Explain what your Bipolar episodes feel like?

@skilsaw, what you wrote about my quotation was funny.

quietgirl2538 wrote:@skilsaw, what you wrote about my quotation was funny.

often a word of truth is spoken in jest.

They feel intense, like a buzzing in my bones, like my brain is on fire.

I'm animated and personable to an extent, but I'm mostly anjerknto everyone. I'm sarcastic and demanding. I get paranoid and anxious. I'm way more outgoing. More productive, don't sleep as much. It feels great until it doesn't and I get hospitalized.

I am starting to go through a hypo phase now, so maybe I can add something here. I can tell I am becoming hypo because my normal meds start to fail. Hypersexuality rushes in like a hurricane. Ideas start to boil over; I do a lot of writing, fiction, and non-fiction. I become agitated and impatient with others. But I can also be very charming and funny if I am in the right circumstances. It takes a lot of control to keep this impatient/charm in balance which is why as things get worse I avoid people.

If I don't sleep for days, which can happen, most of the hypo symptoms will go away and be replaced by paranoia. I fear to go to sleep because I suffer dreams of extreme evil (even though I don't believe in evil, it's the best way I can describe it) and wake up in that state after 10 minutes of sleep. Depersonalization and derealization are rather extreme too. Oddly, during this time I will occasionally, suddenly, feel a sense of euphoria and the physical world will start to look magical, especially lights which become intensely saturated and tend to glow at the edges.

Since I have worked most of my life trying to enact a "plan of attack" when things start to get out of hand, I tend not to go to extremes that often. My life is stress-free (again, something I have worked hard to accomplish) and I can bunker in when I need to.

In my youth, I suffered bad depression but not chronically. It's the worst thing I have ever experienced (that, and panic attacks). However, as I matured through my 20s these episodes occurred with less frequency. These days, if I do have a streak of depression it will last for two weeks and be the equivalent of someone who vegetates in front of the TV all day. However, I will not get anything done and everything I am doing at the time will seem like a futile exercise. I am very acquainted with the symptoms and tend to ride these periods out watching movies and attempting to get one or two things done a day. Sometimes I will rocket out of these states and immediately be in a hypomanic state. The change can happen over a few hours.

All of the above I learned about over three decades with a LOT of trial and error and lots of mistakes.

otter.

Depression: I'm not tired, but I just want to sleep so I can pass time without feeling this emptiness inside me. (TW) I want to self harm just to feel (end TW). I don't want to eat. I try, but I just go into the kitchen and look around and end up laying on the floor. I feel disconnected to the world and everything in it. I feel like a sad bag of numbness.

Hypomania: I want to do all the things at once, so I jump from making the "best playlist ever" on youtube to writing "the best book ever" to drawing "the best picture ever" and so on all day. I only need maybe 2-5 hours of sleep a night. God is running through my veins. There's some hypersexuality but I don't have the patience to find someone else to help with that. I will never say no if the opportunity to act on that arises. I wonder why everyone else is so slow and stupid. I think about stopping meds to intensity and keep the euphoria going, and about half the time act on that. Life feels like a party and nothing can hurt me.

Mania: I get angry that I can't physically do everything at once. My thoughts overlap, and there is no time between thinking "I should jump off the roof and break these windows and run into the woods and paint the trees and rocks and run across the ocean" and attempting to do a few of these things. When things go my way I feel the on top of the world-ness I described earlieir, and when they don't I am raging.

Mixed: It's the speed and aggression of mania combined with the feeling crappy and terrible sadness of depression. I always get suicidal during mixed episodes. If I'm going to live 5,000 years, which is what it feels like, I don't want to live another second. I really cannot talk to other people during mixed episodes because I will want to beat the s**t out of them.

Voracious, I've been hypo the last few days. Didn't realize it but it felt sooo good! Now I crashed and I'm going with the flow. I like your explanation of being hypo. That's just how I felt like this last time.