Funny Bipolar Memoir

I wrote about my experience with bipolar and drug addiction with a dark sense of humor.

Tall Dark Insane

 

CHAPTER 1

 

I once stood on the edge of a 4-story parking garage debating on whether or not I should jump. It wasn’t because I wanted to commit suicide it was because I thought that I could fly. I had never successfully flown before but had attempted several times. I concluded that if I jumped off a building then my body would have no choice but to fly in order to avoid death. I concluded that even if I were to die, the only consequence would be that this dream would be over and that I would wake up in my bed once again and have to start over. This is mania.

            The month leading up to this moment was atypical. I was a senior in high school and I had mononucleosis so bad that I was out of school for a month. My girlfriend at the time, who was my first love, had broken up with me but it wasn’t her fault I became so depressed. I was a socially anxious person driven by the cliché desire of becoming popular so when I finally had the hot cheerleader girlfriend, my selfish desires became a reality �" at the time that was fulfilling. In hindsight, I actually was somewhat popular �" as in a lot of people knew who I was not they necessarily liked me. I grew up as an athletic kid so I knew all of the guys who became the jocks. I also had a good reputation for being a musician and at the time I was one of the only people to own recording equipment. This is several years before electronic dance music became popular and everyone was suddenly a producer on his or her laptop. It was the time where the intersection between analog and digital had sprung. The girl mentioned above found myself and Michael Cera to be alike and for some reason that was attractive. To this today I don’t know if I should have been insulted or if I should take it as compliment. I am always concerned as to why girls find me attractive. Usually after I tell them that I am bipolar and have been to rehab several times, sparks fly and some sort of tragedy bonding occurs. This usually leads to some type of Romeo and Juliet romance that is too physically intense for my heart and results in me having an existential crisis. I’m not good at relationships because I have watched too many movies and I think that fiction can be replicated. I try to be Ryan Gosling but I end up being Donnie Darko. As for the previous Michael Cera reference, The film Superbad and Juno was outrageously popular that year and Michael Cera’s character was that of a lanky shy white dude who sucked with girls. He was innocent and kind. For some reason I maintained that image for the next 5 years despite being arrested for drug possession several times. I once told a girl that I had been arrested for domestic assault and she immediately asked me for my number and we ended up dating for 5 or 6 months. It was toxic but I am a sick f**k and love toxic. I have a dark back story and its quite a turn on for some people. Apparently, being depressed is sexy.

            Anyways, the day after this cheerleader girl broke my heart I was so depressed I just laid down on the floor. I remember crying on the phone begging for another chance. She didn’t specify the reason for why she broke up with me but I’m guessing that when I said I wanted to kill my parents (sarcastically) she saw that as a red flag and figured I was a lunatic. There was also a moment at the cafeteria one school day where she accurately predicted that I was indeed bipolar. I didn’t know much about bipolar disorder back then but I do now. I wasn’t serious about killing my parents but I was just one of those teenage kids who had overprotective parents that did there best to keep me out of trouble. All I wanted was trouble. I wanted to be cool and I thought that the reward of risk and rebellion would be satisfying. I clearly listen to too many punk rock and emo music. I sometimes wish that I was the type of person that believes in God and listens to country music. I admire those people. They usually have their s**t together. I, on the other hand, chose to become a skate boarder and a drummer. That combination mixed with weed is trouble.

            Several days after of grieving the break-up I began to smoke weed regularly and listen to Boards of Canada’s album Campfire Headphases. If you have ever listented to Boards of Cananda it results in a paradox of feelings: feeling depressed feels good. That’s basically what nostalgia is isn’t it? We long for the past and wish to go back no matter how terrible it was. The older we get the more desensitized we get and less dramatic our life becomes. We become number as time goes on and we begin to develop a dark sense of humor about everything. As I am writing this now, I have spent half the day looking at memes making fun of the oncoming World War 3. We think North Korea is hilarious. Kim Jung-Un has become a f*****g joke. I wonder what the internet would’ve done to Hitler.

