setting. I haven’t been able to do it recently. For the first time in years and years, I started watching television at night. Hours of television. Renting movies. Watching two movies in a night. Before, I would go weeks without ever turning my TV set on, without ever wanting to turn it on. I just had no desire to sit there and watch something, I had to be engaged with my project. I called this determination, I called it drive. I’ve thought it strange, recently, this willingness I had to sit on my couch and walk movies all night. It was new to me. I’d only recently come to accept it.
Two weeks ago, under the supervision of a doctor, I began tapering the dose of my anti-psychotic medication, so it is now at the levels it was before I had that breakdown. (I have not changed the dosage of my SSRI, however.) Today was my first day at the original, very low, levels.
And here’s what has happened: I do not watch television now. I do not enjoy watching television. I want to be working. I have so many ideas and they need to be implemented. The ideas come so quickly and all I can do is sit at my computer for hours and hours at a time trying to get them all taken care of. I obsess. My insides boil, they churn, they produce ideas and the ideas need to be constantly expelled from my body. Time disappears into the ideas. It is an unending process. In the past week, I have figured out how to give Evil Beet’s traffic numbers a 30% boost, Zelda Lily is doubling in traffic and will probably continue to grow exponentially week over week, and even Lilly Likes, the red-headed stepchild whose source code I can’t control, has seen a traffic boost. This is after seeing stagnant or declining numbers on all those sites for months, because I was completely unmotivated to do anything to change it. Once I was in obsession mode, it took me a matter of days to sort all this out and get everything back on track, even better than before.
But I can’t stop. I can’t stop working on it and I can’t stop obsessing on it. I get these things in my brain and they don’t stop ever and I have to continue to work on them. I have to make them great. And I think this is officially a mild mania. I don’t think this is normal good old-fashioned hard work. This is not normal, healthy thinking. This is obsession. And I’m just realizing tonight that that’s what the medicine was doing; it was working, it was preventing the obsession and the mania. It was working. And I’m struggling with this tonight, and it’s just sinking in for real, and I’m a little tearful. Because I’ve been sane long enough to recognize this as a little crazy. It’s not an unpleasant crazy — I feel great, I feel high, like mania is supposed to feel — but after not being manic at all for so many months, I recognize this as manic. And what happens, and why I build successful things and why I solve problems that no one else can solve and why people want to know how I’ve accomplished so much at this age, is that I have this disease that involves this mania and in addition to that I happen to have a statistically significant advantage in innate intelligence and I had parents who presented with me with every imaginable opportunity to become obsessed with something that would help me grow and also I’m pretty (not an ingredient to be undervalued) and the interaction of those key factors over the twenty-seven-plus years of my life has resulted in a very specific combustion effect, an overhead fireball of focused creative energy and limited-definition success. I’ve long known I had nothing to do with most of those factors. They were God- or parent-given; nothing I’d worked for or earned. But I used to think the first factor was me — my work ethic, my drive. I was a really, really hard worker. But now it kind of looks like that first factor isn’t really me, either. It’s an abnormality in the wiring of my brain. I cannot let go of a problem once I’ve begun trying to solve it. I’m incapable, like the alcoholic who can not put down the drink once he has made the choice to pick it up — a choice that was never earnestly his to make in the first place. It is not a choice I make to work hard. It is just the thing my brain does when it’s in its natural state. I have done nothing special or commendable. My neurological wiring is an outlier, as was its external environment. It was just the right combination of outliers. Whatever I am, whoever I am, however I represent value, it is clearly something entirely distinct from what the world would perceive as my accomplishments. The steady-state “I,” the observer mechanism, must be something separate from the mechanisms of the brain and the body, something inexplicably untied to neuromatter; this must be the soul concept.
I know this sounds crazy. It is, kind of. It definitely is. But I can do really, really cool stuff when I’m like this. Really brilliant and big and fun stuff. It’s exciting. I cannot do those things when I’m heavily medicated. I can’t even start. My brain doesn’t click in. It never really starts. And I’ve already realized that neither state — medicated or not — is really “me.” They’re all just variations on the wiring of my brain, operating independently, like neural franchisees. I’m something else entirely, I’m just not sure what yet.
But here’s what’s really weird: I can’t decide which I like better. There’s a phenomenal rush in the mania and there is such accomplishment, but there’s such peace and stability in the medication. With the mania there will come depression. There will be lows to accompany the highs. With the meds there will be neither lows or highs. I will be capable but I will not excel. I will be competent but not exceptional. I will not build exciting things. I know I will not. The difference is so immense, and it is not surmountable.
To be honest, I kind of love being like this. But ask me about it again when I’m on the depression end.
