In the these pages we've tried to put together some of the complex and jagged pieces of our experiences to give you a sense from the inside of what it's like to live with this thing they call bipolar disorder.

Mania, Depression, and the Territory Between

In an attempt to find language that can map the extremes of our landscapes, we've drawn the following paragraphs from letters we've received and the words people have posted on The Icarus Project website, interspersed with our own commentary.

One of the first things we've noticed is that there seems to be a universal wave function underlying bipolar experience; like a pendulum, our moods and subsequently the course of our lives, will swing down as far as they swing up, and the two extremes can't seem to exist without each other, unless the pendulum comes to equilibrium closer to the center.

"It is as if my thoughts have sailed away. I can see them in the distance, but I can't access them. I feel like I've experienced an amazing dream where everything came together and fit in gorgeous geometrical patterns. And now, my reality crowds around me like stale smoke. I feel cowardly, inept, and worthless." -emiko

Though bipolar affects an astonishingly wide range of people, it seems to give many of us the feeling that we are somehow different in ways other people might not ever notice.

"First of all, I live about the most "normal" life imaginable. I have a husband. I teach school. I have three kids. I go to their ballgames. I go to Church. Even though my life appears to be normal to the person who hardly knows me, I really wonder, "Can someone with BP ever truly be normal?" I can sit in a meeting with all the teachers and ten minutes before they come up with the plan, I have already planned and executed everything in my mind. Sometimes I feel like I am going to have a "meltdown" yet no one around me even knows. With the help of medication, I am maintaining a "look" of normalcy. Yet, I wonder how long it will actually last this time. Do non-BP people even have the remotest idea of the magnitude with which we feel emotion? Is this the curse or the blessing of this disorder?" -bpbear

Bipolar seems to mark all of us with an intense sensitivity to the world we live in. So often it becomes too much to handle.

"I remember sitting in a thrift store parking lot, at night in winter Ceveland, staring at the parking lights just thinking of the oil, the people who got the oil, the people who sell the oil, the people who use the oil, and just how insane and fucked up it all was. It felt like I was the only one who knew that this was all going to have to end, that there wasn't enough and we weren't conserving it. This pretty much drove me crazy. I went from science to self-discovery in an attempt to make sense of it all when I was about 16, started smoking, tripping, all that. I would like to say that it has helped, helped me discover the realm of "more than me" and basically sparked the spiritual side of my life. The only problem is addiction. I've been addicted ever since. I think that it's been my way of medicating the "craziness" and feeling of this world, both good and bad." -ilove

Part of what's so distressing about being manic-depressive is that you feel like you're given access, at times, to brilliant and seemingly secret visions of the world"”and when they are snatched away without warning it's so hard to stop chasing after them.

"At times I can find so much meaning in every tiny little thing around that most "normal" people might never throughout their entire life think about twice. Like the flow of a small stream of water after a misty rain or even that first breath of fresh air you inhale after a day or two of not leaving the house because of a manic or depressed episode. At the times in my life when it seems everything is right, when I can find a significance in life, when I'm at peace"¦ those times are what the depression of bipolar disorder destroys in an instant when it hits. Creating a cul-de-sac at almost every road you turn down. Like an endless vicious cycle of deceit played out on another level of thought. Like a chess game that you've mastered through brilliant strategy, and you're about to capture the queen with a silent pawn and in that last pouncing move the board flips and you start over again. Like a Sisyphus cycle of damnation, endlessly rolling that rock to the top only to watch it tumble." -Jereme

Sometimes you build a universe in your mind that is like an intricate house of cards, and though you think it's impenetrable, only a breath or the flick of a fingertip can make it all fall down around you. The pendulum never remains at its highest point; it swings from ecstasy and revelation to suicidal depression according to its own laws of physics.

"I'd spent the first part of that fall flying through uncharted regions of human understanding, convinced that the secret to world peace was the simple fact that the carbon in our bodies was born in the supernovas of huge stars, so we were all obviously the same. This made me ecstatically happy. This was by far the most compelling piece of information on the planet and I was going to share it with every high school student in America. When I failed a biology test, however, the infrastructure of the universe seemed to fall apart. Within a few weeks I was calling Al at the suicide hotline to mutter about how I should obviously either stop existing or move to a beach in Hawaii. All that crap about the stars seemed to be laughing at me." -a

They say that the cycle begins with mania

There is a moment when the universe seems to expand"”we find ourselves with boundless energy and sharpened vision, noticing more and more of the connections between everything in the world around us, and feeling compelled to talk about them constantly. The psychiatric establishment calls this "hypomania," or mild mania, and it is the furthest that some of us reach on our upswings. It is intoxicating. In these early stages we tend to become incredibly confident and magnetic to the people around us, and often find ourselves dreaming up grandiose projects and becoming the center of attention. Sometimes we find ourselves becoming intensely irritable and impatient.

