Crash

I was doing better mood-wise for a couple of weeks. I was in that sweet spot where I seemed to have enough energy and enough motivation to get things done every day. I was making a to-do list and doing most of it. I was being gentle with myself on the things I didn’t accomplish. All of my therapists thought I was doing so well and really on the “road to recovery.” But there was a little niggling thought at the back of my head that reminded me that this was probably a false positive. This probably wouldn’t last.

Then, for the past several days, my energy has become more scattered. My motivation has been single-focused. I’ve blown off consequences and sleep. Last night I was unquestionably hypomanic. All of the good few weeks were just building mania. Because of course they were. I don’t get to have nice things. They are always curses wrapped in pretty paper.

Last night I decided to complete a 300 piece puzzle, online, at 10 P.M. It was a picture of a bunch of marbles, for fuck’s sake! Sir laid out consequences, made threats, made bargains, walked away and ignored me, and finally physically took the computer away (a risk he doesn’t always want to take when I’m wound tight). Fortunately, I stayed good natured and I didn’t devolve into rage or self-harm which is the dark side of the mania coin – too much energy channeled to anger rather than joy. Last night I stayed happy, even after my computer was taken away. I kept bursting into spontaneous song and dance moves even after Sir dunked me in a cool shower. I continued clapping rhythms with my hands and slapping them on my body after Sir shut off all the lights. I quieted when he took a wooden spoon to my ass, but promptly began chattering at him as soon as it stopped falling. The current of my words was so fast that they jammed up at the strait of my mouth and my stutter kicked in so I signed, but even my hands couldn’t handle the press of my words between lapses into echoing and rhyming. Sir finally smacked the back of my legs with the ruler paddle (that and the meds kicking in is what eventually broke through). But even as I crawled into bed and felt the pressure on my lips and tongue ease, felt silence settle in my mouth, my brain still hummed. Sir read to me, his voice soft and slow, until I stopped fighting the drugs and allowed sleep to take me.

Today, I am crashed. It feels as if all of the good of the past three weeks has come back demanding its price, its pound of my body, my brain, my heart, my spirit. I feel pummeled and dark and pathetic, like a half-drowned creature shivering in an unforgiving night.

And it surely isn’t over. Mania doesn’t let me go so easily. It will surge back tonight, tomorrow, next week, pressuring my words again, making my skin crawl, scattering my focus, making me act like someone I’m embarrassed to be in the cold light of morning, trying to reclaim the hill it doesn’t mind me dying on.

And then, when my brain has finally used up the last chemicals it can scrape from my walls, I will crash for good… a deep depression just in time to start the new school year, fighting to make anything matter, to remember what, if anything, ever had. Hopeless weight, all my limbs like bags of sand. Even the cursed glimmer of knowledge that, if nothing else, at least eventually I’ll be manic again can’t penetrate the darkness of my prefrontal cortex, the door closed firmly to hope.

I don’t have a bipolar diagnosis anymore. But bipolar-adjacent is shitty real estate where not even meds keep me stable.

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