The Mania Felt Like Clarity |
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Our culture prizes manic energy as genius and productivity—a myth that tells the sick that illness is a gift.
Recovery can feel like a loss: People often grieve the false clarity and certainty that mania provided.
Mania's first casualty is the capacity to truly see another person; it is often the last thing to return.
For weeks before everything came apart, I did not so much sleep as pause. I would lie down and rise three hours later, convinced the hours had been wasted, that the world had accelerated and I was keeping pace with it, ahead of it, while everyone around me trudged through fog. Ideas arrived faster than I could write them down. Connections lit up everywhere. A stranger’s glance was a signal. My own thoughts, ordinary for nearly 40 years, had become, overnight, the thoughts of someone chosen.
What most accounts get wrong: It did not feel like sickness. It felt like health. It felt like the best version of myself, finally unleashed.
And there was a seduction in it for someone like me. I had spent my adult life in the profession of thinking, a historian trained to doubt. Mania offered the opposite: not just certainty, but the sense of being inexhaustible and prolific, the energy our culture prizes. The anthropologist Emily Martin, in her study Bipolar Expeditions, describes that energy as “a valuable resource in the ever-accelerating spiral of productivity.” Who, having chosen the life of the mind, would not want to be utterly certain of his own—and inexhaustible besides? It felt like arrival, like becoming, finally, the thinker I was always meant to be.
That is the cruelty of mania, and the reason it is far more dangerous than the sadness we picture. Depression announces itself. The sufferer knows something is wrong and wants it to stop. Mania does the opposite. It feels like a gift. And so the person in its grip becomes its fiercest defender, the last........