As mania accelerates, it becomes much more urgent to plan and create than it becomes to sleep or take care of ourselves. We are suddenly so much more electric and moving so much faster than everyone else that it seems like our worlds hardly intersect though we are inhabiting the same space. Although we start making less and less sense to the people around us, we see synchronicities everywhere. Everything we experience seems to fit into a master plan of the universe that no one else has access to. At the height of our manias it might seem like we have a direct line to God or simply to the meaning of the universe; we pass through states of intense euphoria and spiritual enlightenment on our way to the Truth. Sometimes it seems like the world is full of nothing but hypocrisy and everyone we love is turning on us, and we become furious, destructive, and full of rage. Sometimes it becomes abundantly clear that the government and/or our personal demons are coming to get us and we are haunted by paranoid certainty of grand conspiracies and imminent apocalypse. One of the biggest challenges for people like us is attempting to make sense afterwards of the visions we have during our manias. In our society it seems our revelations are considered psychosis if we choose to believe there might be any truth in them.

The Beginning of the Cycle. *It is hard to know where to draw the line between having boundless energy, seeing meaning everywhere, and behavior that is symptomatic of a problem: budding mania.*

"Stopped sleeping much. Waking up early all the time. Had vivid thoughts again. Then one day started seeing illuminated patterns rising up out of the dirt. Found myself hiking through canyons that were suddenly so lucidly cut out of the sky that their immensity became comprehensible and I could see all of them at once. Could see time in the rocks and feel weight in the air. Somehow climbed 3000 feet in 3 miles without feeling like I'd gone anywhere at all. Bounding up switchbacks and intoxicated on sunlight. Ardently discussing the roundness of the moon with god and the sky. Understanding all the ways in which the word mountain is a container for the whole universe. How language gives us stopping points, words like "normal" give us a way to say this is where I end and pathology begins, demarcate chunks of the universe and keep them separate, how language gives us ways to categorize all of our behavior as ok or not ok, to begin censoring ourselves with their words for the experiences that feel inseparable from our souls"¦ Was I becoming manic? Is that what I have to call this? Or was I having a "true" experience? Was I closer to god or crazy?" -icarus

At some point the insights and theories evolving in our brains become so all-consuming that we feel an urgent need to communicate them to everyone"¦ We talk too much and become irritated when the people around us can't keep up. We find ourselves alienating lovers and being talked about by friends.

"I started getting really short with my friends, cutting them off in mid-sentence because I knew how important it was that I get my thoughts out before it was too late. I knew that I wouldn't live to see the day, but I wanted to make sure I did as much as I could before the government got me. I needed to leave behind instructions for everyone so they'd know what to do without me around. I'd wake up in the morning from a couple hours of restless sleep and pour out pages and pages of ideas for what life should look like after the revolution. My housemates, my girlfriend, and everyone else around in the community was getting really sick of me and telling me to chill the fuck out. I had great ideas, they said, but no one was going to listen if I was talking so fast."-scatter

We become obsessed with a million projects that are going to change or explain the world and suddenly find ourselves fearless, convinced of our own importance, and unafraid to do things like reach out to famous people we would never have contacted if we had actually been getting enough sleep.

"In the weeks leading up to my psychotic break I was working on an economic tract that was essentially going to re-invent Marxism for the digital age. I had actually been corresponding with John Kenneth Galbraith of all people and he had been writing back. I laugh now when think of it. I wonder what he made of all of my sprawling pages and diagrams"¦" -anon.

At some point our own theories and fantasies become the worlds we inhabit, and we position ourselves in the center as messianic figures, mystics, or simply the only person who really knows"¦ Everything we encounter fits into our own personal mythologies, which become written in the symbolic language that used to belong to our dreams but now bleeds over into our waking lives.

