Rested and alert, I woke up at 7:45 AM after forcing myself to bed at 3. It’s Saturday, I am here alone, and I do not have to be in Philadelphia until 7PM tonight. I am in the midst of my most profound manic episode of the summer, the kind that finds me locked away by myself writing music night after night, doing anything I can to avoid going to bed, instinctively waking up from my reluctant sleep every few hours to check my email and send awkward text messages that I won’t remember, arguing with friends and co-workers and strangers a little too easily, and filled with the most wild and inspiring ideas and frustrations and drive to both reach out to everyone and cut myself off.

This is me, right now.

It is a double-edged sword. On one end, we have the drive behind almost everything I have accomplished that I would consider integral to my identity: Woe and most of its best songs, learning PHP and building phillymetal.com, all the high-level tech knowledge, most of the books I’ve read, all of my best writing, so many of the events I remember most, so many of the decisions I’ve made. On the other, we have the failed relationships, missed work, missed school, missed social obligations in general, the alienation of friends, money wasted, time investments in things that never panned out, the damage to my health, the occasional risky behavior. Of course, it could be worse. I don’t… blow my savings on cocaine but I guess there’s still time left for that.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder three years ago and it snapped everything into focus. A lifetime of weird behavior summed up very succinctly, missed by doctors because I had never done anything crazy enough for them to consider anything more than simple depression. The final straw was when I jumped in my car and chased down a mugger who violently attacked two girls and stole one of their purses… while another girl I had just met was in the car with me. At 2 AM. When I checked myself into the hospital two weeks later, that incident caught their attention. Suddenly, a lot of the problems I had with school, routine, and really just life in general could be reexamined for what they were: tainted — I refuse to say “controlled,” as I ultimately have to be responsible for my actions — by a chemical condition that at times made me untouchable, at other times made me unbearable.

And here we are again. I’m dealing rather well, if I do say so. Mornings like this are difficult because I have to concede that my recent behavior — writing 20 minutes of music in three weeks, in particular — is not exactly normal, even if it does benefit me. I am realizing that I have an opinion of my manic episodes that verges on romantic; after all, they are the source of such drama, such adventure, some rabid creativity! There are enough personality archetypes that seem pervasive enough in our culture — the free-spirit, the wild artist, the uncompromising visionary — that one could possibly argue that we, as a culture, view bipolar disorder’s extremes in idealized, romantic language. The language is one-sided, though and focuses on the benefits because they make great stories, rarely its propensity to seize upon an individual with the worst possible emotion with no provocation, prodding them in a direction they don’t belong. Can I blame it for massive run-on sentences? Probably.

I feel fortunate in that for all of the grief it causes me, my episodes are relatively tame compared to others. Most of the specifics have been omitted here, particularly about the lows, and I hope that nobody reading this (not that anyone will read this) feels that my expressions of hypomania somehow marginalize more serious experiences. With all of the violence in America lately, I think that we need more serious discussions about mental health, and before that discussion begins, everyone owes it to him or herself to look inside and seriously examine the things they do, why they do them, and how they can make the most of everything they have.