3 am muffins and mania

It is three o'clock in the morning and I am baking muffins. Have been for a while. Don't really know why.

So while I'm waiting for the next batch to finish, I will talk to you of mania, at least as I experience it.

Wikipedia says: Mania (from Greek μανία and that from μαίνομαι - mainomai, "to rage, to be furious". (Yes I quite like Wikipedia.) It goes on further to say: Symptoms of mania include rapid speech, racing thoughts, decreased need for sleep, hypersexuality, euphoria, impulsiveness, grandiosity, in some cases psychosis, and increased interest in goal-directed activities.

That's what Wikepedia says. Online definitions don't speak much of the human experience, however.

Increased interest in goal-directed activites. Hmm. Maybe that's why I'm baking tray after tray of muffins in the middle of the night. I've also been getting mad urges to go to Alaska.

But anyway.

I will describe one of my previous manic episodes.

It started out simply with me not sleeping. It crept up quickly and before I knew it I was running almost all night with no sleep and I wasn't even feeling it. I started to feel really, really good. Everything took on a sort of detail, it was like I was experiencing the world through a 50 inch hi-def flatscreen with super surround sound. I felt so in control. It was like I could see everything in my head and could organize it perfectly. I felt like I could control the world.

These feelings scared me at first. I could tell something had changed, I could tell that my world was speeding up, and I mentioned my concerns to my therapist. She thought I was fine. I did not share this view. I was just coming out of a depressive episode (will talk about that next time) and everyone thought it was great that I felt So Much Better.

Things escalated. Suddenly I could orchestrate the world, I could make everything work exactly as I thought it should. By the next week I went to the appointment with my therapist and didn't want to sit down. I wandered the office restlessly and talked a blue streak about everything that popped into my head. The weather. The news. My cat. Last night's television. How wonderful things were. My cat again.

This time she was concerned. I was perfectly fine.

She sent me to a psychiatrist for a one-time assessment. Being the good student that I was, I took notes on what things were like and brought them into my session with the psychiatrist. She wanted me to try Seroquel, an anti-psychotic/mood stabilizer that is good at getting people back to sleep. This is where my mind broke loose from reality a little. When I got the prescription for six little pills filled at the pharmacy I was convinced that she was only humouring me and had secretly told the pharmacy to give me a placebo. I decided not to take the medication. I didn't know what it would do to me and I didn't trust her anyway. Bad decision.

That was the more fun, early beginnings. My memory of what follows isn't exactly clear. Mania tends to give you fuzzy spots.

Pretty soon I went from feeling great to feeling terrified beyond reason. I wasn't sleeping because if I did, something bad would happen, some catastrophe would fall. One night I was so struck with creativity that I spent four hours composing pages of poetry, and then started two new short stories. The next night I spent too much money on paint and more paint and I decorated my apartment with detailed rabbits and random abstract finger paint. I started going for walks at 2 in the morning. Frantic walks that took an hour or more. I stopped going out during the day because the sky was so big and open that I was convinced that the sun would crush me. I pulled away from people. I was paranoid. When I went on my 2 am walks I could always hear people whispering behind me, and shadows flew past the edges of my vision. Probably the biggest personality change is that I started compulsively sex-seeking. I went to craigslist to look for sexual partners. I talked to several guys and made some plans. I was supposed to meet up with the first one after work on a Saturday.

Work was particularly hard that Saturday. I had spent the week hiding in isolation and slowly going crazy. When I had to come out on Saturday all of the sudden I didn't quite fit properly into the world any more. I had to whitewash over myself, to try and keep the illusion that my world hadn't just cracked apart before my eyes. I held it together for most of work.

Something shifted. All week I had been slowly moving from pure mania to a "mixed" state, which is when symptoms of mania and depression both occur. Mixed states are scary. They are dangerous. Gone was the superman feeling. All I was left with was paranoia, extreme amounts of energy, and the idea that maybe I should be dead. I canceled with the guy, and he was angry and stalked me via text message for awhile. That was the day I stepped on the subway and heard people thinking that I should be dead. Everything broke to pieces after that. I was worse off than I was before. But alas, that will wait until I decide to write about depression.

Which won't be right now because I have to go take out some muffins!