"I left my house at 2 am and went to the Tenderloin hunting for prostitutes, when I couldn't find any I started looking for people to talk to about my theory about the transformation of the earth into the new heaven and men and women into perfect "angel creatures." On my walk home I found a homeless man sleeping on the steps of a church and shook him awake and gave him my whole wallet with over $200 in it, because"”of course, being the new Messiah, I would have no need for money, ID and credit cards any more. It all seemed so logical. The next day my wife somehow wrangled me to the hospital where (as I remember it) I underwent a sort of metaphorical crucifixion. After knocking over some equipment I was tackled by about five guys, shot up with Haldol, and strapped onto the gurney. From there I embarked on this indescribable mystical journey I like to think was probably pretty similar to what Muhammad went through. My wife doesn't quite remember it that way though"¦ I was just mumbling and nuts."-m.l.

Sometimes our dreams become elaborate nightmares filled with conspiracies and secret languages. When we awake months later we sometimes still find scraps of truth in the psychotic rubble.

"I ended up thinking that nanobots had been implanted into me during the surgery, and that my professors were covertly training me for my summer anthropology research abroad. I also thought I had identified a new way of communication, something animalistic and non-verbal, that was generally subconscious but noticeable through very close observation. When I describe it now, I still feel that this mode of communication exists, but I was definitely reading into people's utterances too much, deciphering subconscious admissions and clues of desire in everybody's statements. Things took on an overtly sexual set of qualities for me. I ended up in a mental ward"¦ it was horrendous, although not as bad as before. A positive result was that I was diagnosed as manic depressive."-k

When we enter the world of hallucinations and delusions we are told we are having a psychotic break with reality and routinely hospitalized, diagnosed with a disease, and drugged. And this may save our lives. But many of us touch on similar places when we're in those frantic states, and it's hard not to wonder if the parallel perceptions we sometimes have are due to more than biochemistry. Could they actually be openings onto something real, something so powerful it tips our fragile brains over the edge? Are we getting a glimpse of systems underlying society and patterns underlying experience that most people never have a chance to see?

"I wonder how I managed not to get picked up when I wandered the streets in the sleepless nights carrying absurd items in my backpack"”like every journal I've kept since I was 12, nothing practical like a jacket or a sleeping bag"” and terrified to go home because there were people living on my rooftop waiting for me to get in bed so they could jump through my skylights and kill me. Mostly, I wonder what it is that made us have such similar paranoias, the same idea that secret messages were coming through the billboards, the same notion of an impending crisis"”for me it was the revolution, though I had a very different idea of what that would mean back then, and everything was so urgent because of it, the same thoughts that I was being recorded and broadcast both to audiences of random anybody's and to secret government agencies"”video as well as audio, and I was sure that my fillings in my teeth and some of my jewelry were transmitting my location as well, the same conviction that there were constantly 2 or more layers of conversations going on, and that there were these other languages being used simultaneously that most people weren't even aware of.

So when I read about this stuff in your article, that you'd had very similar delusions and the like, it really got me thinking"”what brought our brains, in different times, different genders, with different backgrounds and upbringings"”what brought our brains into such intensely parallel thinking? Are those things somewhat universal? Are there any universals when it comes to mental health breakdowns?"-b.

Regardless of what is revealed to us - whatever brilliance or passion is touched on in our flights through the sky"”eventually our wings melt from flying too close to the sun, and we plunge into the depths of our solitary oceans of misery. At some point, due to the laws of gravity in our minds and souls, everything slips.

"My diagnosis came in June when I saw the world in crystal clear perfection on the summer solstice. I went running in the streets half naked blowing kisses to on-coming vehicles. I was locked up in a hospital and drugged pretty heavily. When I came out I still thought I understood the world more clearly than I ever had before "” living life in such an open state, moment to moment. I was then hospitalized again after visiting a friend in Philly and getting turned on to hip-hop music. After getting out of that hospital I was still feeling high for a couple of weeks, and then I crashed. My feelings of unself-consciousness gave way to deep insecurities. I moved back to my hometown. It's been months now and I still feel bleak and hopeless. When I was manic I understood helen cixous, bjork, lacan, and talib kwel. Now I lack the concentration to read and music is dry and empty. When I was manic I hardly ate or slept. Now all I do is eat and sleep. I never used to watch TV (even before my mania). Now I find myself channel surfing. In my previous life, I loved cyborgs and donna haraway. Now I can't muster up the interest for any social theory. I don't know who I am anymore. It feels like my soul has abandoned me. I miss my passion and lust for life. I miss my curiosity. And I miss my trust in myself." -emiko

Many of us try to claw our way out with drugs and alcohol.

