I’m now back in New Jersey. My fiery mania, inevitably, burns out and I collapse into a debilitating depression. What goes up, must come down. The other pole of Bipolar Disorder. For me, depression is very challenging to write about in an engaging way. Every time I’m depressed, my mind becomes so dull that, even when I’m not depressed and try to reflect back upon the depressions, I thought associate and emotionally resonate with that dull mind. Basically, it feels really bad to think about having been depressed, so it’s hard to write about it. The most creative way I’ve been able to describe what depression feels like when it immediately follows mania is to say, “It’s as though I’m a lion who has been reduced to a worm but is tortured by the memory of what it was like to be that lion.” That is some painful shit: Being acutely aware of how dynamic my personality was, and now I’m just a rumor of a husk of my former self. It’s an awful feeling.
:(