Once, during a therapy session, I was talking through a recent experience with Dr. A. There was a pause on her end. Not the intentional kind, when a good therapist wants to allows space for a feeling to come to surface or for a new insight to sink in; but rather the pause of a response withheld. Dr. A seemed accordingly hesitant: “I don’t normally like to do this…to put people into categories, but…”. My brain: “I can handle it Doc, just tell me – it can’t be any worse than the diagnoses of my inner critic over the years”. Dr. A pulled out her pocketbook of neuro-divergences. “It sounds like…you’re presenting some of the symptoms of hypo-mania – but not outright mania, certainly not that!”. Brain: “well I could have told you that, albeit with different words perhaps – got anything new for me Doc?”. Dr. A goes through the list of symptoms, asking me questions and nodding slowly. She reaches the end of the page: “actually, your symptoms do qualify as mania”.
I am familiar with my ‘manic episodes’. I do not believe that they come anything close to what people suffering with bipolars disorder experience. I do not spend all of my money or stay up all night in my mania. During my episodes, which can last a few hours or a few weeks, I tend to work a lot of hours throughout the weekdays and weekend, run a lot of miles twice a day, have difficulty falling and staying asleep, eat too little, eat a little too cleanly, talk quickly, interrupt more aggressively, listen less. It can manifest in one or both of the following mental states: a) an intoxicating senes of godliness which feels euphoric but is highly unstable and b) a very uncomfortable agitation, as though I have more energy than I could ever use up.
I did say that this pseudo-diagnosis was not news to me, although the clinical term was. What this definition did change for me was the following:
a) once this condition was named explicitly by a professional, albeit informally, I could recognize this transient mental state as just that – a temporary collection of thoughts, feelings and physical sensations. I could see that it does not mean that there is anything I am inherently lacking, or any real energy I need to run off. I understood that it was merely a state of high-mental energy that needed to be assuaged and deescalated. Which brings me to …
b) the insight that ‘using up the energy’ would not deescalate my manic state. Quite the opposite. It would feed the fire and build the momentum of the state. What I needed to do was not to speed up and get busy to ‘run off some steam’, as had been my intuition, but to slow down and do less.
While close friends and my mother might gently express concern during these episodes, suggesting that I “go easy on myself” and “don’t get injured again”, alarm bells were never raised, because from the outside, my behaviour suggests that I am “seizing the day”, “highly motivated” or “hyper-productive”.
‘Type A syndrome’ (TAS) is an ill-defined term. In fact, I don’t believe that it’s a term at all. It is not usually pathologized as I hazard to do here, and is more often used to describe a personality trait, one generally considered beneficial at that. My point in this ‘Part I’ of a series of posts on my experiences and resulting thoughts on TAS is not to claim that it is equivalent to mania. My point is that they share many problematic symptoms, which are glorified in a society obsessed with hyper-productivity. My point, is that hyper-productivity is not necessarily reflective of a happy and well-balanced individual, but can in fact reflect the opposite: someone with cracks in their soul grasping at outward achievement with a desperate, undying, but ultimately misguided hope that it will fill them up and make them feel alright.
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