"I see you as someone learning to be yourself. Right now you're in a particularly ungraceful period, and that's fine. It might feel ugly, but it's fine. I've heard voices and seen things too. I've gotten exorbitantly drunk time after time after time after time. I've taken ecstasy in the middle of a depression and made myself completely suicidal after a few hours of fun, and hated myself for doing it. I've gone out and had 10 shots of tequila a few months after getting out of the psych ward, while taking Depakote, and found myself projectile vomiting for days afterwards. And then more tequila when I was done.

And when I think about it, the excessive amount of crap I put in my body, from sugar to Ecstasy, really was this way to get the fuck away from myself. To magically develop social skills in a crowd, or bulldoze my head out of depression for a night, or blind myself with euphoria to all the hypocrisy that seemed to be eating up my brain. To feel satisfied with the people who didn't actually satisfy me, or to force a night of wild exhilaration when I felt stuck or raw and anxious, or to numb myself against the school that made me alternately want to be a superhero or a total dropout.

It just seemed like the most effective (though totally temporary) way to smother all the pain and how hard it was to live in my skin and not try to jump out, though I wouldn't have said that then. It still makes me sad to think about everything I did. There's some serious shame there." -ashley

For some of us the transition to depression comes as a cataclysmic crash into total hopelessness and loss of energy after weeks or months of being on fire, our minds suddenly burned out and refusing to make the simplest connections between the activities of our daily lives, rendering basic functioning next to impossible and tremendously exhausting. Some of us spend most of our time lingering for months or years in habitual states of depression that are only occasionally punctuated by mild manias. For many others the slide into depression is marked by the agitated purgatory of unbearable restlessness and confusion called a mixed state. These states, marked by both mania and depression, can be transitional or they can occur independently throughout the course of someone's life and wreak havoc.

"Here's my DSM identity - I'm an "˜ultra-rapid cycling' bipolar I with psychotic features and MIXED STATES! This particular manifestation of hell is profound! Mixed states are like being "˜tired-wired.' I get jacked up with a mind that feels like it's on fire - can't stop thinking, can't stop working, can't sleep, can't eat, can't concentrate - basic mania. But here's the catch - all this occurs through the prism of extreme negativity, despondency and rage. In other words, I get manic and deeply depressed all at the same time. It is not a happy, euphoric and mind-expanding mania. It is not a sluggish and low-energy depression. It's freaking Armageddon.

Mixed states really trigger those nasty, frenzied, psychotic episodes - that incomprehensible rant at the checker in Safeway who didn't pack your grocery bag "˜just right,' the gasoline-fueled game of speeding through a 25mph school zone at 90 mph and everybody "˜fucking better get outta my way' attitude, that aggressive, fight-picking, arrest-inducing confrontation with the cop drinking his latte' at Starbucks. Mixed states - amped up, enraged, deeply anti-social, aggressive and very, very dark. PS - Some people get "˜86'd or banned from bars and taverns. In my whacked out, suburban, pseudo-soccer mom life, I've been banned from my neighborhood grocery store, the drycleaner and post office (is that legal?). And funny"¦ I "˜look' so "˜normal.' "-anon

Often these mixed states mark the disorienting, desperate passage from the upper world to the under world. We may start witnessing the hideous shattering of all the intricate dreams we constructed when we were flying"”while knowing we are utterly powerless to do anything to save them. We want so badly to keep up the pace we were managing before, but our thoughts are fragmenting and it's becoming harder and harder to explain anything to anyone. Nasty thoughts descend like frantic certainties: you can't possibly follow through on what you started, you are a failure, you are letting everyone down, you are crazy, you are doing it again. Mixed states can become very dangerous. We may lack the focus to cook ourselves dinner, but we have enough energy to jump off a bridge.

