Consider the following scenario:

A person visits his doctor or psychiatrist in a state of near suicide. After probing for other possible causes of the patient’s condition, the psychiatrist concludes the culprit is clinical depression and prescribes a standard antidepressant. The pill works uncommonly fast.

Within two or three days the patient’s energy has returned, his dark mood lifts, and for one brief shining moment he knows what it’s like to feel normal, and even better than normal. His mind is racing now. He starts making grand plans. Meanwhile, his mind keeps racing.

He thinks this is just a side effect that will go away, so he takes another pill. After all, the very last thing he wants to happen is to crash back into that horrible depression of his, knowing full well that next time there may be no return.

But his racing mind refuses to stop. Instead, it cranks into an even higher gear. He cannot sleep, his heart is pounding, he is talking a mile a minute, and soon he is vividly hallucinating. “Roller coaster” is totally inadequate to describe the experience. One is not driving the brain. Rather, the brain is driving the person.

In extreme cases, the victim will rage completely out of control. In one extraordinary situation, a person on an antidepressant actually robbed a bank and was acquitted. That, my friends, is the closest modern medicine has come to a laboratory test for a psychiatric condition.

The illness is bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression. Toss an antidepressant at a person with bipolar disorder—with no mood-stabilizing medication to hold the antidepressant action at bay—and watch him flip out.

I was depressed. At the time, I had no knowledge of bipolar disorder in the family. All I talked about was my depression. All of them—my depression within a depression, my depression following a depression, my depression following the depression on top of the depression, and so on. My “ups” were what I mistook for normal behavior, so I did not feel compelled to bring them to my psychiatrist’s attention.

The ups—let’s talk about the ups for a while. We all have our moments of elation, giddiness, or bliss. This is perfectly normal, as are those days when we get up on the “right” side of bed and the world seems to spin in our direction. If someone has hit the genetic jackpot, he or she can feel something like this nearly every day, with fame and fortune and friends gravitating to him or her like iron filings to a magnet.

Other times, that intoxicating sense of elation starts escalating out of control. One may start talking fast, spending money, and engaging in inappropriate activities. Or the magic may start to wear off, as winning behavior deteriorates into crass and embarrassing caricature.

Sometimes the elation turns sour, into a dysphoric rage that makes work and social and family life hell for all concerned. To me, bipolar disorder is the equivalent of being stuck in bumper to-bumper traffic in a race car.

The world is simply too slow and people too dull-witted to accommodate you. The initial advantage over one’s fellow man inevitably gives way to frustration and occasional rage. Sure, at first you experience the exuberation of weaving in and out of traffic as you leave the world behind in your rearview mirror, but now there are more cars, all closer together, backed up for miles on end.

Your engine is revving hard, but you find yourself banging your head against the dash in utter despair because you are desperate to pop the clutch and floor it, yet all you can do is hopelessly idle and suck other people’s fumes.

Or it can be the very opposite. This time you are the one standing still. The mind, once engaged in a certain activity, finds it impossible to switch off into another one. One finds oneself staying in the shower until the water in the tank runs cold or staring off into space as if in a trance. As for getting out of bed, forget it—one is effectively bound to the mattress.

Nothing goes right in this state of time. Every rock, every tree, everything God has placed on earth has turned against me and me alone. People conspire to make my life miserable, computers find new ways to throw up error codes, numbers and their values change right before my very eyes, and being placed on hold is enough to reduce me to tears.

I hear the voices, I wake up in the strangest of places, have no idea of where I have been, what I have done, which websites I’ve visited, who I may have had conversations with, either online or on the phone, I’ve killed off in my head people who hurt me, told outrageous stories to prop my ego up and spent money like there is no more in the mint.

But then I have those time-standing-still moments—those times in the shower and under the covers. Yet time also stands still in the midst of feverish activity. When I am on a creative streak, I note, “the sun takes its leave, booming music falls mute, and the steaming hot cup of tea by my side is stone cold when I pick it up a minute later.” Walking into company in this frame of time can be an out-of world experience, for you are there, completely in your own moment, but not theirs.

