On being Cyclothymic

A Flight of Ideas: On Being Cyclothymic

by Brian Cameron Taylor

I am Cyclothymic. I have Cyclothymia, also known as Bipolar III. This brain disorder has been in effect since birth and has in common with the other types of Bipolar, altered stages of operation ranging from depression to mania. With Cyclothymia, the experience of this range is “watered down” or less extreme, with fewer or weaker “crazy manic phases” and fewer or weaker “crippling depressive phases” but, also with fewer or weaker “normal phases” because “hypomania is ongoing or constant.” Hypomania is the inexhaustible well from which I draw every great and terrible thing I do. Depression defines the physical limitations of my body to drink from this well.

The Flight of Ideas is just what it sounds like, ideas flying around in my mind. It is the opposite of “thinking nothing” which is something I’ve not ever been able to understand. Sometimes, your partner is staring off into space and you say, “What are you thinking about?” They answer, “Nothing.” But I can’t imagine what that is like. To me, “nothing” means “nothing important,” or “nothing worth mentioning.” But it’s always “something.” Even if I hypnotize myself, (I learned how to hypnotize) I am still “the one doing the hypnosis on myself.” If I imagine the grey concrete staircase going down, down the long, never ending concrete staircase, I step, down, down, foot after foot, down the grey staircase deeper… All these things are in my head, probably with an ongoing quiet narration and critique beside. (It’s always my voice in my head, but an ongoing argument between two, three or four “operators.” These “operators” are not different persons or personalities, they are all just me, but they communicate via separating their voices. As in, “Why would YOU think that? Because I AM the one who first had the idea. Yeah, but YOU….” Literally arguing with myself, often over “nothing.”) Even if I am drifting off to sleep and not actively thinking anything other than the mantra I’ve been repeating to myself silently for thirty years (the Lord’s Prayer,) my ideas bubble up, triggering some reference in my brain that requires my attention. Even if that thing bubbling up is nonsensical, it might require that I be surprised, or amused or horrified. This does not cease, I think even when I’m asleep, but I can’t really comment on sleep more than to say I’m terrible at it. 

My flight of ideas is non-stop but I am taciturn by nature and training, patient by training and practice and now, at 53 years of age, experienced. I’m also a writer, philosopher, musician and filmmaker. I’m a creative person who can channel all this energy into art. I’m also well loved and respected by my friends and family. I have the support of the world and am fortunate. I wish I could feel gratitude properly. I try to be grateful. I have issues with processing feelings. My point is, I have multiple outlets for all my cyclothymia, good and bad. Many people with problems like mine don’t have all the tools and resources I have. Those are the people who are really suffering. Sure, I suffer, but for the most part, I’m a productive person doing what he wants. For this I know I’m grateful, even if I can’t understand it properly. 

People with cyclothymia can produce a mad amount of work. They throw themselves completely into the things they undertake, but they also might suddenly flake out or quit because they have already found something new to throw themselves into. So they suddenly quit secure jobs, leave partners or end their own lives. Choices are a problem for the cyclothymic. Bad choosing should be postponed, not commented upon, undecided. So maybe the taciturn nature of my quietude, my noticing of this flakiness in my twenties, dressing like a rap star, doing cocaine, quitting  my job and failing to end my life leads to a decision to “sleep on it.” I have said, “let me sleep on it,” every time I could, to delay a choice I felt unable to make, since then. I am taciturn because if I don’t say anything I can’t say something crazy. I am just fortunate that the world has mistaken my disorder as contemplation, my experiences as ordinary experimentation. 

My mother knew I was cyclothymic and I think she was as well. I think this because the “crazy” behaviour I noticed in her is now coming out of me. Yes, it is true that in parts we are all going to “turn into our parents” but these things are habituated, learned. A disorder is a disorder. Mom trained me to deal with this disorder by teaching me how to be still and quiet. She did this by harping at me as I grew up. Sit still, don’t fidget, leave that alone. Why did you say that? What were you thinking? If you don’t want to be taken for a fool don’t say foolish things! This probably sounds pretty normal, and I think for the most part it is. Most parents want their kids to learn to get along with the world. As a kid I didn’t think much of it, until I got to school and realized nobody was sitting still, nobody was stopping themselves from acting a fool. 

