Looking back a few years, to journal entries from December 2007, I see someone with bipolar who doesn’t know he’s got it and who’s floundering, trying to make sense of the emotional turmoil. I had to make lists like, “Things I’m not doing that I should,” and “Things I should be doing to make things better,” and “Things I have not been doing that previously worked.”

I went through months of irritable mania and despairing depressions searching for the reason why things should feel so terrible all the time, and why I should feel like doing nothing all the time. It ate up all my attention – I journaled for thousands of words on this topic, always looking for the answer to the question, “Why?” Why am I feeling the way I do right now, as opposed to just a few days ago when I felt completely differently? Why do the depressions come on so fast and saddle me with unclear reasoning and paralysis? Why are my responses to normal events heightened in a very negative way? What’s the mechanism for this?

I came up with theory after theory. The investigations came up with unsatisfying answers, like loneliness, bad upbringing, leaving grad school, paired with descriptions of the minute-by-minute of my “spirals,” which was the word I used to name my paranoid depressions. “The spiral has me today and I feel like hell,” or, “I’m not in a spiral and thank god for that.” The spiral. I had no better word for it at the time. But the word’s bipolar, and I’m glad I know it now.