Getting High : Mania
Superman has nothing on me. Strength, speed, energy, and even flight are all mine. The world speaks to me, the weather responds to my emotions. The whole of existance is carefully planned play to entertain and torture me. I am the center, I am the best, and I'm not so sure that I didn't actually create it all to begin with. High on mania, the world is a play, a play that stars me.
Doctors and counsellors can describe the symptoms, but the elusive elation that mania delivers is intoxicating, captivating, and deadly. Clinical explanations do nothing to explain the power of this beast. A drive so powerful, an urge so strong, was not meant to last. The cyclic, passing nature of the mania - sweet sweet mania - is addictive. When medication makes the mania go away, it is difficult to like the medication. When most people spend their entire life trying to feel this way, why would one try to stop it ?
In the milder forms, mania feels like love in the springtime. The world has a golden glow, and your heart is well protected from the bleakness of reality. You sing and dance, write and paint. You wake up with early, go to bed late, and have energy to spare. You eat less, do more, and unexplainably love it all. In small doses, mania is bliss.
A bit more mania causes urgency. Something needs to be done, and you need to do it. What was a general sense of happiness, quickly becomes an overwhelming urge to satiate. Nothing satisfies completely. If that was good, then doing it twice would be better. You quickly rip through all the things that bring joy - sex, drugs, shopping, hobbies, writing, drawing, singing, dancing - and still desire more. More pleasure, more fun, more entertaining. Bigger, bolder, better.
That urgency soon develops into responsibility. You have been gifted with superhuman strength, drive, and understanding. The well of energy becomes a nuclear bomb, and you are required to put that to good use. It is an obligation, your appointed task from God to change the world, to test the bounds of reality. What was a tune in your head, becomes a symphony that must be written, produced, and performed for millions. What was an experiment, becomes the single most important discovery of the century, and you must quickly get that theory published for the sake of mankind. What was a blissful high, becomes a dizzying delusion.
Still the mania can climb, and from those heights the fall can be nasty. Sleep becomes a distant memory, or a constant state of existance. The whole of reality seems pliable, a dream world where you are in complete control. With that control come the responsiblity to do something, and you mind spins with the potential steps. So many thought race through your mind that there isn't room for a cohesive plan, a short term memory, or a thought of consequence. The casualties pile up all around you as you sacrifice your friends, family, and self for your appointed task. It would be unbecoming of a prophet, a messenger of this amazing knowledge, to worry about worldy issues. You are working on the realm of the Lord, you can work miracles.
A little higher up the hill and your body begins to give. The stress of the climb, the increased heart rate, lack of sleep and food, and constant indulgences take their toll. None the less, the mania pushes on, a constant source of adreneline. No longer a well of energy, it is a run away stallion dragging you face down through the gravel. You can't sit, can't relax, can't catch your breath. When you speak, your words fight to get out, often coming before the last one was finished. A conversation is impossible, all you can do is rant. It takes to long to listen to somebody else speak, and you are thinking twenty times faster than anybody else. But with that speed, you sacrifice accuracy, and you become accidentally destructive.
The atmosphere thins out soon, and you can't survive much higher. This is the place I've never been, and hope never to go. Provided you haven't killed yourself in some delusional stunt, it is hard to say which will happen first, a stroke or a heart attack. One of the two is inevidable if the mania does not subside. You are human, despite what you think, and your poor body can only take so much for so long. Mania does kill, straight and simple, and at some point you have to recognize that you are on the rocket ship, and get off.
Hopefully the burners on this rocket burn out before you get this high. If your body doesn't naturally stop, the doctors have one treatment, and only one treatment, a throwback from the black and white science fiction thrillers : Electroshock. A course of electroshock therapy, with all the nasty side effects, is the only known way of stopping a manic episode once it has begun. The kind doctors inject you with drugs to paralyze your body, so you don't convulse and bite your tounge and such, and then run electrical currents through your brain. The create a series of seizures activity in your brain that "reset" it back to normal, a sort of reboot for your moods.
Of course, once you are all the way up here, when you fall, you fall hard. The next step, after a nice strong manic swing, is the pit of depression. And the depression is usually lower than the manic was high.