"I have all this anxious awful electricity and I can't sit still. I constantly feel like I should be doing something, but it's totally impossible to focus and I start feeling like a failed superhero. I walk around and see the sky full of birds and wonder why they all look like some kind of detached dreamworld, not real, not feeling beautiful at all, feeling like some joke of a real experience I can't have. I might feel unbelievably happy in a wired, red-eyed way for two hours and then totally apocalyptic and strung out like coming down after eating 5 pints of ice cream and all I want is to crawl out of my skin. There are occasional moments of total lucidity and astounding connections between ideas, and I cling to them like someone drowning, but then there are also moments of being curled up as small as I can get on my bed, refusing to speak or eat and determined that I should just die. I feel like my chest is going to burst with all this self-directed anger and I get violent if someone tries to touch me because I'm not worth it and I might explode"”even though I would love to be touched. I just want to run away and break things. It seems more and more impossible to talk to anyone because my own hysterical accelerating soundtrack is just too overwhelming. It starts to seem more and more reasonable that I would cause everyone so much less trouble if I just died." -anon.

In some ways the depressions that come feel like death. The world outside us is no different than it was a few days, weeks, or months ago, but we are suddenly totally unable to participate in it.

"There is a real life, and there is living death. Disinterest and disgust and nothingness. I feel it in my chest. It breaks my heart. It feels like breathlessness. Being pulled from the shore"¦ again and again and again. And every time I hear of someone else going through this, it breaks my heart even more. Upon finding meaning and joy it becomes obsolete within moments. I am so sick of interacting with other human beings. As soon as I enter a conversation, I am frantically searching for a way out. since everything I believe in revolves around the importance of communication and mutual aid it leaves me as a rather high-contrast hypocrite. This assists in furthering my sense of total personal worthlessness. I am considering going back on medication. No one can live like this. What's worse is that this post will look so silly in a day or a week or whatever. I'll be like "˜oh I'm fine, how stupid of me"¦.. how uninspiring! Why does it say "˜go to social services' on my hand?' "-atrophy

When we are depressed the world becomes small and we find ourselves constantly disgusted with the fact that simply brushing our teeth or doing the laundry feels like such a huge task that thinking about something outside ourselves"”like world politics or our next-door neighbor"”seems next to impossible.

"Depression feels like shrinkage of thought and perspective. There's no comfort of Big Picture. #1 dilemma becomes how to acquire food without leaving bed, instead of how to write Great American Novel. Meanwhile, the negative thought loop gets shorter and shorter, until all it contains is something along the lines of "everything is bad, everything is bad"¦". Fuck, you can't even be creative about why the world is a terrible place anymore. There's only the "terrible," with no meaning whatsoever. Where there's no meaning, there's no light to make out anything beautiful, and nothing will ever change. Because the world outside is a reflection of the world inside, everything drives the badness home. It often feels like being trapped inside a cylindrical 360 degree movie screen, onto which the world is projected. You become completely isolated and hideously bored. Life is like watching the same bad movie over and over. Not much action in that story. But there's one thing that always gives me a little smile of irony and the absurd afterward: the personal records that I break when I'm depressed, such as consecutive hours in bathtub, consecutive pb&j meals, number of days in same clothes, etc"¦" -Tiger

Depression is all-consuming and totally overwhelming.

"My depressions, when they are pure depressions, have sometimes felt like each day was going to be my last, for months on end, worrying late at night in bed that "it's all over" and that I have blown it, blown my whole life, time has caught up with me and passed me by and I've been a loser the whole way through"¦then waking up in the morning in the agony of the realization that yet another day has still arrived. And what am I going to do about it, what am I going to do about ANYTHING, there are ten or twenty obstacles to everything I can think to do. My morbid stacks of books and papers and the dust bunnies all over everything. My addiction to the computer and expectation that there will be anything but junk in my box if I do the addictive thing and log into my e-mail"¦.Depression that there is no food in the house that I want to eat, but that I will not have the energy or the money to go out of the house to get something I DO want to eat. Depression that what I really might want to eat is not only expensive, but fattening. Fear of looking at my own artwork and realizing it's shit. The spines of my books reveal narrowness and immaturity instead of scholarliness. "¦My clothes no longer represent who I am, or maybe I don't fit in some, or maybe I am looking at a huge dry cleaning bill. The fact that I wear socks out in three wearings and can't afford to be buying socks all the time. Not brushing my teeth.