So what state of time will it be today? Forget about the terms manic depression and bipolar disorder. Instead, let’s give this thing a name that truly represents its characteristics—bichronicity. Yes, I am proud to say, I am bichronic. I experience the full spectrum of time, from warp speed to standing still.

In the past, I never knew which state of time I would turn up in, day to day, minute to minute. This tended to make my life somewhat unpredictable. I’ve gone from recluse to life of the party to social embarrassment, from hyper productive to plain lazy, from being totally on top of the situation to being completely out of it.

I have tears in my eyes. I call the times when time doesn’t exist my catatonic times. I can sit there, perfectly still, not reacting to my surroundings because to me, they don’t exist. I am in a time bubble when that happens. I thought I was the only one that happened to and never mention it to my friends because sometimes I am embarrassed to ever admit, even to them, that my own perceptions of the multiverse are so profoundly skewed.

Now to my hyper phases. Especially when it comes to sexual activity. I’ve found attraction to what the world would see as weird. “I fuck like a blender on full speed when I’m in a mania!”  “I got involved with someone at work. She pursued me. Many years younger. It was just sex. Was I good? Damn I was good.  It was intense. I was a magnet for younger women. Did I love it? Yes.”

It goes on.  “When I was in a relationship, I would wear my poor partner out. To me sex was like potato chips, once you started you couldn’t stop until you ate the whole bag. I couldn’t stop until the poor girl was begging for mercy, she couldn’t go on anymore. Then I would go home and masturbate stupid.”

Of course, the depressive side was another story, and “I can’t say if it’s a worthwhile trade to have sizzling sex when you have to take the mania and depression in order to get it. My ability to alternatively fuck like blenders on full speed on one hand or be as responsive as a block of wood on the other can lead to disastrous choices in my relationships.

I think in the end we bipolars are a cultural minority. Society is made by normal people for normal people and ruled as I see it by the biggest assholes among them. Some of us are natural born heretics. I feel now for many years a vocation to found an order of people that want another life.

St. Francis of Assisi did it. Why shouldn’t I? Every time I have a couple of decent days back to back, I hope that this is the beginning of my recovery. Then something negative confronts me and I get a panic attack and head for the hills. I go right down the tubes to hopelessness and constant depression and anxiety.

There, even good things are heavily veiled in grey. No shower, no shaving, no energy, no hope. Just scared and remembering back to my childhood diagnosis of “Born Wrong.”

I’m 39, very smart, very articulate, and very personable, with a Doctorate in Philosophy. Unfortunately, the best job I can get is trying to bake cakes, and I feel lucky. My illness cannot take the demands of something more challenging, more stressful, that would place me in pressure cooker situations amongst people.

When I lose it, I admit, you don’t really want to be around me. Those who live with individuals describe the experience as akin to walking on eggs. By contrast, I compare my dealings with people to “walking on shifting boards.”

The world is far from a safe place, and the ground beneath me could collapse any second.”It’s like demons possess me. Something inside of yourself so overwhelms you that you want to change it instantly. Such as slitting your wrists, impulsive sex, alcohol, and acting out.

I describe myself as spontaneous and lively and loving until I get hurt. Then I screw up and fall apart. The irony is people with this disorder want to help so much, but the problem is I have trouble relating to people.

“Don’t believe everything you think.”

“It’s humiliating to me to have to admit that there is something wrong with me mentally … I hate living this way. I have hope that I can be fixed or healed, but how can I face the people I love and apologize for my behavior and ask for forgiveness?” It is a daily war against giving into the darkness. The impulses, and constant voices in your head saying how unworthy you are to be here, how unworthy of life, push into you.

But, each day I try to win, I try to survive, and those who have not these forces pushing them have no concept of how strong I am, we all are, for winning a war daily against things that would immobilize many of them.