Today I am restless, moody, bored. I would like to get in the car and head out across the country. I would like to smash something. I would like to crawl out of my skin and into a new life. This is one phase of my bipolar disorder-the restless one. It’s the mood that has made me move more than twenty-five times in my life, and has taken me to jobs as disparate as selling vacuum cleaners to teaching creative writing at a university. Give me a new challenge and I can rise to the occasion with unlimited energy, optimism, and creativity. At Cooper Union art school at nineteen, I took Benzedrine and drank coffee, skinny as a rail, roller-skating on the streets of New York or walking barefoot on hot days to do the gallery scene. I stayed up all night to build sound and light machines, talked endlessly out loud to friends, or to myself--my head filled with infinite solutions to problems from the minute to the monumental. Then the crash would come, the fall into a gray sticky gum of immobility. Mind shut down, limbs refusing to move, the ennui of nothingness would settle over me. Flat, meaningless existence, hardly bearable. Days, weeks, or months hiding in my room, living out of my bed. No reason in the universe to get out of it.. ..I was finally diagnosed as bipolar in my late forties when I was going through a hellish menopause. Wow, I thought, this explains so many things, like the two personal bankruptcies I had gone through because of business failures. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to run those businesses. I was capable enough, but running a business stimulated my hypomania, and that stimulated my unreasonable optimism and belief that I could do anything. I was capable of seeing only the upside, never the down, and so I was always expanding and adding new products and projects and never put any money away for that rainy day I knew would never come.
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