“Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall, I’m not quite right at all…am I?”

‘All the Madmen’ David Bowie All the Madmen (YouTube)

Ever since I can remember, I have felt out of step with reality; I’m not part of what people accept as normal. I think most people feel like is from time to time. There’s nothing uniquely strange about me. I can blend in. I can chat to people about music and television. I can be as interesting or banal as anyone else. My sense of ‘wrongness’ stems from my inability to tame my emotions. Sometimes I reduce this wrongness to insanity. But if I give myself this label, what does it mean? What are the implications of proclaiming oneself mad?

When you need help, you need the vocabulary to both understand and communicate your distress. Having a mental illness, for me, is like running a marathon through a maze of words, struggling to snatch and grab the right combination of terms to explain what’s happening to me. Everyone with a mental illness has their own lexicon. But these words have their own consequences. Am I sane or am I irredeemably crazy? Will help offered me take me away from myself and extract me permanently from the ‘civilised world’? If I can’t describe or understand my illness, then maybe I am too far gone for help. Is this bipolar disorder, this manic depression, killing me? I don’t know what it all means and I certainly cannot safely explain myself.

Depression is too inadequate a word to describe the intense cascade of awfulness that one experiences when crushingly low. Establishing shades of horror and pain is impossible because the chiaroscuro of depression is so ambiguous. Mania for me is much easier to describe: the shift from mischievous, urgent, joyful enthusiasm for everything, to mind-meltingly fast and intrusive thoughts and delusions is a clearer experience for me. I love being hypomanic because I recognise it as the best of me. I choose to believe that my greatest accomplishments and ideas have come from riding the crest of the hypomanic wave. If this is illness, I tell myself, then why would anyone want to deny themselves such brilliance? If this is insanity, so be it.

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” Edgar Allen Poe

I ask myself: is insanity my default setting? If I am insane, then asking me to accept a regimen of treatment to medicate me away from myself seems like some kind of horrible punishment. My problem is that draw too dramatic a distinction between ‘wellness’ and depression: ‘horrible sanity’ or insanity.

‘Wellness’:

Boundless energy

Uninterrupted flow of ideas

Wit and humour

Socialising

Asking questions

Coming to singular conclusions about many things

Flashes of electric clarity

Understanding and acting on things instantly

Learning new and challenging things

Talking to everyone

Being able to enjoy things ‘just because’

Depression:

Horror

Hatred

Fog

Dread

Fear

Drain

Nausea

Blackness

Suicide

But these states are not separate: being joyful and carefree is not a sustainable state; being haunted and drained of enthusiasm feels sustainable because depression convinces you that you will never recover. Hypomania is not a perpetual state of wonderfulness because, after a while, mania appears in its wake and things go too fast, become too intrusive, everything is loud and sharp and chaotic and nothing makes sense anymore. Mania, for me, is what Poe termed ‘horrible sanity’ and depression ‘insanity’. Mania has a richer, but simpler, lexicon. Depression has a heavier, vaguer one.

When I accepted that my ‘horrible sanity’ was something just as dangerous as my black, suicidal depressions, I began to explore the ways in which I could receive and accept treatment: a ‘horrible sanity’ in need of taming, not neutering. I wanted my ‘insanity’ to be nailed tightly in a steel box and thrown into the deepest ocean. I did not want to be “stand[ing], foot in hand, talking to my wall” anymore. But, perhaps, on some level I did. My sense of self and authenticity has been challenged many times over the years, but I simply do not know who I am without the overt symptoms of bipolar disorder. The best of me is also the worst of me… “here I stand”