I am calm, yet I am frantic.

I am calm, yet I am frantic. Some of the manic madness from yesterday has subsided in some ways but heightened in others. My brain is a mess. My thoughts are chaos. But my speech has slowed down some, or when I catch myself speeding up I try to suppress it.

This, most often does not work. But still I try. This is a weird time. I normally do not have this much self-insight into what is going on with me when I begin to get manic. Lately I have been more in tune to my mental illness.

It has been over 3 years since my diagnosis. Maybe things have just fallen into a place where I can see it for some weird reason or another. Most times I am pretty far into a hypomanic or manic episode before I know. Looking back I can see it, because retrospect as you all know, can be a very powerful thing. Looking back I can almost always pinpoint the first signs, however subtle they are.

But last time and this time I have been more noticing of what is happening to my mind. I have noticed the speeding up sooner than I have in the past. I guess a large part of that is the no sleep thing that is going on with me right now.

I have no choice but to notice things because what else am I going to be doing all hours of the night? Except pick apart what is going on inside me and write, and then write some more. Or cleaning at 3:00AM can be a nice big flashing red light. Like some indicator beacon going off inside my head warning me of where this is headed.

Writing seems to be the only thing that is really keeping me grounded lately. From one extreme to the next. I cycled a lot faster this time than I have in a really long time. My mania back in March came and did not stay as long as some other times, but then I guess I was sick, and my doctor and I managed to manage it faster than the last time.

Then depression crept crashed in, instead of balance.

No nice little neat balanced mood before cycling back into mania or depression. Or at least not much balance before the switch.

This past month or so, probably closer to 8 weeks have brought more anxiety than I have had since 2013. I have no idea where it came from initially. But I guess I know with the family things we have going on, I can understand why it has stayed. It is every day now, no days break. I hate the feeling.

I feel like I want to check out of my body and brain for a day. Just crawl right out of my skin and not have to deal with what I am feeling. No tingly feeling just under the surface, getting stronger. No insomnia. No intrusive thoughts. No manic brain, where everything seems to be occupying the same space at the same time, all vying for my complete attention.

The only thing benefiting from my hypomania/mania right now, is my writing. And I am not even sure if that is benefiting or if it is just me believing that my manic writing is better than my every day writing. If it is because I tend to churn out more writing when I feel this way.

It’s almost like when manic and talking too much, I find myself posting to Facebook more often than I normally would, and I seem to not be able to help posting to my blog once I get something written.

Then I get nervous that I am irritating my readers because of my frequent posts. I then try to remind myself that my readers read my blog for a reason, because they can relate or they enjoy my writing or some other reason within themselves, which means I most likely am not irritating them as much as my mind tells me I am. So I try not to worry about that. But worrying is something I am good at, and I apologize if I am indeed irritating anyone.

The mania is keeping me completely drawn in to the writing. It is making feel like I really do have some sort of talent which in turn is making me want to publish so bad that it almost hurts.

And so begins the manic chore of researching publishers, types of publishers. Would I self-publish or otherwise? Do I even have enough manageable, coherent articles to even begin to think about this idea in a more possible way….or am I delusional in thinking I could even possibly bring my writings together in book form?

Is this some manic brain idea forcing me to start a project that I know I will not finish? Getting excited over the prospects only to have them dashed and squashed once I begin to get balanced again?

Sometimes I hate this part of this disorder. Because I get such good ideas, or maybe good is not the word I am looking for. They are intrusive ideas that I act on, only to completely abandon them once the balance comes back into play.

But mania is where all my good ideas are concocted.