In school I noticed that I was “not wild and crazy” like “all the other kids” and that their energy, unobserved in my family, charged me up like a lightbulb. If the kids were happy, I was happy. If the kids were naughty, I was naughty. If the kids were mean, I was mean. I immediately began acting out. I hadn’t yet learned that what Mom was teaching me wasn’t just for when I’m at home, but tools for life in the world full of other people. “Other people, for the most part, are idiots and assholes. You have to be better than they are by behaving better than they do.” This was my Mother’s way of saying, “If Timmy jumped off a bridge, would you too?” It also illustrates a kind of logic that planted a seed in my mind.

My family moved a lot because my Dad had a lot of different jobs until he became a crane operator, then we moved to wherever large construction projects were. We moved sixteen times in the first twelve years of my life. Sometimes we moved house within the same town. As a kid I understood needing to move to a new town for Dad’s job but I never knew why we would live in three different houses in the same town. I still don’t, but then again, I wasn’t the one making the choices of rentals… I do remember that we were “barely hanging on by our fingernails,” yet sometimes Dad would come home from work with a new truck, a new home stereo and a motorcycle for me for my sixth birthday. I became adept at the hobbies of the loner, reading, motorcycle riding and listening to music. I liked to sing and dance. I used my moms’ knitting needles to drum on the couch to Boney M. I started playing guitar… I dyed and permed my hair… I kissed a girl and I liked it…

I cried a lot. I was lonely, scared. Sad for no reason. I had bad dreams. I had hallucinations at night. I said strange things and people thought I was weird. Weird people thought I was interesting, so I started hanging out with them. I became self-absorbed, needy. I was picked on and bullied, I sometimes fought back, sometimes just took punches. As a teen I realised my Mom behaved “in ways I was not going allow myself to behave” and put my back up, furrowed my brow and harnessed an anger I didn’t know was there. The world would not break me as it had her! (It has.) Interestingly, now I can see that while I was deciding not to be like my mom in her actions, I was enacting the behaviours of my dad at the time, being unkind to partners. This would have been a double whammy for my mom, losing her partner at the time and then having her son be like, “Well Mom, maybe if you weren’t such a bitch!” I never got to apologize for this before she died, because I have only just recently realized my guilt. But then again, I have said so many horrible things to so many undeserving people. 

Sadness and Anger envelop me for extended periods of time. I have had to excuse myself from society several times. Joy and Creativity envelop me too, and perhaps then I am just as insufferable, but in a different, annoying way. “Yeah, yeah, Brian. All your ideas are great and everyone can’t wait to hear the next…” I get that. That’s why I became a writer. A writer can go back over his work, edit, clarify and de-embarrass himself. A musician has songs to sing, it’s like a formula to follow. A filmmaker has complete control over every aspect of the film an audience views. I know I have to be very careful “live and in-person” because a.) God knows what I’m going to say and b.) see a. I am fortunate that I’m intelligent and other than when faced with my baser instincts, the “things that I say” fall into the category of finer, rather than coarser. (When I was a younger, hornier man I got into all kinds of trouble.) My incessant drive to experience, already something dangerous for a social being made worse by being a loner, leads to mountain climbing, sex and drugs. As I boy I had heard about it from Jim Morrison and read about it in counter culture. (What twelve year old reads Castaneda or the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?) (Answer: Brian set loose in local libraries of BC in 1984.) Now in my teens I was striking out to make my own marks in this enterprise of exploration. Thus, I’ve had to overcome habits, repeatedly. It’s ongoing. “I used to do drugs. I still do. But I used to too.” In fairness, my drug use has hurt a lot of people. I think it’s amazing that the world didn’t kill me from age 10 to 20, while I was literally taking every opportunity that came my way to experience as much as possible. From 20 to 30 it was amazing I didn’t kill myself. From 30 until 50 the world was lucky I didn’t destroy it…

For a while, as an adult, although I knew I was “depressed” and seemed to be also “anxious” I thought perhaps only then an “asshole” and not an “addict.” Certain drugs worked neglibly, some not at all. Others worked magnificently, too well… I certainly wasn’t, in my younger years, capable of insight enough to say it was the illness talking, not I. I just thought I was a bit of a jerk and a genius. I drink. I do drugs. I go to work. There is no problem. I can stay up all night writing and drinking. Get three hours sleep and go make Pizzas at Dominos. I did. 

