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Who Am I When I’m Not Crazy?
Sometime in the muggiest autumn Bavaria has seen in years, I throw myself onto an active train track. My friends are shouting my name in worry. The Polizei are shouting in German. I have been drinking, but I am not drunk. I am eighteen. I am laughing. The scene is exactly as I’ve described, but it’s not what you’re thinking — at least, not in my mind.
“There was a shoe,” I explain, still laughing, after I’ve been pulled back up on the platform just as the train comes into sight. I hold the shoe in my hands; a single plain, black high heel. I don’t know where it came from, or what happened to the person who left it there. Maybe they jumped onto the track for a different reason.
This is just one of the many times my disorder has nearly gotten me killed. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in the midst of a manic episode — undiagnosed and untreated, and wholly not understood. It would be years before I realized I was bipolar, and longer still before I came to terms with what that meant. Largely, it meant that I could not allow myself to live the way I so desperately wanted; recklessly and unrestrained.
There is contention within the linguistics community regarding the true origin of the word mania. Its Greek roots are clear; ania means to produce great mental anguish and manos means relaxed or loose — but whether or not mania stemmed from one…