Manic – May 1995

Mania means never having to say "coincidence." Honing and applying the perspective of analytical-interconnectedness to your daily regimen rules out the possibility of that phenomenon. Everything is linked. There is no coincidence. On a good day, this modus operandi can be full of positivity and FUN! On bad days, though, thoughts morph to shit and paranoia tempts. But that’s all part of the deal…

Manic Depression, with all of its faces, is a thinking disease. Dis-ease. The overwhelming power of the brain can result in a wide array of bizarre, yet related behavior in the afflicted, from crying jags and isolation, to feelings of invulnerability and a heightened sense of perception through analysis of body language and verbal selection, to alienation and hostility towards others. Manics are always thinking. About who knows what (probably something convoluted and grandiose), but make no mistake, their thoughts are somewhere out there, careening along on some freakout tangent or other, travelling so fast they can’t tell anyone how they might have gotten from point A to point X. But the thought line is there. And the process is so complex and involved that, to articulate every machination is, at times, impossible to relay with much or any clarity.

Lithium helps, kind of. I took it for about three months, and there were positive aspects to the salt isotope, like I didn’t feel crazy, which was nice. But the downside was that there were no highs. That was the trade-off for the removal of the low end of my thoughts. The peaks on both ends were eliminated. Everything felt like the color gray, and was 1.75 degrees off-kilter from normal. Almost happiness. Almost.

I was working at the Front Desk of the Casa Marina in Key West when I started my first and only cycle of Lithium. My quack of a psychologist (whom I only went to three times before fully realizing how full of shit she was) told me that confusion might be a side effect to be aware of before the Lithium reached an effective saturation in my blood stream. It took a little under three weeks for the drug to start working, and there were times when I would look at the reservation computer and not know where to start, or not know the name of the person next to me, just for a second sometimes, sometimes longer. The confusion added to the everyday stress of the job, making it almost too much to bear without crying or unusual or inappropriate behavior.

I can’t fully articulate these perceptions; they’re too subjective for words. But everything was off. And the back of my brain felt like it was squeezing itself. A sensation I really didn’t like. So the whole grand Lithium experiment was a trade off of remedies, side effects, and restrictions, with the negative finally outweighing the positive. So Lithium got pushed by the wayside with little fanfare.

It is very easy to destroy the self-image of people who think too much.