Going back to the act of listening to depressed music while depressed: it’s like in a movie when something tragic happens so they start to play some song about heartbreak and sadness. It intensifies the effect and makes it even more theatrical. I am a musician who makes instrumentals (because I suck at singing) and I am obsessed with how soundtracks compliment scenes. I like to listen to songs where the lyrics almost replicate what I am going through. Tragic moments are significant and for some reason, we want to remember them. We want to understand why we change and when we changed. Its part of the development and maturation process. We never want to forget who we were before said event happened. We want to remember who we were beforehand and we need an explanation as to why we changed. These are the types of deep conversations you have with your significant other while its raining at 11:30 pm 3 months into a relationship and your smoking a cigarette. I remember recently seeing a photo of myself at age 3 and I started crying because I knew the horrors my young self would one day endure. I know a common slogan of my millennial generation is to have no regrets but god damn do I regret a lot. We learn from our mistakes and feeling remorse is a good way to ensure that we do not repeat them.

            For those of you that have heard of bipolar disorder or may know someone with it, there is something you must understand about the potential of having such a mental illness. It’s not a disease of the mind so much as a disease of the brain. It’s physical. Currently, there are many neuroscientists and activists who resent the use of the word mental illness and want to change the name to something along the lines of having a chronic brain condition. It would reduce stigma if people got a decent education of the brain. You’d be surprised at how similar Parkinson’s and Schizophrenia are similar. No one sees Michael J. Fox as mentally ill. All of my symptoms of bipolar disorder have a chemical basis. This is why people with severe mental illnesses go to psychiatrists who have been to medical school. Talk therapy is helpful but some symptoms can only be alleviated by medication. I have experienced visual and auditory hallucinations. No therapist can talk me out of something like that. Medicaitons are paramount to maintaining a normal life and it is not a simple process. It can take years of trying tons of different medications to find a balance that works but even then the individual needs to be cognizant of the side effects and be able to assess themselves and symptoms of their disorder. I once counted 17 medications that I had been on and I did that about 3 years ago.

            I had experienced severe depression off and on for the entire time I was in high school but something strange happens when you get older. The average onset of a major manic episode occurs between the ages of 18-21. Manic episodes can be euphoric full of delusions and hallucinations. It can put you in a state where you feel more confident than Kanye West. Grandiosity is a key component and can make you believe that you are the greatest and smartest individual on the planet. When you feel that confident and that powerful this only one option: save the world.

            A lot happens before one decides to save the world in a manic episode. Mine started with a complete disconnect from reality. I woke up one morning after a deep slumber and a lucid dream. I woke up and believed that I was actually still dreaming. I reasoned that real life is actually a dream and we have these set beliefs in this dream world that limit our potential. We have the laws of physics but I believed that these were made up constructs of reality. It was as if all of these superhero movies and fictional books and movies were simply products of our imagination that could never truly exist. Deep down inside we all want to believe that is not the case. I felt as if I had crossed into a dimension where anything was possible. I believed I had achieved this because I had solved the riddle disproving reality. For 4 hours I sat with a notebook and described my theory about how 1=0. My argument was basically that 1 and 0 are just numbers and that numbers were man-made constructs that ignored the true concept of infinite. There is much more to that theory but I can’t even remember my exact reasoning but remember I was already delusional at this point. I felt as though I was some kind of genius with this huge revelation and I wanted to share it with people I know. Believing I was dreaming and that 1=0 were my first delusions that led me on adventure towards more and more delusions.

            When you are supremely confident and speak with conviction, persuasion is a lot easier. I was in this state and I managed to convince several of my friends that there was some truth as to my crazy theories. I had the charisma of a cult leader. I probably could’ve convinced a vegan to eat meat in that state. What I’ve learned form that is that people are discontent with reality and wish for their fantasies to be a reality. We all wish there were special individuals in this world like the X-Men. Our childish dreams still persist into our adulthood but as we get older we put these things into boxes. There are those people today who transcend the average abilities of man and it makes us full of wonder. We want our minds to blown and we love it when it happens. We want to escape the average day-to-day life so we go to the movies and dream of love stories or we do drugs and listen to trippy music. When we are young our conversations revolve around philosophy. Everyone wants to be the main character of their own movie in whichever genre they would like. It’s hard to believe people who say they can tell the future or have superpowers but deep inside we wish that they were real. That’s why people still go to psychics. In ancient times, people were a lot more susceptible and superstitious. If David Blaine went back two thousand years into the past we would be praying to him as a God today. Now we know he is just a great magician but we know that those are just tricks (except catching a bullet with his teeth �" that was real). Science has made us skeptical. Even today baseball athletes will be randomly drug tested after hitting a home rome because its hard for us to comprehend that greatness can be achieved authentically. We have put our imagination and science into two different boxes. We think being pragmatists and realists makes us smart. How unromantic. This is why kids are so adorable. They don’t know the depressing truth of reality that awaits them once they graduate college.

