Upside down

I had promised myself a relaxing evening of leisure in front of the box this evening. I just got a text from Matt that read "I bet you £100 you are not watching telly".

Well, he's right, I'm in front of my computer; but, I'm not working. After watching the first part of Stephen Fry's The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive I have been self-diagnosing Bipolar Disorder - what a great way to relax!

It's no revelation, but it's a reminder. A family history of manic depression runs through my family like a sprinter on steroids. It still plays a huge part in the life of a close relative. I try not to dwell on it, but I know I'm at risk. It's not only family history, it's also personal experience.
I've had one serious episode of "mania" and lots of little ones when I was a teenager. At the time it seemed perfectly reasonable. It was everyone else in the world who couldn't see the danger, I was completely sound of mind and right to be petrified of the impending nuclear war that would finish us all off. Or the AIDS that would finish me off (a regular preoccupation in spite of my sensible and, dare I say it, conservative, sexual exploits during my university years).

But the big one started in early November, 1997. Looking back, I was already teetering on the verge of something. I was unhappy in my job, which hadn't turned out to be everything I thought it would be, and unhappy in my relationship, which had. I'd been getting increasingly and compulsively superstitious about everything and anything (if I don't blink before the bus comes I'll make it into work alive, etc) and reading hugely significant meaning into anything that crossed my path (including mice, read on).

We were on our way to Oxford with friends who had moved up there from London. During the drive, we saw a man (?) in a full clown costume behind the wheel of a car we'd just overtaken. I don't like clowns at the best of times, but in my fragile mental state, I took this to be a sign that something awful and devastating was about to happen.

Miraculously, we walked away from the car journey alive, but that evening at our friend's new house, a news item came up about the crisis in Iraq. Our friends, who always looked on the bright side, proceeded to tell us some bibble about Nostradamus (my late Grandma's guru) and how this latest brinkmanship would probably result in World War 3. I felt a dark cloud descend upon me (as you would) but it didn't dissipate for the rest of the evening. Or for the next three months. I literally felt like I'd just been handed a death sentence.

I wandered around during those three months in a daze. What started as a weird day full of doom and gloom (followed by the first train home to London in the morning to get out of my friend's haunted house - I wasn't well), developed into a full-blown manic episode. It's all a bit blurry, but I remember it got so bad that I hastily arranged a week off work because a mouse ran out from behind the toilet - a clear signal that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse were saddling up. (The new shower curtain we'd erected was definitely going to kick-start the End Times). I rang the doctor to make an appointment, during which I'd decided to tell him we were all going to die and beg for drugs to ease the forthcoming pain, but cancelled at the last minute to take a train back to Yorkshire, thus escaping the blast wind.

I vividly remember a trip to the Aquarium where I had to puke in the toilet because I got so upset about not being able to hear the three minute warning that far underground. There was a lot of puking.

Looking back in my diary you'd never know. I went to gigs and parties and pre-Christmas business lunches and although I was distracted and had constant anxiety attacks, I did function relatively normally, if only on the outside. I don't even know if my then-boyfriend and flatmates were suspicious (you'd have to ask Minks).

It might sound funny now, it might sound scary or ridiculous, even. I certainly sound like a nutter. But at the time it was real and it was awful and I lived on the edge for weeks. It ended abruptly when I met Matt and realised that there were more pressing matters in my life to attend to than thermo nuclear bomb shelters.

Since the big one, I've had mini episodes (September the 11th sparked a medium sized one, but I doubt I was alone there) but nothing too heavy. I do feel concern for the future, though. I worried a little bit about my vulnerability in terms of post natal depression. I believe I got away with that one (unless Eliott being a round-the-clock screamer was a figment of my exhausted and sleep-deprived imagination).

I definitely live my life in a series of mini manias. The ups kick-in with every accepted commission, every complement, every tiny triumph. I pelt around the house in a state of near hysteria (last Friday morning I'd pitched three ideas, done an interview, cleaned out a pan cupboard, fed and watered my child, gone through a set of client amends with an agency, had a bath and spoken to a National newspaper editor - all before 10am) but the downs smack me in the face weekly, sometimes daily. My mood can turn on the whiff of what I perceive to be someone else's negative opinion of me or what I've done. I frequently decide my work is rubbish (at other times I am a literary genius) or what I've said to someone was the wrong thing to say and now they hate me for it. It's a feeling, a bad feeling. A sinking of the heart, a pain in the chest - a glimpse into that other world. That dark place where I hurl in unfamiliar toilet bowls because I don't have the energy, strength or courage to face up to the real problems in my life.

I loved the Stephen Fry film because I identified with him so much. It's this (undiagnosed) bipolarity that drives me on, it controls my personality - but it also controls my creativity and my successes.

But I do worry about having another "big one". A close relative of mine had a big one when he was a teenager. Now his life has been overtaken by manic depression and I don't want to end up like that. I like to think that mine was a symptom of unhappy life circumstances and it's normal to feel like the world is about to end when there's so much conflict across the globe, yadda yadda. I can talk myself out of it, but I know deep down that I went a bit mad.

And now you do too.