“I am a god. I consume lightning, manufacture it, manifest it. Let them bow.”

– Journal Entry from a Manic Mind.

I lost my mind the way you lose your virginity. Unexpected, messy, and never quite what you thought it’d be. People everywhere establish these boundaries for human experience, and some of them are beautified renditions of our expectations. Suburban dreams meld with prestigious careers and vivid romantic affairs, but life deviates from its norm more often than not, and the cosmic spark in each of us diminishes with haste.

At least, that’s what happened to me. A 3.8 GPA, a speaker of 3 languages, a player of 6 instruments, a filmmaker, a previously published writer, all descriptions abandoned my fragile husk when 3 words disheveled everything I thought comprised me.

“You have RCBPII,” the psychiatrist said with his nose snug in the intake notes, his voice as cold as cancer. For those unfamiliar with the abbreviations, my little man in the white suit told me I have Rapid Cycling Bipolar Type 2(you can see the imperative for the abbreviation).

We’re going to lift off and away from this moment, because I assure you that I morphed into a frigid puddle on the ground, but let’s talk about where I was before the loving drop onto my psychiatrist’s floor. On my head, mind you.

Now, where to begin on my descent to never-ever again land? As I said above, my life was on its way to becoming an article in Forbes on the millennial how-to page(that’s a joke, by the way). I spent my days treading forlorn corridors of academia, writing supposedly vibrant prose, and making films with people I never imagined I’d meet. I lived in Paris for almost a year to study literature in an embrace with the world too tight to abandon, the sails forever caught between an endless cadence I set my feet against. Life had its moments of scintillant beauty, and my eyes drenched themselves in a glaze of wanderlust and joy.

All of that seems good on paper, or in an article by some skinny twenty something, but what I didn’t expound upon were the depressive episodes that laced themselves between the fabrics of my life, the feral anxiety that bubbled electricity beneath my flesh.

Each moment that ushered joy hand in hand was met by month long bouts of ‘melancholia’. As the more astute of the psychiatric elite would state. Let’s avoid the BS, and I’ll tell you that before I attained any of the things listed above, I fell into a major depressive episode at 18 for 7 months and placed a gun into my mouth to celebrate the end with a violent firework. I cried when I let the hammer ease back into hibernation, and my rage gushed red onto my cheeks.

I quickly moved up and on, and decided to forget the whole experience by contriving written worlds. As I spun words, the spool of my tangled mind became less and less like static, and it eased back into its gentle straight wave. Or, so I thought. The moments before my episode, I didn’t realize it would be the last time I’d be quote ‘stable’ until 22, or that I would attempt suicide one more time before seeking treatment for depression; and, unfortunately, that I would attempt suicide once more after I encountered a new deformed face: mania.

When you look back onto these things, all in hindsight and blurred by psychotic paranoia, you realize everything was a symptom, or was it? All those outbursts and sleepless hues of night throughout your teens an allusion to something more horrid. I told the psychiatrist about each episode, I had 2 more before seeking treatment the first time.

He asked if I understood that early onset(anything before 21) depression typically signifies a more acute mood disorder rather than unipolar depression. He asked if I had ever taken any SSRIs, or anti-depressants as they’re formally known. I told him that I had taken St. John’s Wort, but it commenced a few month long episode where mania took hold. I told him it felt like lighting when it kissed you. I told him I was a deity in those moments, an immovable force, invincible to sleep and death’s grimace. It wasn’t difficult to arrive at a diagnosis after that.

I still remember the white walls interrupted by his combative blue shirt, I still remember the need to light up a cigarette after he informed me that Type 2 Polar Bears, contrary to typical thoughts about the disorder, experienced dismal depressive episodes that are deeper, longer and darker than other types. He told me that Type 2 possesses a higher rate of suicide than Type 1. He told me we’d begin popping pills like snare drums in the back of my throat, but I should remain open, because the severity of my case would most likely only have 50ish% relief from symptoms.

In my black clothes, eyes cloudy from a layer of thin liquid, I realized something. For the first time, I saw that the thing dormant inside me was chronic. I looked back on the past few years of my life and stared into the face of cyclical moods, a mind strapped the explosive charges, and collapsed into the fact that I would cycle over and over again until death greeted me with greedy open arms. I wanted help but I wanted to die. The same brain that infused creative surges to my very being could be, has attempted to be, my murderer.

“It’ll be a long road,” he said on that day and it still echoes fruitlessly inside my mind from time to time. He didn’t need to tell me about my illness. What I wanted to know is how I missed it. To which anyone would respond, “probably because you’re living inside it,” which ushered in more questions more lethal to self than ones about the toxicity of lithium.

The depressive episodes were an insufferable cavern of canines that’d maim you, the primary focus of my psychiatrist and therapist. Mania, on the other hand, was the rosy lipped lover who wouldn’t let you sleep at night. At times it would fill you with rage, but only because you dared to look at the world without seeing through its eyes.

What if I liked myself when I was manic? What if it was everything I was supposed to be and more, a reflection of what I could be if I read some self-help books and drank 16 cups of coffee per day. Where would I go without those creative bursts, those hapless flights? Who would I see in the mirror after I stabilize? Where did I begin and the illness end?

If you’ve ever won an award, ever felt the rush from your first kiss or the kiss of someone you adore, the times when life’s beauty is too palpable and thick. That’s a small dose of what mania is like. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, an incessant train of joy and grandiosity. Your dog could die and you’d smile with all your teeth.

The hardest part about the disorder remains the lack of trust for what you feel, what your emotions tell you. They’ve told you that you’re a god and a vermin, at once on a throne and afterwards a corpse to be discovered in a crater. Come watch the spectacle, come to the slaughter.

After a slew of trial and error therapy, I stare at sanity which rests inside a little white pill no bigger than my index finger’s nail. One that allows me to feel human when I was a little too human. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I have a lot of bad days still. Days in which I rejoice that this medication works. Days where I remember when the lethal pendulum of my mind swayed with either a knife or a syringe on its tip. Days where I recall the psychotic breaks where nightmares manifested a reality I’ll never forget.

Each time my medication’s gaping bottle mouth stares up at me, and I see her tiny teeth deranged and crooked, I am reminded I have madness inside me. I’m reminded I’m sick. I’m reminded that unlike the writers before me who shared my illness, I have access to treatment that allows life to slow its pace. I still cycle, I still feel extremes on some days when a misplaced statement triggers the beast beneath the surface, and it nips my brain a little.

These days life is more beautiful than anything I ever saw while manic(I never thought that’d happen). I’m dating the girl of my feckless dreams, I never thought I’d have a stable relationship, but her grace and understanding showed me it’s attainable. I’m surrounded by wondrous examples of true friends, friends who understand and offer patient resolve. My artistic career and life slide along on a horizontal line.

Some days I miss mania, the mixed states, the depression, all those emotions that remind me I’m alive and human. I’m not bipolar, I have bipolar. I would say it doesn’t define me like most articles like these read, but it does. It’s shown me the full capacity of the mind’s emotive ability. It’s shown me the resolute strength inside me, it’s presented a gaze into the depths of my resilience.

I wouldn’t be who I am without staring death in the iris and feeling its stalwart weight fall onto my chest cavity(try to breathe now, do you feel alive yet?). Not once, but 3 times. I wouldn’t be who I am without it, I can’t be who I am with it. Each day presents a challenge, but the florid lullaby from the cosmos itself invites me to rise again. To whom it may concern: rise and rise again, and grip your humanity with grace. It gets better, I promise.

Welcome to the polar bear club.

– J