Our society now has the notion that everyone who is a big talker is full of s**t. We have trouble drawing the line between confidence and arrogance. We’ve become envious of people who are the closest to being superheroes. The majority of the country hates Tom Brady and many hate Lebron James despite them being some of the best athletes to ever grace their sport. We love Michael Phelps but that’s only because he plays for team America and everyone else is our enemy. We love having enemies. We root for Michael Phelps in the same way we wanted to beat Russia to the moon. The cold war might be over but it is still evident in Olympic gymnastics. If Michael Phelps was Russian we would despise him despite is supernatural abilities of being one of the greatest Olympians of all time.

So when I was talking about my crazy theories to my friends they were more eager to listen especially due to the fact they were all 18 years old and still full of wonder and dream. The reality of adulthood hadn’t sunk in it. To mention, we were all stoned off weed, which usually puts people into a state of existential crisis and anything spiritual will sound good under the influence. I basically did some simple mind tricks like one of those TV show hosts that somehow talk to one of the audience members’ dead aunts. I put people in a state of being suggestible but at the same time my mind was sharp and I had great intuition. When your manic you are brilliant, at least for a moment before things get truly bizarre.

I eventually started to begin to believe that I was some sort of prophet and the only explanation was that I was having some sort of religious event that only a biblical character would ever experience. I felt like the chosen one and it felt fantastic. I finally felt special. As a kid I would watch Spiderman and I wished I could be special like him. This was my being bit by a spider moment. I felt like God singled me out and had chosen me to do something special. My delusional mind came down to one conclusion: I was the second coming of Jesus Christ.

            I know this sounds absurd but it is quite common for someone having a manic episode to believe they are Jesus Christ. It was actually under the top 10 symptoms in my psychology book. It is so common that you might wonder why that is. You see, it is rational for someone who is experiencing psychosis to eventually believe they are having a biblical experience. If you were delusional, grandiose, euphoric, hallucinating, detached from reality �" you too would experience some type of irrational belief. For those of you reading that have done shrooms or acid, you might have a slight sense of what I am talking about. The exception is that mine was completely natural. I had no idea what was happening to me. You, on the other hand, were very aware you just swallowed a psychedelic drug. Despite my delusions and irrational beliefs, this was all due to a catastrophic combination of chemicals in my brain. Yes, I wasn’t actually on drugs but it was as if I were. Our brains are constantly producing natural “drugs” that enhance or balance our moods and our feelings and our bodies. Bipolar disorder and many mental illnesses are termed a chemical imbalance. The production of these chemicals are the root of the problem. This is why the problem is physical in nature and not as mental as many may assume. Research in neuroscience proves this fact more and more every year and decades from now the general public will have a better understanding. Until then, I can only offer you my story and my opinion. My experience with bipolar is thorough but my education is limited to a bachelor’s degree is psychology plus countless hours on Google researching brain chemistry.

