ups and downs — living with a bipolar disease

Below is the preface for my journal of how I feel when I’m going through the treatments for hypomania. I don’t know if it is helpful for anyone, but it helps me write about it, so I plan to. Just move along if you don’t care.

I feel great. No, really, I do. My only problem right now is that everyone else is so damn slow. Why can’t they keep up? How can they be so slow?

I am smarter than everyone I run into. It is a curse. It is actually quite annoying. People start a sentence but long before they get to the third word in it, I already know what they are saying and I have replied. They never get to the point, it seems; they just prattle on and I loose interest.

It sounds like ADHD but it isn’t. I’m just smarter than everyone around.

Not everyone of course. I have stumbled into academia and there are a few smart people here. Mikkel tends to be right more often than wrong. David is off the chart smart, and have on occasions cited my own papers against me because he knows what I have written better than me. Andy, or course, is just the anoying combination of smart and nice. Bug generally, people are just damn dumb and it bothers me.

As I am writing this, my neighbors are having a fight. I’m pretty sure that if they just asked me I could sort it out for them, but I don’t really care. I’m thinking about a few books I’m writing. I’m actively writing four books right now, two of them already sold to a publisher, the other two will be soon, I have no doubt. So I focus on that. I am writing the authorative book on subjects I didn’t know much about earlier, but now that that I have thought about them for a few weeks, I know that I know more about them than anyone ever did before.

Because I am just that smart.

I know I am. I just know it. I have no doubt.

I am just that far beyond the rest of humanity. I don’t even know why I bother talking to you. It feels like talking to a child. You cannot possibly keep up with the speed at which my brain is running.

That is honestly how I feel right now. Of course, I know this comes at a cost. Right now, I feel like I’m the best invention since the wheel, but in a day or two, I will crash and then you can’t get me out of bed for a few weeks. I will feel like I am worthless. Like I don’t deserve to live in this world. If I can make it out of bed at all it is to piss. More than that I cannot manage.

I am so smart you wouldn’t believe it, right now, but it comes at a cost.

Actually, with the meds I’m getting now, I shouldn’t be this excited about how smart I am, and the crash shouldn’t be as bad. But the dosage isn’t at its full potential yet, so I stumble along, waiting for it to work.

I have to hold exams tomorrow. I hope I am not feeling the stupidity of the rest of humanity then, but I fear that I might be completely apathic by then. These days, I just don’t know. I have no idea of which Thomas wakes up the next morning.

It worries me a little bit, but not much. Because right now, I’m the smartest man on this earth.

That is how it feels to be manic.