I have Bipolar I disorder. This is a mood disorder characterized by periods of mania and depression. In my 20s, when I was first diagnosed, I had plenty of manic episodes mixed in with depressive ones. In my thirties and forties, I’ve been one big raincloud of depression with only a couple of bright spots. We’ve been tackling my bipolar depression for years and I’ve just been in a weird form of stasis–not getting better, but not getting worse, yet staying depressed all the while.

During my manic episodes, I was incredibly creative. I had about 1,000 ideas in my head brewing all at once. I sat down at the computer, typed and typed, and wrote things very quickly (like an entire musical in a month!). I had an incredible mind and incredible productivity to go with it.

The same thing was for reading. I was voracious. I could read novel after novel without issue and actually retain what I read.

But around the age of 28 or so, the mania that came and went didn’t appear again. I would maybe have moments that would suggest I was about to go into a manic episode, but we always nipped that in the bud with therapy and medication adjustments. Treating my depression has been much harder.

For years I struggled with coming up with ideas. I stopped being able to concentrate on reading. This for certain interfered with me getting my graduate degree, because I struggled with writing and keeping up with assigned readings (which I sometimes skimmed or read summaries of just to survive. Not good). I also screwed over a critique partner by not giving her feedback on her chapters until the night before the term ended.

I remember the first day of my first residency, one of the upperclassmen asked me what my thesis was going to be about, and I said, “I don’t really know. Maybe a fairytale retelling?” And she shot me such a look, I shriveled up a little. She said in warning, “You really need to figure out what you want to write. You don’t have time.” And she was right.

I wasted two semesters trying to write a Beauty and the Beast retelling, and then I started watching anime like Fullmetal Alchemist and the story warped into what would be The Name and the Key (thesis version). I rewrote that thesis maybe eight or nine times, especially the beginning. I just didn’t know what I was doing.

Somehow I graduated with my degree and my thesis passed. Somehow there were little nuggets of brilliance in there. But it was so, so hard to pull off.

Since graduate school, I’ve never quite been able to get back to my manic reading and writing days. I write very slowly now. Ideas just don’t come to me like they used to (in fact, I hardly have any at all). Reading takes so much effort and if I can’t concentrate on fiction or nonfiction, I’ll just switch over to manga because that’s all my brain can handle. And even then, sometimes I have to slow down with that!

I genuinely miss my mania. I don’t know if there’s science to back up the overabundance of creative juices flowing when I was manic, but I just did a cursory search and this article says that “research indicates a possible correlation between bipolar disorder and enhanced creativity, though findings vary across studies.” This means that there’s no conclusive evidence for it. But I feel in my gut, and based on my memories, that I was far more creative and productive when I was in a manic state. I felt like I could take on the world.

However, writing in a manic state has some issues. Sometimes the writing lacks coherency or things don’t make sense (like my ending to Melancholia, where everything was supposed to be a hallucination. Yikes, what a bad way to wrap things up). Sometimes the writing can be just as rushed and frenzied as the brain.

I do think I am a better writer (though not a better reader) now that I am more stable despite my long-lasting depressive state. Though my pace has slowed to a snail’s, the writing is strong, coherent, and expressive. My plots, though they’re hard for me to plan, make sense and are satisfying. My characterization is good. So, I have a lot of nice things to conclude about the writing I do versus the writing I did then, which, in hindsight, was not good enough. My craft has certainly grown since then and I’m so glad I never published anything from the manic era.

Although I am overall grateful to be where I am, sometimes I look back and feel a little twinge of sadness for my past self. I envy the bravery in writing, the ability to not care what people think, the speed in which I wrote, and the amount of ideas flowing through my brain.

I was talking about this with my mother this morning, and she said something hopeful about it: “The creativity, the ideas are still there. What’s changed is your ability to extract them.” This makes it seem like I don’t have a mountain to climb; that somehow I might be able to figure out a solution to my slowness and lack of ideas.

I certainly hope so. I want to be a writer for the rest of my life, and continue to be published despite my bipolar diagnosis.

Being diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder changed my life forever. The illness ate my twenties and was completely destructive. I never want to be like that again. So, I’m happy to be where I’m at now, despite the gems in my past. Maybe someday I’ll be able to be overflowing with ideas and concepts, and more productive, without having to succumb to my illness.

I remain optimistic.