            Bipolar disorder used to be called manic-depressive. Since becoming simply bipolar disorder, people have forgotten all about the word manic. The only time I ever hear the word manic is when someone is making a reference to the song about manic Mondays. Barely anyone knows what manic means even though being manic is half the deal for someone with bipolar disorder. I realize that many people with bipolar disorder find themselves stuck in depressive disorder but as I get older I have begun to have the opposite problem. I function in a hypomanic state at all times. I am constantly sped up and I can’t stop talking. When I am depressed I am introverted but when I am manic I am extraverted. Pressured speech is a symptom of mania and for the last few years I can’t manage to shut the f**k up. I must come across as annoying to my friends. I realize this but I have so much to say, thus why I am writing this. I am the type of person who blurts s**t out without thinking about whether or not it is appropriate or offensive. I have a facetious and self-deprecating sense of humor about my mental illness. I like to make fun of myself and I like to poke fun at others. This is due to being apart of the mentally ill community. I went to rehab 3 times and lived in 3 halfway houses. I was surrounded by guys in their late 20’s who were supremely confident and they absolutely destroyed me verbally. I had to learn to laugh at myself. They all had tattoos and half of them were from New Jersey. They were cocky and at the time I was a chubby harmless kid from Virginia. I didn’t fit in but I had to adapt. I had no choice but to become witty in order to survive. A dark sense of humor is a coping mechanism undoubtedly. Sometimes, being a depressed drug-addicted bipolar kid is hilarious. Through that I have learned that the one thing all people have in common is insecurity. We all have them and its most likely the best way to empathize and connect with people. I have chosen not to hide my insecurity. This might be a paradox, but I am not insecure about my insecurities. Insecurities humanize us. All I want is to be authentic.

            I am a musician and one thing you have to respect about most musicians is that they are blunt. Lots of musicians write songs about girls they love or girls that broke their hearts. You need to stop for a second and think about the fact that the girl in those songs will hear that song and know for a fact that she is the one the singer is referring to. That takes guts on the part of the singer. As I get older, I have started to have trouble writing songs about girls due to the fear that she will hear the lyrics I have chosen to write about her. I used to be very public about my music and I can almost guarantee my lyrics have made people close to me uncomfortable. That isn’t as big an issue for hugely popular musicians. Their audience is millions of people who don’t actually know them. I, on the other hand, have about 30 people in my circle that listen to my music and know exactly what I am talking about. When I sing about being depressed they get worried. I can’t imagine what my parents feel when they listened to the songs I wrote in high school. That’s one reason I started to make instrumentals instead of songs with vocals. I don’t want the girls I sing about to feel some sense of pity or maybe even anger towards me. My lyrics tend to be blunt and I don’t want them to understand. I don’t decorate my lyrics with flowerly language and metaphors. I have been heavily influenced by Jesse Lacy of Brand New and let me tell you, that dude is blunt as f**k �" “I get paid to make girls panic while I sing”. He knows what he is doing and he doesn’t play any games with his music. He says what he means. It hits hard. I once saw him in concert and near the end he said that it can get “monotonous” playing the same songs for 10 years but that he does it for his fans. Finally, someone admits that having a hit song can be tedious. I respect that.

            The first time I went to rehab I was 18 years old. All of my friends were going to college while I was given a one way ticket to Florida. If you don’t know, Florida is the east cost epicenter for the rehab industries. Some 50,000 people occupy south florida �" specifically Delray Beach. They search your bags, take away your phone and your wallet, and then verbally abuse you for months to make you fear the consequences of doing drugs. Its very effective on someone like me �" an overweight teenager who has had sex maybe 15 times. It’s ironic that I was surrounded by palm trees, a swimming pool, and perfect temperatures year around and yet at the same time I was locked in a facility with cameras watching my every move. I was a drug addict and yet the drug I was addicted to was laughable and embarrassing. I was made fun of relentlessly for it. Here is the thing. I was put on probation months earlier and had been a pothead beforehand. This was 2009 and synthetic marijuana had just emerged. I was one of the first to try it and I was immediately hooked. It was powerful and it was similar yet so much different from marijuana. All in all: it fucked me up real good. I don’t care what drug you like to do. If you absolutely love getting high and absolutely hate being sober: you have a drug problem. I would steal money from my parents and I would even pay the sales associate in quarters to get my fix. I would take an hour and half metro train to Washington D.C. from Virginia in order to get high with one of my best friends. Everyone needs a drug buddy, and we both ended up in rehab multiple times so synthetic marijuana isn’t a joke. Ever heard of the Miami Zombie? That guy smoked synthetic marijuana and literally ate someone’s face off. There is something in synthetic marijuana that makes it quite unusual and people are doing prison time for it. All I know is that it got me high as f**k and I loved it. It drove me to addiction. The high I got for it pales in comparison to alcohol and nobody thinks alcoholism is a joke so thinking an addiction to synthetic marijuana is funny. But its okay, I get that it might seem funny to you. I look like a p***y compared to a heroin addict or a crack head. All I can say is that I am glad I have never touched heroin or cocaine but at the same time I am embarrassed that I ended up in rehab without doing so.

