The Maddening Happening

I sit here with a blank notebook and an empty bottle of Lithium wondering when I’ll start feeling like myself again. I have grown accustomed to a week of hypomania and attribute all of my great ideas to that state of madness. What is normal and why do we idealize it? I try to write and nothing comes. It’s meaningless to force inspiration. I have a setting, character development and a storyline, yet what I produce has somehow missed its intended mark. Am I in some way different than I was even three weeks ago? Where is the passion that turns the wheels inside of my head to create something from nothing? The power of words is just that: the ability to create, to bring meaning and purpose.

Is this depression? I’m not sure I even understand that state of mind. For seven years I’ve been in a dream state. Hospitals put bandages on my shattered psyche and passed me along to the next doctor in line waiting to take a crack at how to fix me. Either I was manic or I wasn’t and the word depression didn’t even come into play until the end of my last manic-psychotic episode.

Hypomania has become my drug of choice. A state of inspiration and creativity, with pressure to succeed and reach self imposed deadlines out of irrational fears. Who am I if I am reduced to a life of normalcy? Writing without creating is simply self indulgence (or in the case of this piece, just self pity).

Who am I when I can’t find the words to express my feelings. At that point, am I still alive? A person without emotion is consumed by void. I am neither happy nor sad, just in a state of existence. I used to be moved to tears by music or movies or speeches and now I rarely feel anything. It’s not that the quality of those things is in some way different, I’ve just become desensitized to pain through the pharmaceuticals.

Life is nothing more than a series of experiences. Some are good, some are bad but all of them shape who we will become as individuals. We are the product of what has happened to us and how we have responded to it. Joy and sadness can both be responses to the same event; it just depends on how the person processes it. One person’s dream job is another's worst nightmare. The ability to persevere comes down to the grit of the person.

I find meaning from writing. Self Expression is my go-to therapy and without it I don’t feel like me. Words create my reality for better or for worse. I know that I exist because I can feel and when I stop feeling I become afraid. Emotions let us know that we are still alive. I try to capture moments to make them into memories. I write about what I know and it’s more for myself than anyone who would care to read my works. When I can’t create, I feel as though I am in an in-between state, stuck between two realities. Writing without emotion is cold and empty, generic and conventional, a product of vanity and self-indulgence.

I can’t remember the last time I felt alive; neither overrun with joy, nor suffering in pain and sadness. I just simply exist in a robotic trance, going through the motions like other everyday people. I wonder where God is in all of this. Who am I to be blessed with an ordinary life taken for granted when there is so much suffering in the world? Who am I to compare my pain to others who live with much worse illnesses. So what, I spend two weeks a year locked up in an asylum? Some people never leave places like that.

For better or worse, a disability can give you your abilities. My madness fosters my productivity and that pushes me further. Just know that your words create your reality, heaven and hell are only inches apart. I’m grateful to have a home to go home to, a family to love me, and a belief in myself that no circumstance can ever take away.