New Day
To recap, the day prior, I had just taken an increased dosage of my medications. Towards the evening, I started to act a bit unlike myself. At the time, I knew I had a massive headache but I didn’t think it affected my ability to think and be rational. That night, I also texted some strange things to this girl who happened to be a psychiatry resident. When the next day rolls around, I take another increased dosage of my medication believing that I was still thinking rationally. I then texted more uncharacteristic things in an attempt to explain and justify myself. While in my head, I felt like I was being extremely rational, I was probably looking a bit crazy. There is a bit more of this back and forth for a while.
Intro to mania
Out of nowhere, I apparently started having manic episodes. This was all new to me so I had no idea that I was behaving in strange ways. It should be noted that I thought it was over between us. So, I justified my behavior by thinking it was okay to do this as if it didn’t matter. I then proceeded to text these long paragraphs of crazy thoughts. Why did I do this? To this day, I don’t really know why. Surely not for any rational reasons. Because I was having these manic episodes, these text messages reflected my mood. I recall the first major shift in mood is when I all of a sudden experienced deep sadness. And suddenly my deep-seated insecurities surfaced. Because I have a natural tendency toward introspection and rumination, it was easy for me to immediately explain my personal baggage through text. Over the course of the next few hours, I would send some random crazy text every hour or so. Eventually, she responded and told me that I was having manic episodes. I was initially in disbelief, but when I thought about the previous day, I realized that she was right. Just to give you an example of how out-of-touch I was, I remember feeling and thinking that my life had somehow been saved because I revealed my manic episodes to her through text. In reality, it was just a side effect.
Tomorrow
Over the course of the next 3 days, the side effects slowly waned with each day. But the next day was obviously the worst day. Now that I was aware that I was having manic episodes, I thought I would be able to recognize when it happened. In retrospect, a person whose judgment is impaired can’t really recognize it, but I, believing I was rational, thought I could. (To be continued)
