Thought it was time for another piece all about what is is to be me. The deconstruction of a legend, or something similar. I have written previously on my blog about the OCD I suffer from and the depression it has caused over the years. On the other side of depression though, and just as troublesome, is what I call mania.
Mania is the emotional opposite of depression, but they are definitely siblings. It is the state I find myself in when the emotion is pulsating and forcing its way out of me, everything needs urgent evacuation or it will fry me from the inside. There are times when I just have to react, dramatically, to events around me - whether that be to shout at the TV news or to laugh outwardly, loudly and embarassingly at a sub-par joke, as if the laughter were the vocalisation of anger at the paucity of the material.
It is not, however, just the big and outward gestures and signs of mania that are troublesome to me. Mania is the little man with the stick who pokes and pokes and won't let up at every opportunity. The force that makes me go that little bit too far, further than my comfort zone in what I say or do. I find myself telling lurid tales just that little bit too lurid for polite company, I am telling tales to shock and I know it. It makes me crave the reaction, sate myself with other's raised eyebrows or disapproving looks. Mania gets off on disapproval, mania is typing these words right now.
I want people to be shocked, I want them to recoil, I want the damn mania (and just who do you think made me type that? poke, bloody poke). It feeds the depression, it is fuel, it is a diaretic for the soul, the two of them are so in cahoots, it is surprising I have ever managed to present a sober and level headed front. At least, that is how it feels when I am manic. Of course it subsides and of course I then find my level.
Why write about it? Well, the mania has coloured parts of my life just as much as the OCD and the depressive episodes have. Every time I have fallen in love I have committed myself to it (at least to my internal satisfaction) completely, the buzz from it is narcotic and I feel it's withdrawal for a long time after the details of her face have faded from memory. In that sense it is helpful - when I get withdrawal pangs when someone goes away, I am normally already starting to fall. Mania is what made Friday and Saturday big nights out in the nineties - hang it all out there and let the weekend blow your mind. It felt like the only option - be out of control and let the emotions rip their moorings.
Mania makes me write poems that illiterate - lest the words miss out on a welcoming world of wonder. Every word I write or say has a purpose when I am manic - it is crystal clarity to depression's haze. This whole piece, by the way, was conceived in a flash on the A47 - one moment's complete overreaction to undimmed headlights and I was writing the why all the way home in my head.
When I am depressed, I don't know how to know myself, when I am manic I HAVE to know myself - a different type of raw necessity - evacuate those emotions and ride the wake behind them waiting until it all subsides into the crushing lows in the immediate aftermath. There's truth, there's truth without reason and there's reason without truth, and I spend my life juggling all three.
I am Dave, and I am manic. And this is an evacuation in words.
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