            Anyways, I realize that smoking synthetic marijuana is an embarrassing way to end up in rehab yet I already know that at some point in my life I will have to get sober again. I am currently drunk writing this. I am an addict. It is in my genes. There is no escaping it. If you think that I have poor will-power than maybe you’re right: I have poor will-power. I am only 26 years old right now and I have already begun to think about the type of things that I will share at future AA meetings. Alcoholics Anonymous is a strange experience. You are surrounded by people who have fucked up their lives and yet are doing everything in their will power to fix it despite their lack of self-control. They say the answer is God. I am sure you have your own opinions about God but at this very moment I don’t believe in him; that is subject to change. The more desperate I become; the more desperate I am into believing some god-like entity can save me from myself. I am not there yet. I need at least 2 more years. I need to finish my Master’s degree before I get sober again. I estimate that I will last at least 4-5 more years before some type on intervention will inevitable occur. I hope to get lucky and last another 10. I have no problem with the idea of getting sober and dedicating my life to the 12-steps again. I have done the 12-steps 4 times before. For you those that don’t know, Step 9 is to basically go back to all the people you have wronged and offer an apology but also offer to do anything you possibly can to right the wrong. I once wrote my friends parent’s a letter about how I used to steal from them. My friend and I would steal their old legos and sell it on craigslist by the pound. I will never forget meeting up in Foxmill parking lot with a guy that had a pony tail and he actually brought a scale. I recently checked the price of legos today and its insane. Marketing to children on the Disney channel is a manipulative way of getting the parents to spend hundreds of dollars but I digress.

I have come to accept that addiction is genetic and that this is going to be apart of my life forever. This is especially evident in my unsuccessful attempts to quit smoking. I have been trying literally every day for 2 years to quit smoking and I have tried using everything I have learned studying psychology to do so. It hasn’t worked yet but I am delusionally optimistic that it will.  As I am writing this, it is currently Spring. You see, winter is the time of seasonal depression and spring time is the season of delusional optimism. I, my friend, feel pretty god damn optimistic right now and its 82 degrees and sunny.

Everytime Summer nears I think of this girl Sarah. We had nothing in common but she was so beautiful that it still haunts me. The biggest turn off for me is when a girl says her favorite music is country. I tried my best to like country that music while I hid my real music taste from her. I was that skater/stoner/wanna-be musician kid in high school who grew up playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. I’m the type of guy who listens to Blink 182 and any song that mentions something about California. Country music just isn’t my thing but I’ve noticed that a lot of beautiful women are drawn to it. After Sarah told me that “we didn’t have chemistry” and that it wasn’t either of her faults I finally realized that I can’t just seek girls who I am sexually attracted to and that I need to focus on women with whom I share a special connection. So my logical next step after this was to construct a Tinder online dating profile with a picture of me holding a shotgun while my profile said “I am a serial killer”. You would be surprised how well that worked.

            My most recent fling was with a girl who was the complete opposite of Sarah. Her name was Searria and she had blue hair and tattoos. She was gorgeous and had one of the most unique styles I have ever encountered. We exchanged intensely emotional texts for 2 weeks before meeting up and having the realization that we had no connection. She didn’t think I was funny and her best friend called me a “total bro”. I’m guessing she said that about me because I was wearing a backwards hat and I was being a bit of a ball buster. You see, when I was going through my rehab and halfway house phase earlier in life I was surrounded by ball busters. All we did was crack jokes on each other. We were ruthless and it was hilarious. I learned to laugh at myself and I learned how to make people laugh at themselves too. That approach works well with drug addicts but when I moved back to suburban Virginia it hasn’t seemed to transfer. I rebuke the statement that I am a total bro. That still bugs me. I only own one collared shirt that I basically stole from my friend and I don’t wear grey sweat pants. I also own almost no sports apparel and I’m not obsessed with college football. If I ever saw that girl again I would say, “I am a dude, not a bro, you b***h”.

