Recently I found myself in a desperate spiral of of unadulterated, uncontrollable rage that brought me to the brink of what I’ll call ‘manic disillusionment on the brink curtain fall’.
I suspect this will be a very long post – I’m not sorry.
It’s worth understanding the context of my most recent manic episode: this is a time of great uncertainty. The Coronavirus slowly inched it’s way across the world over a period of months bringing with it, initially a denial of the full scale of the epidemic which soon became a worldwide pandemic.
To begin with I’ll admit I was typically orientalist, much like much the rest of the Western world. This was a disease from Asia, and Asia will sort themselves out. I’m certainly not proud of this prejudice, but in some respects it staved off the episode that was to come by a couple of months.
Here begins our story. Fast forward to March 5th roundabout when South Africa reported its first confirmed case of COV-19. At first the reaction was, as I was, naive. This was a Eurasian thing – this wasn’t an African disease. At that point the rumor mill was already making unfounded allegations that ‘Africa is immune because the virus doesn’t like heat’. What a load of baloney that turned out to be.
With each passing day the confirmed cases began to climb, so too did my angst that as South Africans we weren’t doing enough. I still believe we took too long to react decisively. Nevertheless we started doing something. Something is better than nothing, right?
Wrong. The wishy-washy messages from government were dull and lacked urgency. Certainly the message for ‘wash your hands’ was spreading slower than the virus itself. Then it was ‘social distancing’ and a jovial State President was doing elbow taps grinning with glee at his novel and devious plan to stop the spread. Then we were tapping shoes rather than giving our friends an embracing hug.
All the while my anxiety was etching deeper and deeper. I figured that watching the news, getting the facts etc. would quell some of those fears. Wrong again. This only exposed me to what was beginning to unfold into what will probably be the greatest catastrophe of this generation. Yet still the Western nations and their decrepit ageing leaders continued poo-poo-ing the issue.
With each passing day I looked to our leaders for, em… leadership. Notably these leaders 99.9% of them were boomers. As I tend to do, and I suspect other bipolar folk too, I began joining the dots and blaming others for ineptitude: the older generation had enjoyed a life of relative prosperity, they were comfortable and were therefore unwilling to make decisive decisions that would upset their privledged apple-cart.
As each dot was joined came new emotions: first it was anxiety, then it was stress, then it was panic and ultimately abandonment. Our leaders had abandoned us, left the youth to fend for themselves post apocalypse. My pleas to leadership to take decisive action were met, time and time again, by vapid rhetoric: “we must remain calm”. Never, ever, ever, tell someone who is clearly not calm to ‘remain calm’. Ever.
Panic, stress, anxiety or abandonment, or a combination of all four, are without a shadow of a doubt my biggest triggers of a bipolar episode. The combination of all these can go one of two ways: a deep depression or, as it was the case this time around, an unhinged rage and defiance that could have ended with me giving up: on me and on the cause itself.
Feel free to skip the next two and jump to The Aftermath.
The Spectrum
I’m going to borrow some concepts from electrical current: analogue and digital signals. Now signals represent the transmission of electricity from a source to some or other receptor.
On the one hand we have digital signals. There are two states here 0 or 1 – much like binary 0’s and 1’s. These can be equated to switching a light on or off, either the switch is off and the light is off or the switch is on and the light is on. On. Off. This is not how bipolar works. Not at all. People often make this mistake that a bipolar person is either ‘on’ making them happy, go-lucky, energizer bunnies or ‘off’ casting them into a desperately sad, depressed state where they can’t even pick up a fork to eat. Sure, these extremes exist but there is a whole lot that happens between ‘on’ and ‘off’.
Analogue signals on the other hand are variable, they oscillate between the peak of ‘on’ and the the trough of ‘off’. This is bipolar disorder. The rate of the oscillation depends on a number of things, which I’ll simplify like this: a torch with a 9V battery can light up a room better than a torch with a 1.5V battery. Lets call this the input variable. There’s also another kind of torch, the kind that the super cool kid had, that gets brighter or dimmer depending on how tightly screwed on the cap is. This is the resistance variable.
Bipolar disorder has a large spectrum, with two ends of it being two extremes – mania (on) and depression (off) – but between the two are a plethora of emotions and their corresponding actions ultimately decide on the magnitude of the peak (high) or trough (low) signal.
The greater the magnitude the greater the result.
The Inputs
Back to Coronavirus. The variables were these:
The input variable: Coronavirus is coming and the world is doomed. Voltage is very high, potential mania is correspondingly increased.
The resistance variable is little more complex. If the time between oscillations (peaks and troughs) increases then there is more time to intercept and ‘flatten the curve’ by taking some or other pill or changing the input variable.
Time however was not on my side however. The virus was on South African shores and no action was being taken to extend the time to either solve the virus or take measures to introspect and flatten my own emotional curve.
The more I heard about flattening the curve the more desperate I became. At first it’s irritability: why won’t people heed the advice of The President and stop climbing all over me at the coffee machine. It’s such a simple request that we keep at least 6ft apart, how come are meetings being held with people in chairs and sounding important just inches apart from each other.
The journey toward a peak had begun.
Over time irritability soon turns into frustration. If you’re as opinionated as I am the time to peak is accelerated 10 fold. It’s as if a compulsion overcomes me and I have no other option than to speak my mind, which is (in my mind at least) the right course of action to take in a particular situation. In this particular case it manifested in a shoot from the hip tirade of desperate pleas to leadership to rise up and embrace technology, to be ahead of the curve and set the tone for our response to this invisible threat.
A lofty but ultimately useless exercise that probably caused more damage than it did good.
Then the President addressed the nation: South Africa will go into full lockdown for 21 days. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camels back. I was infuriated that despite my pleas and efforts to convince people to take bold and decisive action they did not and had wasted an opportunity to get in front of this crisis.
From there things escalated so quickly I actually don’t recall. People talk about blind rage? Well that happened.
The Aftermath
The crash is a feature that I should be used to by now as a consequence of what brought it on. But I said blind, remember? The crash comes in phases too. Mostly I’ll cry for hours. Sometimes I’ll cry myself to bed. It might mean a needle in my left butt cheek to knocked me the eff out.
Still feeling groggy I usually feeling better. Much much better. This is usually because I’ve taken my pills or had them (and others) via IV. I won’t lie the post-medication is fucking marvelous.
Soon the induced placidity wanes and the consequences come into sharp focus. “Holy shit. What. Have. I. Done?!”. The corrosion of relationships with peers and colleagues is inevitable and, if I’m honest, is totally understandable from their point of view. Sometimes I’ll apologize for my actions, particularly if they were – in retrospect – totally disconnected and irrational, other times I won’t because fuck that, I was right.
In this case I was.
There are people that care about all of us bipolar folk. Even me, as I’ve found out. To those those people I apologise for the worry and angst that these episodes cause for you and i cannot thank you for sticking around.
I have to live with myself in the aftermath nevertheless – apologizing to yourself is really difficult, especially because you know you had no intention of causing harm from the outset. People say we ought to forgive ourselves. Forgiveness is a digital signal with a broken switch.
[Needs Editing]