In the past, before medication, I used to get really morbidly depressed. I would see myself as a reflection of a great historical process in which I played a rather humble and humiliated role. I would see generations of hatred between populations staring right through me. Everyone's closed off and no one questioning anything. Depression in the shape of a brand new family vehicle shaped like a teflon-coated suppository driving slowly past on a street that used to be bike-friendly. Depression an extraordinarily ugly piece of prominently placed architecture, sign of the triumph of the state over neighborhood interests. Lazy menu-writing in restaurants: the same mac and cheese, the same duck confit, the same salsa on everything. Depression is when my closest friends and lovers cannot help me and I break into tears all the time." -eduardo

So often, depression doesn't seem to have a distinct cause rooted in the world outside ourselves. Though thoughts like the president is ordering the deaths of innocents or television is brainwashing the next generation might be true"”and though, when we're depressed, these thoughts might loom hideously large in our minds every waking minute of the day and overwhelm us with the sense that the world is ending"”we are not this depressed because the modern world is going to hell, or because a relationship ended, or a person died"”we are depressed because we are depressed. Other people walk through the same world and manage to keep functioning. Perhaps they are don't feel as much as acutely. Or perhaps somewhere along the line our particular brains broke down due to a combination of culture and chemistry that is hard to pin down. Depression is different than sadness or grief or noticing atrocities. It completely takes over your life, and if it spins out of control if can make you obsess endlessly about taking your life.

"When the depression comes it's like having lead weights on all your limbs and thoughts and feelings and emotions. It's not just being really sad. There's a big difference. The couple times it's happened to me I've stopped being able to take care of myself. I get cuts on my hands and don't tend to them even after they get infected and nasty. I get really confused and scattered"”lose all sense of direction and get lost in neighborhoods I normally know like the back of my hand. I'm shut down. I stop being able to perform basic tasks like going to work and buying groceries. I stop being able to communicate with anyone because I can't even get up the energy to formulate sentences between the black noise and broken records skipping in my brain. Everything seems pointless and irrelevant because I know I'm going to be dead soon. Just imagine for a second that all of your deepest and worst insecurities have risen to the surface and are present with you wherever you go: every conversation you have has a second dialogue going on internally telling you that everything coming out of your mouth is full of shit and that you're a liar and a hypocrite and a coward and you better kill yourself as soon as you can before everyone finds out how fucked up you really are. And then imagine that the pain and shame of hating yourself is so great that the thoughts of ending your life are constant, like a broken record: throwing yourself in front of moving cars, jumping out of windows, gun in the back of the head, carbon monoxide in the garage, a handful of pills"¦it's both exhausting and horrible. And it feels like it's never going to end. I stop being able to get out of bed. I curl up in a ball and just wish that someone would come and put me out of my misery. My whole life is one big mistake. And no matter how many times I've come out of it, each new time it never feels like it's ever going to end, it feels like I'm going to be in mental agony forever." -sascha

The arc of rising and falling moods that characterizes bipolar experience does not occur with the same frequency or amplitude for everyone who lives through it. The trajectory described in the preceding pages is usually called the more classic pattern of symptoms, but it is not the only one. For some of us the depressions last months, and reach intensely morbid depths. For others, who are called rapid-cyclers by the psychiatric world, the depression might last only a few days, or even hours, followed by a mania, followed by another depression, and so on, adding up to many cycles over the course of a year. For those of us diagnosed cyclothymic, however, our lives tend to be marked by consistent stretches of a depressive mood that is less black and not as obviously disruptive, but is more persistent, and broken only occasionally by upswings into hypomania. (For more information about the different varieties of bipolar diagnosis, take a look at p. 73, where we've reprinted part of the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria.)

Contrary to popular legend, someone diagnosed with manic depression does not live in a perpetual state of madness"”all forms of bipolar include periods of time when a person is not experiencing acute symptoms"”a "normal" phase, if you will, between episodes"”which the medical establishment refers to as a euthymic period. These stretches can last months and even years, even if we're not on medication"”though they say the stretches become shorter and shorter the longer we're unmedicated, and even shorter if we tend to rapid cycle. These stretches can make it difficult to believe you actually have a serious problem once the memory of the worst times fades a bit"”and so many people go off medication during these periods"”but for most of us the mania and the depression will spring up to bite us again.

When the degree of mania and depression that we experience isn't completely extreme, and when it's haunting us more often than not, as can be the case with Cyclothymia, it can be very hard to figure out what's going on.