            I have only cried during one movie and I actually cried twice. It was Silver Linings Playbook that rightfully awarded Jennifer Lawrence an Oscar. The movie offers a different perspective into bipolar disorder. The main character played Bradley Coopers is obsessed with loosing weight. Weight gain is the most common side effect of bipolar meds. When I was 18 I was 165 pounds and by 19 I was 218 pounds. My self-esteem was shattered and for years I lost and regained weight. Today, I am in good shape thanks in part that I have semi-developed an eating disorder. I track my calories, weigh my food, sometimes starve myself, and if I throw up I try to calculate how many calories I regurgitated. Male eating disorders are on the rise because all of us guys want 6-pack abs. Every package of underwear they sell at the mall has a male model with perfect abs. Girls can buy bigger tits at the plastic surgeon and I bet if men could buy 6-pack abs then it would be a bustling business. Being skinny and having a super low body fat percentage are two completely different beasts. The former is achieved by simply reducing your daily calorie intake and the latter requires an education in nutrition and body building. Every guy with 6-pack abs could tell you how many grams of protein, fat, and carbs to eat everyday and which supplements to take. All they eat is chicken, rice, and veggies. The only reason I want a 6-pack is to make myself more sexually attractive. I am trying to over compensate for what I lack in the neck up area. I wasn’t blessed with great hair. I’m not Kevin Bacon.

            I once tried to suffocate myself in the psych ward after being admitted for psychosis but that’s a story for the next chapter.

 

 

CHAPTER 2

 

Early September 2010

 

I knocked on the door and a black man resembling Morgan Freeman opened the door and I told him, “I need to talk to God”. I had been waiting for 10 minutes before he finally opened the door. “Down the hall and to the left.” This church had an eye-catching banner above the door spelling out the words in lightning bolt letters, “You don’t have to walk alone.” It felt like God himself was speaking directly to me. The empty church had a drum-set and piano on the stage. I asked if I could play and he said I could. I played both instruments for a few minutes each and for the first time in my life I didn’t feel scared. I stood up on the stage alone and a great huge bible was illuminated under the light. I began reading it and once again, God was speaking directly to me. He wanted me to find this. This great mystery was starting to make sense. God had chosen me. There was something special about me. Why me? There was no other explanation: I was having an experience so grand that it could only be of a biblical nature. I was the second coming of Jesus Christ.

            I went into the bathroom and stripped down. I stared at myself in the mirror as the sink filled up. I dipped my head in and baptized myself. I didn’t care that I was doing this in a bathroom because it had to be done. It was the right thing to do. I went into the stall and stood in the toilet. I flushed. The flush represented a cleansing. I needed to be pure for this. I was abiding by tradition. I stood there naked and left down the hallway toward the door I came in. This was the ultimate test. There is nothing more shameful or embarrassing and for my entire life I was scared of embarrassment. This was the ultimate test to overcome that fear. God was testing me but I wasn’t afraid. I knew that the people outside were just figments of my imagination. People are just something that I project into the world as representations of something in my subconscious. Suddenly I heard a voice go, “Hey hold on a second come here.”

The man who looked like Morgan Freeman was in the hallway and he calmly motioned for me to come to him. He told me that I couldn’t do that and that I needed to put my clothes back on and then we would talk. I did what he asked. He took me into his office where he sat me down and just started asking questions about myself. I told him that I was a 19-year old freshman here in Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth University and that school had started two weeks ago. I added that I had recently been to rehab and that I had also been diagnosed bipolar. It hit me that Morgan Freeman played God in the movie Bruce Almighty so I started to think that this man was a messenger from God. This is why I told him revealing things about myself. He told me that other musicians were coming to meet soon and they were my age and he wanted to know if I wanted to hang around and I said sure. I waited on the couch as people started to come in. There was food in the kitchen and I went to get a drink. I go up to the Morgan Freeman guy and I blatantly ask, “Are you God?” He pulled me aside and we stepped out for a cigarette. I couldn’t believe this guy smoked too. He told me he had a difficult life as well and had some hard times growing up. He also asked me my name, if I had family, and what my parent’s phone number was.

