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 of those terms, or a combination, or some other etymological womb altogether, remains debatable.
There’s also room to consider the relationship between mania and maenad, as mentioned in pre-Hippocratic Greek mythology. The maenads were the female followers of Dionysus, perhaps best remembered for their role in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, unable to save Eurydice and consumed by grief, allows the maenads to rip him apart in an ecstatic frenzy. Maenads translates literally as raving ones.
The mythos of the artist being swallowed by anguish did not end with Orpheus. When I was fifteen, I tried to kill myself. It was a poor attempt, because I have always been noncommittal, but it resulted in less than a year’s worth of unhelpful counseling anyway. I don’t really blame the therapist for that; the truth is, I didn’t want to get better.