I hadn’t been hospitalized for my bipolar 1 since 2020.
My behaviors leading up to hospitalization this past January weren’t too embarrassing compared to my past bipolar 1 MANIC episodes. I’ve gotten better at hiding, by better internalizing my rapid shifts in mood-motivated emotion. Unlike my previous cringe explosions where I’ve had to posthumously backtrack and consequentially lament.
Speaking of embarrassment, in this most recent episode, before my family brought me into the hospital, I did call my two ex-girlfriends a few times each. Neither of whom picked up. It sounds weird to say at 33 that I’ve only acquired two ex-girlfriends, I’ve dated a few in between but my college ex and my COVID ex are the only two I could have married. So they’re my exes.
January to me didn’t feel like any episode I’d had before, but they never do. Unfortunately, mania seems to blind us to the truth of the moment. For me, there is usually a specific action taken during those blurry moments that gets me in trouble; verbal confrontation, physical altercation, missing reports, arrests, ext.
Past actions taken that can be objectively seen as the embodiment of stupidity. All of which felt necessary in the moment, but just didn’t need to happen. I did not have to succumb to my emotions. I take things too far because my mood amplifies the feelings that push me in the wrong socially undesirable direction.
What are feelings without emotions?
Emotional behaviors evolved as immediate, automatic, and efficient ways to solve common problems that humans and other emotional animals must solve to survive.
There are three primary functions of emotions.
Emotions prepare us physically for action: The action urges are connected to specific emotions that are largely hard-wired in our biology.
Emotions save time: We don’t have to think everything though. Emotionally we can react to situations extremely fast.
Emotions can be hard to change: (this is supposed to be a good thing) When the associated behavior is very important. (Linehan, 2015)
Biologically it is in our body’s self-interest to stay in a peak mode until safety has been established.
We can fight our desires…
Self-questioning and self-pity usually drag me down Depression Alley, where my sadness can run me over like a freight train; over and over again. Rendering my mind and body useless.
The fact that I can type and keep up with my journals since leaving the hospital, tells me that this cyclical season of depression I’m now facing won’t end me. I just wish some of my fantasies were true. Turns out I am nobody’s chosen one.
My mind has the uncanny ability to create a narrative around my life where, you guessed it, I’m the main character. I’ll refer to this from now on as the Truman Show effect.
Aware or not of the reference, my nurses would get a laugh whenever I quoted “And in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon good evening, and goodnight!” I figured they were in on my game. Nope, just another crazy being crazy.
What was I thinking? Well, I thought I was being recruited into the 2024 world of spycraft. My mind has this phenomenon where it goes into creative-led self-destruction. The chaos is disguised and hidden in patterns before the self, the ego, and the inner me may realize my mind’s localized fallacy. My brain is working against me. Telling me sweet little lies that only I can formulate and sense.
I had constructed an espionage narrative that was, of course, centered around me and my past. I remember thinking that if it were real and published our story could be the best romance ever told. A story including but not limited to; telepathy, the CIA, astral projection, Edward Snowden, aliens, Trump, and my two ex-girlfriends. Reaching much?
My own personal Syfy thriller was based in the here and now. For a time I felt I had access to the information they don’t want us to know. I started drafting some of it out as a science fiction novel, but the editing process will take a while to get the MANIC out of the writing. No one wants to read that brain-scrambled crap.
In hindsight, I can tell that I am desperately longing for love in my life. Why else would I emotionally reach out to a woman I’d gone out of my way to not think of for the past decade? During that strange month, my mind brought her not just back to life, but it made her the central character of my new story. She was a wind-up tool whose purpose was expositional in my new exciting life-driven narrative. In my matrix of reality, she was the one dropping by with the day’s pertinent information. I wasn’t hearing with my ears but within the ear of my mind, her voice then was clear and present. Sad.
Narratively I made sense of why it had to be her telepathicly projecting and reaching out to contact. Some shenanigans that occurred during one of that week’s mania-induced adventures pointed me to her past, maybe present, employer code-named here AlphaC. AlphaC is a company big enough, in my mind, for secret-sanctioned espionage.
A bit of crazy incoming…
Why would spies work the way we see them work in movies? Those kinds of secrets don’t open up to the public until the real agencies dictate those procedures and practices obsolete. Even the newest iteration of James Bond is a dead dinosaur, an idea worth considering. I knew the military was up to something a few years back during that phase when there were like 10 Navy Seal movies released in sequence. All of a sudden every Navy Seal who had ever seen combat was allowed to write a book. It didn’t used to be that way.