It hit my like a brick what was happening and I started crying. I realized that I was going crazy again. This has happened to me before. I was having a manic episode and a psychotic break. I needed to find help as soon as possible. I told the Morgan Freeman looking guy that I would call my parents but as soon as I left the church everything I went back into the delusion. My temporary moment of sanity disappeared.

I started walking back to my dorm, which was only about 100 yards down the street when all of a sudden my new college buddies swarmed me. They told me that my roommate had reported me missing and that they and the police had been searching for me for hours. That’s when a black car pulled up and a couple cop cars. The men told me that I needed to go to the police station with them and one guy handed me a card that was for VCU counseling services. I went with them to the police station. I knew this was all just part of the plan. They didn’t realize that I was actually in the control and that they aren’t even real. God had bigger plans for me. He knew that I could save the world so I let him take control of the situation.

I didn’t respect their authority at all at the police station. I asked them if they could buy me liquor multiple times. I wanted to test my new mind control abilities. It wasn’t working so I tried to be patient. I figured that my powers were slowly developing and that it would take time before I could fully mind control people. I called my friend Tommy and I was like, “Dude I am at a cop station! Here talk to them.” I put him on the phone with an officer as I looked over his shoulder to see what he was writing about me on the computer.

I am not sure why but they decided to let me go. I guess I hadn’t committed any crime but the strange thing was that they let me out in the back alley and not the front entrance. The cop held the door open for me and I tried one last time, “can you buy me and my friends liquor?” He got mad and told me to stop asking him that. He handed me my belongings and I was on my way.

I don’t know what happened to my shoes but I walked barefoot to the 7-11 down the street. I remember walking on green glass from broken beer bottles. I made my way to the street where all the buses were and I asked some homeless guy which bus went to Fredericksburg. He told me so I hopped on that bus. I called Tommy again and I was like, “Dude I am coming to you I will see you soon.” These were just local buses and they weren’t going anywhere outside of Richmond. I just sat on the bus and I started getting very sleepy. I hadn’t slept in 3 days and over the course of the week prior I had slept maybe a total of 12 hours. I was the last one on the bus and the bus driver asked me where I lived. He went out of his way to drive me back to the dorms. Once I was there I saw my college buddies again and they seemed very stern. For a brief second I realized that I was going crazy again. My parents called me and told me they were on their way to pick me up. My college buddies took me up to my room and started tearing down my posters while I was crying. I had told them I could see the poster images in the 3-d and that I was hallucinating. I packed up two suitcases and brought them back down to the front entrance. At least 60 students were on the patio hanging out while I cried my eyes out rolling my suitcases. I got into my parents car and told them I needed to go to the psych ward this time.

The whole car ride back I thought I was going to die in a car wreck. Every car that passed I thought was going to hit us. I wanted to sleep but I couldn’t. It was a three-hour drive and all I remember was telling my parents that I didn’t want to go to Florida again and that this time I needed to go to the psych ward. Last time this happened I didn’t go to the psych ward and I got stuck in psychosis like this for a full 30 days. By the time we got back to home I convinced my parents that I needed to sleep and that I would go to the psych ward in the morning. It was probably at least 3AM at this time so they agreed.

As I lied in bed I saw the imprint of a body lying next to me. It was like a ghost was there. I went to the bathroom where I got naked again and started contorting my body as if I was a wild animal. I had one of those movie-like intense moments were I stared at myself in the mirror sweating. I have never looked that crazy in my life and the image still haunts me. After that I blacked out.

I woke up the next morning and my parents took me to Fairfax hospital. I remember seeing the nurses have eyes the size of cartoon characters. It actually looked like a cartoon and I knew I was hallucinating it. They put me in a wheel chair and rolled me somewhere to get a brain scan. Then they took me to the emergency room and I laid there on my back. This doctor comes in looking like Jesus Christ with an arm cast. He told us that he was a psychologist and that he wanted to talk to me alone. I don’t remember what we talked about but I was getting excited knowing that this guy was Jesus Christ in the flesh and that I was the only person on earth that has ever seen him.

