As I sit on my couch in my parents house writing this, I wonder if it was worth it. But the fact that I still wonder means that everything has positives and negatives. My recent “hypomanic episode” was crucial in helping me fully understand myself, at it was during this time that I felt like I was truly living the life I wanted. But, as you know or as you can guess, mania usually doesn’t end well, regardless of whether you are doing the right thing or not…Butttt, everything is a learning experience…so how can I move forward with the clarity and confidence of “hypomania” while maintaining the empathy and emotional awareness that comes with depression? Will the two sides ever unite?

By telling me my suicidal thoughts are bad, I feel like a bad person. However, if you tell me its ok to “contemplate your existence — everyone does it at some point,” then I don’t feel like such a bad person for wondering if life would be better if I just jumped in front of the 60 mph train thats about to take me home. As a result, I move to the end of the tracks where if I jumped, I would just undergo a lot of agonizing pain due to a massive, now slowly moving object that would probably only crush half my body (Im not sure if I would be more or less depressed without my penis). Understanding that this thought is not something to react to, but rather something to observe but not take too seriously has been tremendous in helping me get through the downs, and it is this attitude that I hope will keep helping me get through the downs. This is classic mindful awareness, however as an intellectual, it took a lot of intellectual effort to convince myself that this was the right thing to do. Its okay to feel negative emotions.

I graduated from UCLA in Neuroscience. I later went to Imperial College London where I completed a Master’s in Experimental Neuroscience. This resulted in my admittance to an MD/PhD program at an amazing university in an amazing city with amazing people. However it was there that things started to go “downhill.” Well, let me preface this by saying in my eyes, things were going uphill. The downhill was everyone else’s eyes. I was riding “hypomania:” a state of being that I view as a reaction to the depressed self. This means a self that was outgoing, talkative, enthusiastic, confident, creative, and everything else, literally. There was nothing I believed I couldn’t do, and I kept proving this to myself by trying new things, learning from my mistakes, and accomplishing my (small) goals.

But I got ahead of myself, as I always do. And as I always do, I started smoking weed. Before I move on, it is NOT weed itself that caused me to leave, but the heightened curiosity for LIFE that comes with weed (which can be a problem in itself) caused me to resent sitting in a classroom spitting spoon fed information. Anyway, I craved stimulation, and hated being bored. But lets be real: if I spent half my existence bored out of mind unable to experience pleasure from anything besides food, masturbation and cigarettes, hopefully you can understand why I crave stimulation when Im not depressed. But if there is anything I have learned about the body, its that it strives to maintain equilibrium. This also applies to emotional energy. Highs breed lows; flying to close to the sun WILL burn you and you WILL fall. This is because your mind wants to balance you out.The real challenge is trying to fly at a reasonable altitude, when you feel you cant get off the ground but more importantly, when you know you can fly to the sun. Just think of pulling a rubber band. The harder you pull, the harder it will hit due to the strength of the rebound force. Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction.

This crave for stimulation is what set me up to fall in medical school. I got some attention after posting about my issues with depression. I then used this attention to release an album of songs I had been working on for two years. I then kept posting “what was on my mind.” But I guess my mind is unique, as my posts worried many of my family, friends and classmates, which is completely fair. But what was unfair is that my attempt to express my mind resulted in 10 cops coming to my apartment, strapping me to a board and taking me to (surprise) the exact hospital that I had spent the past 2 months at, where I resided for there for an additional 1 week. Following my exit, I took a leave of absence from medical school. I am now sitting at home, unemployed, and (relatively) lost. In the coming posts, I will detail this incident for anyone who cares (as only my girlfriend saw what truly went down) but hope to also create a venue where its okay for me to express my thoughts with hopes of clarifying my desires. I want to share the techniques that I have learned to manage my “whatever you wanna call it” and hear how other people have managed theirs. Also, please reach out to me with your stories, as I would love to hear them. Hopefully someone will be interested. Well see how this goes…

P.S. to everyone who I scared and neglected during this time period, I am truly sorry.