How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia

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Of all the delusions that mania conjures, I find one is more enabling. I feel I remember everything. At any point, memory is at best a collection of fact and some fiction, but when I am manic, even my inventions start to seem persuasive. A psychotic subject is first an unreliable narrator. Though modern thought dictates that truth is relative, depression, which invariably follows a manic spell, leaves me lumbering with guilt. I know I have lied. I have professed undying love that I never felt. I have exaggerated my pain, and accused family and friends of crimes they had never committed. Honesty is my punishment, and so each time my life is disrupted, I keep a diary. Keeping a record, I find, makes remembering less treacherous.
I was facilitating a writing workshop in 2007 when mania first made me lose sleep altogether. 'If you haven't read Marquez, you have not had fun,' I told a group of eighteen- year-olds. Secretly, though, I had again begun to find solace in the Mahabharata and The Sound of Music. These were the first stories I had been told, and even though madness made linear understanding and thought untenable, it helped me identify with the protagonists. This self-importance was of course annoying, but it allowed me an immersion that, in the end, proved redemptive. By finding myself in books and films, I made sense of my condition.
I started writing this memoir six months after I had been released from a mental health institution. Lithium, therapy and the kindness of my family and friends had helped me arrive at a point where I could think without interruption. My psychoanalyst had also made a breakthrough possible. She told me, 'More than fabrication, you're prone to fantasy. The trouble with you is that you find reality boring. Trust me, it's not that bad.' Sitting across from her, twice a week, I began talking about money and food. There was suddenly more joy in the mundane than there was in Kafka. I grew averse to drama. The turbulent events of my life were best related with a smirk.