Next thing I know they start drugging me up. I was convinced it was poison so I started hyperventilating. My arms were going numb and my heart was beating fast. I screamed, “I’m having a f*****g heart attack!” A doctor runs in and tells me to breathe deeply in and out of my nose. Within a few seconds I felt better. The man who looked like Jesus walked back in but this time he didn’t have a broken arm. His cast was gone. He was signaling to me that yes indeed he was Jesus and that he has healing powers.

The next thing I know I am going up to the fourth floor. They put me on a table and stick a needle in my arm. I looked at the nurse and said, “If this puts me to sleep I will f*****g kill you.” They injected me with haledol and I passed out. When I woke up I started freaking out. Security was called and they followed me down the hallway where I threatened to leave. I hesitated at the elevator. Something told me I needed to stay. I found a payphone and dialed my friend Tommy’s number. I don’t remember what I said.

They stripped me down and took away all of my belongings and gave me a cup full of pills and told me to swallow them. I had to wear a hospital gown at first until my parents could bring me clothes. There is nothing worse than being trapped somewhere not knowing when you can leave and not being able to get any answers. Nobody would tell me how long I was staying there for so I figured I would have to act like I was okay and do certain things to make it look like I was getting better.

            The first night I tried to sleep but I couldn’t. I was still highly manic at this point and had barely slept all week. I just wanted to escape and to black out so I tried to make myself pass out by holding my breath as long as I could and then smothering myself with a pillowcase. I wasn’t trying to kill myself I just wanted to become unconscious. They gave me Ambien, mood stabilizers, and antipsychotics and it eventually knocked me out.

            There is something terrible about not being able to go outside for several days. I figured that they were watching my every move and evaluating my recovery. I remember exercising on the stationary bike to show them that I was motivated. I tried to sound sane in group therapy sessions. I remember looking around the room and seeing the other people there who I felt were much crazier than I was. There was a young pretty girl who came in the next day and I remember thinking to myself that I would be stupid to try and get involved with her so I didn’t.

            There was a cafeteria room with a piano. As much as I could I would play that old piano and people enjoyed listening. It was the only thing there that reminded me of normalcy. In the kitchen there was Jello in the fridge and I binged on it as much as possible when I could. I would also pour sugar packets into the milk cartons and shake them up to create a makeshift milkshake.

            One day my parents came and they brought me my clothes. I also got to pick what food I wanted that day so I picked pizza and chips. I told my parents that as soon as I got out I wanted them to bring me a pack of cigarettes. The doctors put me on a nicotine patch in combination with nicotine gum every two hours and it actually worked. I don’t know how I made it through those 6 days in the psych ward but to this day it makes me nauseous thinking about it. If you ever want to see an accurate depiction of a psych ward go see the movie, “Its Kind of a Funny Story” with Zach Galafanakis. I would write more about what its like to be in the psych ward but I am happy to say I don’t remember much.

 

So, that is the story of my 2^nd major manic episode. I had 3 episodes like this in 3 years but I remember that one the most. It was fast and intense. I occasionally have flashbacks about this s**t and I have no idea how to tell people about that story. I have no idea how they might react. That’s why dating is hard. I get forced into a corner and have no choice to become vulnerable. I like to advertise myself as someone with a dark past but a bright future but I have an inkling that my experiences with bipolar come across as unattractive. I am 26 years old right now writing this and it is very possible that at some point down the road it could very well happen again and send me back to rock bottom. Something like divorce or a death in my family might send me over the edge. The fact that 50% of marriages end in divorce terrifies me because I feel like I am the perfect candidate for being a single father. I sometimes imagine myself as Brad Pitt standing by the road next to a 4-year old girl with a pink backpack struggling to tell her some sort of life lesson. Other times, I imagine having a beer with my future son and giving him a lesson in genetics and informing him that he has a high risk of developing bipolar disorder and addiction. The only good genes that I got were my height and my good eyesight. I am the tallest by far in my immediate family and I am the only one who doesn’t have to wear glasses. The worse gene I inherited, far worse than bipolar or addiction was that the phenotype for my mustache is blonde. If I grow my beard out I look like a fool and growing a beard is a right of passage to manhood for some reason when you are my age.

 

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Author's Note

This is just a draft/excerpt.