As a kid, when I first started writing, it was fiction or commentary. (When assigned, “what did you do on summer vacation?” I would tell a detailed story of one particular, standout moment of the summer, rather than a summary.) Then, as horny teen, poetry and song. (And writing music, on guitar or piano.) All of this would just come out. No effort required. But I also only created it when it was time to create it. I had no drive to do these things beyond merely being able to. They were just more experiences to be had. Once I had learned how to do something, I could move on to the next experience. This is the advantage of the loner. He can “roam around at his whim.” I would learn how to play and work well with others by making an effort to only speak when having something clever to say. I would later learn that doing this feels good and I amuse myself constantly. As a teen I played baseball, hockey, rugby, none of them well, but I contributed. As a teen I started playing in bands with friends that I still do to this day. From working together I know I can work together. 

When I went to college, I quit, but before I did I fell in love with philosophy, in particular logic. The idea that we can quantify words and ideas as being more or less true meant that it would be possible for me to not have to bring emotion into meaning. I had noticed that when I argued with my girlfriend that she always presupposed what I was reasoning. “You just think that because your mother…” When I removed the presupposition from her argument, we would at least be getting rid of an untruth or an irrelevancy. I never lost an argument because my girlfriend couldn’t even understand what I was saying. This is not a comment upon her intelligence but rather my disorder. The point is, although I could tell that “something was up” with my “self” or my “personality” that was very different from other peoples, I didn’t know what it was. Maybe I was just Spock-like? Operating on a different level, where ‘different’ means superior?

The girlfriend became the mother of my children. Our first born was the direct result of “choosing to quit college, get jobs and start a family.” It was not a question of getting pregnant then making the choice. That decision took place in my head at one specific instant after watching the film Parenthood with my girlfriend at college. For my girlfriend, the series of events that led to ‘her getting pregnant,’ months later, after having quit school, moved towns, got jobs, etcetera would be described as multiple different choices, unfolding in time. In the unfolding of the logic of these two different “truths” is illustrated the difference between my point of view and the not my point of view shared by the world, if not my girlfriend: There are not different truths. There are only misunderstandings of the truth. Results are truth. The words in this paragraph describe the unfolding of events in time in reality. The logic is inarguable. In my mind, one moment, one memory, a choice, crystal clear after a forgetful movie, instantly changing the lives of multiple people, cascading outwardly into time. If you don’t believe me, ask my grandson.

Logic and learning to use it (I am a logician) helps me make sense of the world. It can’t help me with my screwed up emotions but it can help me navigate the world, in spite of them. So I do things like cry for no reason during a non-emotional part of the song in such a way that I know I must then change it. Or I write a philosophical essay that I myself can barely comprehend, just because it seems to be there, true. Or I say something cutting to you because you're a Trump supporter and that ends the friendship you thought you had with me. Or I say “Why aren’t you wearing those shoes that lifted your butt up so nice?” to a coworker. It’s just a math equation to me. Shoes plus butt up equals nice. (Apologies, this one is from my younger days.) It’s not that I’m a jerk, (although that’s what I thought it was, perhaps seasoned with “astonishing outspokenness",) it turns out that it’s disorder. When I was in my 20s and working with others, I would casually tell them anything about my private life, with complete candour and honesty. I became aware that if I have a “filter” it is at least faulty. I had to learn to shut up even further when encouraged to share. 

Logic helps me externally, with the world. I can’t make use of it internally or rather, I can only make as much use as I have will power. For instance, alcohol makes me feel instantly good. It’s Joy Juice. Stopping drinking was very difficult, but I did it. Since I quit drinking, I get no Joy Juice. So I experience less joy. This is the logic of it. That logic is a bummer, but it’s 100% accurate. Also since I quit drinking, I have felt the negative long term effects of drinking leave my body and mind. I’m much less angry overall. I feel much more physically fit, less poisoned. This poisoning was from Joy Juice. You can’t notice the poisoning until you get all the poison out of your system and you feel so much better. That poisoning was the opposite of joy. This means I’m currently not actually experiencing less joy than when I was drinking, simply spreading that joy out over the all-time I’m not drinking. I know all this to be true and logically sound, yet I still struggle to think of drink as poison and not Joy Juice. Feelings get in the way. Wrong thinking. Instant gratification trumps long term vision… Yeah, yeah. We know… Around and around we go.

