Non-fiction by Amy Tryphena

           
I have vivid recollections of my first manic episode. Mostly a euphoric experience, often metaphysical, even spiritual. I was out of touch with reality, but in touch with something intangible. 

Every day I was up with the birdsong, on less than four hours sleep, to aimlessly flitter around, obsessing over my own ruminations.

            Restless, yearning for adventure, I would find myself roaming, driven by my own scattergun thoughts.

             Some of those days return to me now in flashbacks.        

“Down to the beach, across old mine workings. Over to Blue Hills. The river draws me. Forging its ancient path, snaking through the bracken valley, seeking the sea. It’s conscious, talking to me through little whispers. Telling me secrets.”

            Something about my thoughts didn’t make sense, but the logical insights were fleeting.

            I would lose time, as if parts of my day had been plucked out of existence.

“Now I’m home, how did I get here? I can’t find my keys. An open window!” 

            Oblivious to the twenty-foot drop below, I scaled the wooden fence in my flip flops and squeezed myself through the little wooden window.

“I’m Wonder Woman, my phobia of heights has vanished. I can do anything, I’m so powerful. I’ve been blessed by the universe. Oops, keys were in my pocket all along.”

            Lying on my bed, counting the bumps in the artex ceiling, my mind sprinted through a myriad of thoughts, multiple conversations with itself, simultaneously running like an eight-track reel to reel. Layers upon layers of melodies. 

            My body fizzed, vibrating, like a swarm of bees rioting under my skin.

            I had been like this all week. I felt strained, over-stretched, as if running on borrowed energy.

            Looking into the bedside mirror, my eyes were like black holes, outlined by twinkling stars. A common sign of mania in bipolar disorder.

“It’s like Spaghetti Junction in my head. Maybe a glass of wine will help.”

             The need to self-medicate drove me back to the poky little kitchen to seek out a cheap screw cap bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. It tasted sour in the back of my throat. I threw the rest of the glass back anyway. I could feel tension in my muscles releasing, my mind slowed to just 2 or 3 lanes of traffic.

            Catching my eye, the pink hues of sunset, reflecting off the clouds, drew me back outside. I saw the world in a visceral light. The colours so vivid I wanted to drink them in. I used the keys, that were in my pocket all along, to unlock the door, and go barefoot, to sit outside the flat, cross legged on the moss-covered concrete steps.

            A moment of serenity allowed me to marvel at the sky. Filled with wonder at my own existence, as if I was new to this world. Euphoria rushed through my body, rose hot through my blood. A sense of profundity led my thoughts.

“I think, maybe… I am a sage? A prophet, an ancient druid priestess reincarnated. I am the universe experiencing itself.

I can feel gravity, as if it is a tangible object you can hold in your hand. I feel the strands of energy that connect me to the tides, tether me to the moon. I sense the lunar orbit, the earth revolving around the sun. The other planets are in reach too, on strands of energy, on the great web of life.

There’s more, oh, so much more. I’m riding an intergalactic highway of light. The galaxy lays before me. I am holding it all in my hands.

This is exhilarating, maybe I am a kind of inter-galactic being.”

            It seemed like a reasonable conclusion at the time.

            Back on earth, the sun had set. The moon was up and the stars I had become acquainted with blinked their way into the indigo sky.

             Life swung so wildly for me then. Two months prior to this manic episode, my existence was so untenable I had tried to die.

            Now, I was floating so high. Filled with esoteric, grandiose thoughts, in a world apart from reality.

“I must be on a sacred mission. Why else would I be able to feel an entire galaxy at my fingertips? “

            Doctors insist these experiences can be rationalised as psychosis. What if they can also be understood as a gift?

Amy Tryphena is a Cornish writer, living in West-Cornwall. She has a passion for writing short fiction, nature non-fiction, as well as her experiences with bipolar disorder. She has a blog bipolarroughguide.com and is published in Literally Stories, Close 2 the Bone and Elsewhere-Journal. You can find her on BlueSky @realkernow.bsky.social and Instagram @bipolarroughguide.