"I'm now trying to come to terms with my personality: my moods and my sensitivity. For me, it's hard to really pin down my cycles because I'm so caught up in them. But I've read Kay Jamison's book and I recognize that while I do have flights of energy, creativity, and nights without sleeping, I don't have such full-blown manias. I don't have hallucinatory trips "˜to the rings of Saturn.' Hypomania seems to be what I hit. Depression? Well, I had one major bout of depression a year ago. It had to do with grad school collapsing around me and my feeling that I had no out, no escape from my situation. But most of the time I'm just kind of "˜depressive.' Not flat out depressed, but dealing regularly with low self esteem and poor (or at least very inconsistent) motivation. Before, I thought the waves were the world going up and down. Only a year ago did I realize it was me. Since then, I've been watching myself"”my moods and my reactions. Depression and elation are there, but the hardest thing in dealing with other people are my outbursts of anger. They always seem justified, but never to the anger's recipient"¦ My ex-girlfriend-and-still-good-friend has said that it's painful to watch someone with my potential struggle so much. She has been urging me to see a psychiatrist for awhile"¦ and I am coming to terms with the notion that even though I am reacting to real situations, there is an aspect of my emotions that is problematic." -NG

When you're rapid-cycling, on the other hand, the mood changes can come so fast that it seems like you're caught in a perpetual struggle between the extremes of mania and depression that can be equally hard to identify.

"I'm an ultra rapid cycler "” or, rather, it begins with rapid cycling and then, if unchecked, accelerates exponentially into ultra-ultra rapid cycling, until my life can seem a blur of just mixed states. At the time I was diagnosed, which was at my worst, I was switching between extreme states every 15 minutes to 2 hours. The mixed states would last up to 5-10 minutes. About enough time for me to get ready to commit suicide, or at one point, try to pick up where I had been interrupted before - then, BAM, I'm manic or depressed, and either don't have the interest or don't have the energy anymore to go through with it. I think the rapid cycling may actually bring a person closer to a suicidal state faster than the "˜classic' months/years cycling, if only because those oh-so-dangerous mixed states are much more frequent.

I am glad to have this forum [for rapid cyclers], because as much as all those with bipolar disorder have in common, sometimes it's hard to relate well with those who have the more "classic" bipolar. I met a woman once who had that. For about 7 months she'd have depression, gain a lot of weight, not accomplish anything. Then she'd have about 3 months of near solid, practically no sleep, mania. She'd become a skeleton and paint like crazy. Then she'd maybe have a couple months to a year of remission. And as much as I understood "” and much more than your average person who doesn't know the difference between feeling down and major depression "” we had a hard time truly understanding the specifically different hues of suffering that the different types of BPD create." -Amita

When you're cycling that fast it's hard to know who you are anymore"”the idea of a "real" me seems distant and hard to grasp as your whole world seems to change hourly. For some of us who are sensitive it seems that adding and withdrawing certain psych drugs from our bodies might help trigger this cycling.

"Not soon after some of the first experiments with putting me on SSRI's I started to have what both my psychiatrist and I (after my own extensive research) recognized as mixed states and rapid cycling- a feeling of extreme well being and hyper happiness would descend only to turn minutes later into extreme hopelessness, and this would happen at a dizzying rate until I was afraid to do anything- knowing that minutes later my mood would unpredictably segue into some opposite or even worse, mixed extreme like agitated happiness, or raging depression." -permafrost

While rapid-cycling can be particularly difficult to treat, no form of bipolar responds unanimously to a simple formula, no matter what the textbooks might declare. Our bodies have different sensitivities and different rhythms. Learning to take care of ourselves usually involves changing more than the combination of pills that we swallow.

"My response to all the cycling, when I was living in the city, had basically been to alternately take on tons of jobs and then when I started crashing to cancel everything and hide"”so I had no accountability and NO routine whatsoever and it made it so much easier for the machinations of my brain to seem totally unbearable when things weren't actually that tragic"¦ You know what I honestly think helped me? Three things. a) got on a reasonable dose of lithium b) started working with an energy healer/body worker c) moved to a vegetable farm and started doing physical labor 10 hours a day. I was still having cycles for the first 3 or 4 months I was there, but they were much less dramatic, something more like 3 weeks semi-up and 1 week down, probably also related to monthly hormones. But I really think that having to get my ass out into the sunshine and the mud every day and work until I was tired was SO good for me, and so good for getting off that awful cycling track." -icarus

We all have to find our own formulas, worked out over months and years of experimenting, getting to know ourselves, and listening to the demands of our restless hearts that do not want to be ignored.

When we feel we are getting closer, we must not forget that the nature of this illness is change.