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[Author’s Note: As part of the #BareYourMind campaign, here’s a story of my experience being bipolar. If you struggle with mental illness, I encourage you to share your stories as well. Let’s work together to de-stigmatize mental health in our society by giving it a human face.]
Continued from Part 3…
I was tripping my face off with mania so hard that I almost missed my train stop. If I wasn’t on such a self-important mission to confirm my greatness to the universe, I very well might have continued riding in a loop for God knows how long. But I had to get to my car, because the Sand Flats were calling me.
The Sand Flats were an abandoned sand quarry. It was a tortured landscape slowly being taken back by nature. My friends and I had discovered it years before, right after high school spat us out into the world. It was a place of sanctuary and escape for us, a group of misfits who had never found our place in the Darwinian experiment of the public school system.
We had, however, found each other. We had bonded over our shared misfit-hood. Once we had stumbled upon it, we came to believe the Sand Flats reflected us with its very geography. Like us, it had been rejected. It had become our adoptive homeland, and we were its last admirers.
Now I found myself in my car as if I had miraculously teleported from the subway to the driver’s seat. Every song on the radio spoke to my grandeur, the aching beauty of my existence. I wept uncontrollably as I contemplated my unique significance in the history of the world.
When I pulled into the parking lot of a nearby college campus, the sun was setting. The conflagration of my imagination considered the flaming horizon an echo of my inner turmoil, and my crying intensified. There were two ways to get to the Sand Flats: through a twisting, hilly set of paths through a dark wood, or a straight shot down the edge of a busy road. I chose the road. It was the less strenuous way, and besides, the woods would be full of terrors generated by my fevered brain. In hindsight, I consider what people driving past would have seen: a grown man, weeping and laughing uncontrollably, walking down the shoulder of the road.
Finally, I reached the small hill that had to be ascended to reach the Sand Flats. I lurched up the face at a run. From there, I quickly found myself on all fours, scrambling in the dirt. But the struggle was worth it. I crested the hill, breathing raggedly from the effort. Before me was my reward: an expanse of desolate beauty. The light of the setting sun cast a bloody glow across a stark landscape punctuated by broken hillocks covered with weeds and tall wild grasses.
I laughed and gave a great bellow of triumph as I lifted my fists to the sky, Rocky Balboa-style. I tilted my head back and laughed at the first stars blinking into existence above me. Then, I sat down, and contemplated my own splendor. I thought about people admiring me. There were faces in my mind of those who had formerly been my tormentors and detractors: high school bullies, constantly critical bosses, women who had turned me down. They had all missed the point of me, and had therefore missed out on my glory.
There was, of course, a bitter irony that was lost on me in the depths of my illness: the people granting me their favor were all imaginary. I was like a traveler somehow mistaking my map for the actual land through which I traveled. Not to mention I was forgetting the wife, daughter, and unborn child who were waiting for me to come home from work.
Hours passed, and still I sat. My body was motionless but my mind was streaking uncontrollably through an infinite cosmos of possibilities. It all seemed so wondrous to me, but little did I know that soon I would see it as monstrous.
Then, my cellphone began to ring in my pocket.
Continued in Part 5…
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The post The Incredible Electrified Man (Part 4) appeared first on The Good Men Project.
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