Sometimes I win my struggles. When I complete a project, a recording, a film, an essay, a book, but also the painting of the house, finding a new car, making a new musician friend. Sometimes I lose my struggles, my relationships with all my loved ones are strained, I’m a lot to live with and “a bit more than normal to work with.” I’m completely absent from your life if you’re not invested in mine. (The friend/Dad who never calls, but sends you nothing but love.) I’m quite the hermit. I often get on a stage and make noise, but then I pack up and go home. I produce an amazing amount of content. Think about quantity for a moment: In the last fifteen years I’ve written nine books, produced about 50 original song recordings, made two feature films and several shorts, music videos AND was the sole marketeer of all this content, able to publish all to a worldwide market, (to limited success,) while holding down a full time job. Now, that’s quite a bit, but all that released content is the tip of the iceberg of what I produced, it’s just “the good stuff.” It is probably ten to twenty percent of the content I actually start and don’t finish. On the go for me right now are: My third Studious B album, brainstorming a new feature film project, writing my autobiography, writing a sci-fi novel, doing active philosophy through my Ai company Eliaison Ai and publishing that philosophy in a new book. Still, every day, my brain announces multiple times a day, "Hey, what about a monologue-like play, where you tell your life story, ala Monster in a Box?” “Hey! Informational Platonism is groundbreaking and going to shake Social Physics to the core! Get on it. Hey!!” “Eat the Pizza! Eat the Pizza! Eat the Pizza!” (Sorry, I don’t know how that got in there.)

I’m often Ant-Social and I’m sometimes Hyper-Social. Since I’ve quit drinking, I’ve had to increase my acting, meaning I have to “put a smile on my face, get out there and shoot the shit.” Frankly, the world is lucky that I’m anti-confrontation, despite my political rants. I really can’t handle confrontation in the name of what I think is stupid. Like anyone who claims to be “anti-woke.” I have to completely avoid these people, because I will constantly be tearing them a new asshole, until we’re both in tears and having gotten nowhere. (Read my essays instead.) If you are my friend, or you were my friend until I tore you a new asshole, I’m sorry, but you’re still an idiot, regardless of my disorder. My disorder just seems to make it impossible for me not to get excited in the face of stupidity. I blame my mother. (This is a joke for Psychiatrists and those who love them.) If you have been hurt by me for any reason, I apologize. 

In two and half years I wasted $60000 in the stock market, day trading stock every morning. Why did I keep at it until the money was gone? Am I stupid for doing this? I must be stupid in some way. This was a choice and a continued choosing for over two years. Is this delusion? This is another opportunity to separate and include the me from the disorder. I am it and it is me. I too am an idiot in some ways. I am extremely stubborn, or perhaps willful. I choose to draw strength from this stubbornness by trying to experience it as willpower. I know that my will can help me accomplish an amazing amount of creative work, if nothing else.  

I seek attention and am charismatic while also irritable and withdrawn. I love and loathe myself. I have done great and terrible things. I’m so lonely and I just want you to call me but when you do I will get a lump in my throat and not answer. Then I will feel bad about that. Being my partner, friend or teammate is going to require extra effort from both of us. I am trying to harness the energy of the mania to do good in the world, via my writing in every form it takes. I am trying to fight off depression by shedding unhealthy habits and strengthening the body. I have removed myself from the stress of everyday life to live the creative life of the mind. I feel much better than I ever have. The world is still a fucking mess. I will continue to try to help it in the ways that I am able, for whatever that is worth. I do so only because I believe a person’s purpose is illustrated by their work over their lifetime. It’s not necessary that I am real, in whole or in part, to write these words, but rather that the words are made real by your reading them just now, that proves I once was. 

Nowadays, my flight of ideas is like a babbling stream that murmurs past my cabin. I can go out to that stream and fish out treasures, if I want to. And there are days where I have a really stupid idea shouting loudly for my attention, like “Buy some whiskey!” But I can also remember I have a strong will, that my health will only suffer if I drink, yadda yadda… All the cliches are cliches because they’re true. Being any type of bipolar is a major consideration for life operations, for you and other operators. I’m still in the discovery stage of diagnosis, but in a way, we’re all in a constant state of discovery. What I have learned in the last few years is that I have no business saying anything is factual to anyone else, ever. I have no idea if my thoughts or feelings are legitimate, good, right or true. By delaying choice, sleeping on it, and focusing my “babbling stream” into a narrow pipeline, I can both destroy and create. If I keep myself healthy and focused on healthy goals in work, in play and in my relationships, I can continue to improve the great things I do and lessen the terrible. You can too I suspect, you needn’t be disordered to require order.