The Peak of Mania (or So I Hope)

I've been thinking lately about my last major episode with the paranoid delusions and hallucinations. At the time, it seemed to have crept up on me during the preceding evening. Then, after a frenetic, sleepless night, I was still wide awake the next morning. I remember clearly when the hallucinations began--I literally felt something snap in my head. It was as if a twig had broken; there was an audible crack. I had been sitting up in bed with my head back against the wall, with my eyes closed. My eyes snapped open...and I stepped through the looking glass.

I've looked back a lot and realized that I'd started to get sick long before that day. I'd been under a lot of stress since the previous summer, and my paranoia had slowly surfaced. I'd changed positions at work to try to eliminate stress, but it had only created a different kind of stress. My home life had grown increasingly more difficult, adding further strain. Everything was in disarray. I felt a sense of desperation about everything. Nothing was right and I was thoroughly upset and unhappy. One of the things I recently realized is that I was deeply delusional long before the day my mind completely snapped.

In retrospect, I see that I spent the months from November to April in an increasing state of delusion. High functioning at first, but each day eroding my grip on reality. There was, and still is, a sense of being under water during that time. I lived in a different world, I lived a different life. My ideas, my actions, were bizarre. When I think of it now, I am incredulous. I don't know how I managed to function at all. I realize that it had come to the point in January that I was barely able to do so, that I was limping along, bloody and battered. The fact that I made it all the way to March is amazing.

I'd started playing a role play game online that November. I had come to live in this game without realizing it. I developed bonds with certain people. I thought of them as my real friends. I spent inordinate amounts of time online--to the exclusion of pretty much everything and everyone. I'd stay up far later than I should, sleeping only 4 hours a night. I put so much of my emotional self into the game. How things were going in the game dictated my every emotion. I laughed, I cried, I was furious, I was over the moon, I was revered, I was reviled...all in one night, every night it seemed. I could not pull myself away. I was consumed by thoughts of it; waking in the middle of what little sleep I found, obsessing over it. Then I wouldn't be able to get back to sleep. I couldn't focus or concentrate on anything. I was aware on some level that my "real" life was slipping away from my hands, but there was little I could or wanted to do about it. I lived somewhere else now.

My judgment deserted me. I made up my mind to have a costly cosmetic procedure I'd wanted for a very long time. I pulled a substantial amount of money out of my 401(k) plan to pay for it. I also paid for an out of state vacation months ahead of time, to boot. I told myself I was just going to live my life before I was too old. I was erratic and out of control.

I managed to tear myself from the game because it was causing me too much pain, but I just jumped to another game with one of the players from the first game. My paranoia was full blown by then and my grip on reality was all but gone. I became convinced that the other players from the first game had followed me to the next and were there just to fuck with my head. For the next two months, I was almost entirely in this underwater state of being. I was functioning at maybe 10% by that time, unable to work at this point. My laptop was always in my lap. I stayed up until 2am or earlier every day, only to wake at 6:30a. I was back in the game after I took my son to school in the morning. That is where I stayed every moment I had when I was not doing something for my kids.

It is taking me a long time to come back from this. Medication is really the only thing that has helped. Even though I was finally able to break my attachment to living in alternate realities after my psychotic break, I was still consumed by thoughts of the game and what happened. I was haunted by thoughts of the people I played with and what I thought they had been trying to do to me. It has only been lately that I was able to put aside the thought that there was a plan to "get me" or to do me some mental damage. And I mean in the VERY recent past. At the height of my delusions, in fact when my mind actually broke, I believed my husband was spearheading the campaign against me with the game people.

Before all this, mania had been the best high in the world. It had been nothing but a pleasurable experience for me. I'd never had a mixed state. I'd crashed before for sure, but nothing like this. Truth be told, this experience is what keeps me on my meds. It doesn't matter how tiresome or cumbersome it can be. It doesn't matter whether I worry about it possibly reducing my life expectancy or affecting my physical health in some way. It doesn't matter about the current side affects. It doesn't matter that I miss the pleasure of a "normal" mania. I never, ever, ever want to go through that again. I won't take that risk. My fear is that the normal mania has passed and that it will forever be psychotic now.

I read a comment from a woman on a blog one time. She said that she'd never had ill effects from a manic episode and was PRAYING for one. You never have ill effects until you do. Even the pleasurable ones have ill effects you just don't see, but you never know what demons lurk around the corner. I now live in fear of mania and PRAY that I never see it again.