What made me do that? I imagine people (and by people I mean me) with a less-than-life-destroying case of bipolar have complicated memories of the time before they knew they were bipolar, when it seemed normal to be a little off, when it was your personality, not your diagnosis.

I don’t think it even enters into it whether or not you were miserable during that time. There’s a pre and post-diagnosis life, two lives in one, good or bad, and it’s useful to think about the world on the other side, before the diagnosis, before the veil fell.

But you can’t go home again. I’m thinking about my teen years, before this crazy really got started up, when it was mild. The thing you can do is try to remember: through the years, scrapbook moments when the crazy took hold in a — what other way to put it — more innocent way. When depression was shyness and hypomania was excitement.

Nostalgia settles into me. Remember adolescent dark spells deeper than everyone else’s, sometimes fascinating me with their blacker-than-black mood. Or then the way staying up all night felt like an interesting way to reset the wildly spinning mechanisms in my head, like a watch you quickly wind 12 hours ahead just to set one minute back.

Oh yeah, that’s what made me do that.