Manic Monday

In her book, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison writes "I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been mildly manic. When I am my present 'normal' self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing, and effervescent."

This quote smacked me upside my head. Thank god someone said it, and that someone just so happens to also be a Professor of Psychiatry at a little ole' school called Johns Hopkins University. I felt this in every little grey fold that makes up my big beautiful brain.

I miss being manic. I miss the creativity. I miss the confidence. I miss how happy I was. I miss the adventures I would go on. I miss being able to do a million things at once. I miss how fast my brain was able to compute information. I miss the feeling of 24 hours feeling like 24 days.

Life felt so much more colorful and alive. It felt like every day was a bright beautiful gift I got to unwrap and simply discover the magic of being.

The tricky part of mania is there is such a massive swing of the different stages. For example when I see my Psychiatrist, one of the first questions is about my happiness level, and if I feel like I'm experiencing any symptoms of hypomania. Which is the first stage of mania and often the clue that acute mania is on the way. Imagine that...being too happy is a sign of mental illness. That is something I am going to have to get used to in this lifetime. It feels so clinical and robotic to me to gauge anything based upon that, but for now that's what is asked, and I have a wonderful Therapist I see that helps me balance out that frustration.

Like everything, there are always two sides to any coin, and after my diagnosis I began to discover just how many people out there did not share mine and Kay's viewpoint on mania. I found that many social accounts are really in the game of not only beating themselves up publicly on their own accounts, but fostering a place where shame and guilt are the norm in the comments section.

I look at all the stages of mania to be a unique human experience. Of course there were cringey moments, and moments I wish I could make disappear, but doesn't everyone have those? I find it increasingly detrimental that there are accounts beating themselves and other people up for what they have been through in a manic episode. What if we took the time to share these stories from a place of vulnerability and self-love, rather than sit in the comments section and bash ourselves for our behavior during what anyone would say is a very difficult human experience.

Go lightly with love,

Holly