Bipolar

What it is like... "There is a particular kind of pain, joy, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and furious like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones, and then you think of even others. Shyness goes, I say the right things and do what is considered awesome and even genius, the power to captivate others I know with certainty. There are interests found in boring people. I am in control; I am in the "IN" crowd, and part of the inner circle. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, school excellence, and happiness fills my soul. But, somewhere this all changes. The fast ideas are too fast, and there are far too many, overwhelming confusion replaces what was so clear. Memory goes. Humor and interest on friend's faces are replaced by derision and confusion. I feel things going really fast and also people want this and that from me. There is so little time for me. Everything previously moving with the tide is now the tide pulling me out to sea.... I am irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and sinking in a quicksand in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality into my mind. I hate my own ideas. It goes on and on, and finally there are only other's recollections of your behavior.... your bizarre, frantic, aimless behaviors..... for mania has at least some grace in partially erasing memories. What then after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders..... medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Assignments forgotten, tests flunked, explanations due at school, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined family. My stepdad, I love him, I hate him. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild impulsive chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?"