The bipolar stability I had gained in 2016 started evaporating.
It had held for five years – longer than I had any right to expect, longer than most people in my condition manage without a serious episode.
But evaporation is the right word. Not a crash. Not a sudden break. A slow, almost imperceptible thinning.
But this time it was mania-dominated. The longer periods of mild hypomania slowly started turning into erratic mania. The engine that had hummed productively in 2018 and 2019 was now running hot. The rpm was climbing. I could feel it; and then, gradually, I couldn’t.
By mid-2021, I had probably lost the ability to notice the changes.
That sentence deserves a moment. The ability to notice changes in your own mental state is, for a bipolar person, the single most important survival tool. It is the early warning system.
When it goes ; when the very instrument you use to measure the illness becomes part of the illness; you are, to use a technical term, in trouble.
Launched a series of startups. Seed self-funded. None survived more than a year.
I’ll elaborate on those three sentences in the next chapter. They deserve more space than 2021 can give them ; because in 2021, I wasn’t yet writing sentences. I was writing company names.