Our country’s enemies see what Hollywood puts out, so any secrets we see are old and of the past. So what are they doing now? Their goal isn’t just to scare our enemies. So are these strategic releases just within the playbook of American military recruiting tactics? Or maybe they're obscuring the playing field to hide very new (and very expensive) technology.
In a world (2024) where every electronic component is a point and click away from turning into an audio/visual spyware device, how do agents of the system move and communicate undetected? Telepathicly of course. Who are the ones with this hidden capability? Well, Bipolar 1 individuals with psychotic tendencies are primary candidates to exercise this practice. It has something to do with the lithium. Crazy. At least that is the secret I was “told” by my dead and gone ex. The AlphaC-employed woman I haven’t spoken to in over a decade. Dead to me.
The point is my fantasy narrative was exactly what I wanted to believe. I’ve always wanted to be a spy, I’ve always wanted to be important, I’ve always wanted to be in love, and I’ve always wanted there to be a point to all this past and present suffering. I thought I was being careful, I thought I was asking the right questions and taking the right precautions, but I guess not because people noticed.
“Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it.” - Dr. Brand -Interstellar.
That’s why in my mind she was able to reach out the way that she did, because of our past love connection. Love transcends reality, or at least that’s what I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe so badly that my cognitive dissonance shrugged off any evidence contrary to my new standard of belief. Like her having a husband and kid. Just part of her cover story, duh. It was one of my wildest dreams, and I wish I still believed it. If she wasn’t true then none of it was true, meaning I’m back to being a nobody. Great, grand, wonderful.
A quick timeline that got me here: October-November I had to deal with a very stressful situation in a class for my master’s in counseling. Luckily I handled it like a pro and, minus a few nights’ sleep, I got a 92% in the class. In December my friends and I celebrated my 33rd birthday, the first time I had people to celebrate with in years. These are the friends that know of and have some understanding of my diagnosis. Not controversial to say that at the time everything was going swimmingly within my out-of-family local support group. But I went in too deep when I started a YouTube channel to broadcast our internet gaming antics.
My dudes were all for the channel idea when I floated it around, but they then distanced themselves from me once I got our channel up and running. The channel has since been rebranded Mike Fortnite but I haven’t touched it much since the hospital. Still kind of painful that they all left me hanging. I just figured it takes someone a bit crazy to pull off something crazy. Wrong. I get fewer likes and views there than I do here on SubStack, which ain’t great. By January 14th I was talking to (mostly friendly) ghosts in my apartment and completely ditching out on work.
The “cold snap” we had around Atlanta in January was brutal. It was the weather that made me first start skipping out on my warehouse job. It was the weather that killed my apartment’s heater and had me waking up freezing in the middle of the night. It was my visible cold breath inside that put space ghosts in my mind. Due to this persistent bone-chilling cold, by the tail end of January, I had a sore throat and stuffy nose. Which I guess is grounds for testing COVID-19 positive at the hospital now. Awesome.
Thanks to the good fortune of my own shenanigans I was not brought to the hospital on a Friday. I’ve said on the channel before and I will reiterate, if you are going to commit someone you love to a hospital don’t do it on a Friday, and don’t do it on a weekend. The doctors are all gone and nothing positive gets done. I don’t make the rules.
Quarantine in the hospital sucks, thanks CDC (insert middle finger) guidelines. I was put in a room alone with no daily contact but with nurses and techs, the doctors switched in and out and came in like every other day. Each day I had an assigned “sitter” who would sit outside my room and monitor me on my own CCTV channel. Sometimes if I moved too much in my bed they would come in and adjust the camera for a better angle. Not exactly helping the Truman Show effect I was then dealing with. All of the books and games I had packed, because I foresaw the inevitability of a long-haul hospitalization, were taken away from me. I even had to beg the staff to let me hold onto my bible, which if you're seeing ghosts, definitely helps.
If I’m going to frame this last hospitalization as a learning experience, I learned not to mix and match antipsychotics. One (Seroquel) helps me get the best possible sleep, while the other (Saphris) puts me in the best possible mood the following day. Both make me tired so they're taken at night, Seroquel one day and Saphris the next, and so forth. I figured I was getting the best of both worlds, turns out that’s not a thing. Hello Zyprexa.
Doctors upped my lithium and changed the antipsychotic (Zyprexa). Well, wouldn’t you know it the voices are gone. Voices as in the auditory hallucinations that followed me around like vengeful spirits for the past month. A now known symptom of my induced psychosis. Back to being quiet, back to being lonely, back to being me.
Drop a <3 plz.
References
Marsha M. Linehan, DBT Skills Traning Manual Second Edtion
Musically inspired: “In For the Kill” - La Roux, Skream