Touched With Fire

"Yes, of course," she said. "Okay, let's talk about the rest of your life. It sounds like you're also experiencing high periods. Can you tell me about those? How long do they last?"

"Days, weeks, months," I replied. "It depends."

"Can you tell me about your last episode?"

"Yeah, well, I somehow thought it would be a great idea to design, produce, film and edit an eight-hour video lecture series and a three-hundred-page meticulously-designed slideshow presentation in the space of about two weeks, proving from first principles why Einstein was wrong about-"

Shut the fuck up, my mind screamed. Shut your mouth right now. You're not allowed to say that Einstein is wrong! You're in a fucking psychologist's office, you idiot! She'll send you to a mental hospital.

"Anyway," I covered, "my father is a doctor, and he'd always chuckle when I talked about my 'spiritual fluff' as if I was just an irrational and cute little girl with fantastical creative ideas. But he was also the first person to stop what he was doing and watch that entire eight-hour video series from start to finish. That was the moment he started taking my ideas seriously instead of just chuckling and calling me 'woo woo.' So my highly rational and scientific father no longer thinks I'm full of shit, in case you were trying to figure out if I am."

The psychologist looked at me with a kind-but-neutral expression. I couldn't tell what she was thinking. I didn't like that. "It sounds like you feel very creative in these periods," she said.

"Yes," I agreed. "It's like I have with some kind of creative fever. Usually it happens when I'm coming out of the depressive phase. I'd do anything to escape that feeling of complete and utter apathy, so I just run full force into passion and get swept away in it. In the moment, I don't think about or care about the consequences.

But then, after I made that video series, I came down from the high and couldn't understand why on earth I'd just spent two weeks making a stupid video series that no one besides my parents and my sister would ever watch or care about. Y'know? Like, I have stuff to do. I have to deal with the 'practicalities of life,' and there I was making a lecture series on something I'm, quite honestly, completely ill-qualified to talk about. It just didn't make any sense, and I'd get so confused and angry at myself and slip into a dark depression again."

"And that's when you came here?" she asked.

"No," I replied. "I was in that depression for about a week, then a few days later, I was struck with another brilliant idea. After a three week frenzy, I realized I'd written a goddamn book out of nowhere. I didn't have any notes or structure or plot for it. I just opened my laptop and started typing, and a few weeks later, an entire manuscript was staring back at me. Well, almost an entire manuscript. I crashed into a depression before I could finish it. That's when I ended up here."

"It sounds like you produce a lot of work in a short period of time. Do you need to sleep much during these creative phases," she asked.

I shook my head. "No. That's what's strange. I'll go to sleep at midnight and leap out of bed at four a.m, absolutely buzzing."

"So you have a lot of energy, then? More than usual?"

"Yeah," I agreed. "That's part of the reason I find it so hard to do actual 'useful' work. I just can't concentrate. My legs are all restless and jittery. I need to be walked around the block for twenty minutes every hour, like a racehorse. If I have to be in a meeting, I can't sit still. It's torture."

The psychologist nodded. "But it sounds like you can focus on writing your book or filming your video series, or whatever creative project you've taken to."

"Well, yeah," I said. "I can focus very intensely on that, but I still need lots of movement. I usually write sections of the book in my mind when I'm on a long walk, or in a bath, or something. Then I'll sit in front of the computer and translate it into words, which is actually quite a productive routine. It's certainly not productive if I need to do 'real work,' though. You know — work I actually get paid for. It's a pain in the arse. My attention span on those things is approximately thirty seconds."

"Okay," she said as she scribbled something else onto the sheet. "Do you find yourself getting angry at people or lashing out at them?"

"I don't think so." I paused for a moment in thought. "I guess I was more highly strung when I was younger, but that could also be a maturity thing. It's generally pretty difficult to make me angry with day-to-day events. If someone is saying or doing something I don't agree with, I'm more likely to confront them when I'm in one of these high periods, though."

"What about irritability? Do you find yourself becoming easily irritated by others? More so than usual?"

"Umm..." I thought. "Actually, I guess so. My tolerance for stupidity and bullshit definitely decreases. I get very irritated by arbitrary rules that make no sense."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Like, I get irritated by people who think something is absolutely and fundamentally true, but really, they've just decided it's true in a completely subjective manner. And then they try to inflict their messed up, illogical worldview on everyone else like a bunch of authoritarian dictators. There's nothing wrong with being wrong about something, but being wrong and then dogmatically shoving your stupidity down everyone else's throat just pisses me off. Just because they're asleep at the wheel, doesn't mean I have to close my eyes and drive off a cliff with them. I refuse to be a sheep."

She nodded and looked at me, as if wanting me to say more.

"I dunno," I continued blabbering. "I guess I just sometimes struggle to fit into this world. We live in a society that wants everyone to follow the rules and be all neat and orderly and fall into line, and I just don't. I just don't fit into this tiny, restrictive box that I'm apparently supposed to fit into. Our whole society worships excellence and order and conscientious high performance, and I'm just none of those things. I can be those things with a lot of willpower, but it just sends me spiraling into a depression after a while, so what's the point? I don't get paid unless I'm excellent. No one wants to pay for failure and chaos unless you can eventually pull some order out of it — and that takes years and years for ambitious projects that truly matter. No wonder there are so many starving artists. I have to survive in this world and this economic system, but sometimes I don't know how. Everything I create, I end up destroying during the inevitable depression that follows. So why bother? What's the point in even trying, y'know?

And I actually used to be so excellent when I was a kid. I was the perfect little girl who got perfect marks on all her tests to make the adults happy, until I realized it was all bullshit. Perfect marks are boring. They're just boxes that get ticked. There's no challenge to it. There's no progress. There's no point to all. It's just rehashing what we already think we know. How do rote learning and box-ticking improve the world? They have their place, but for the most part, they don't improve anything. They just maintain the status quo. And in our status quo, children are starving, and bombs are dropping, and people are suffering. Is that really the best we can do? Is that really the status quo we want to maintain? If not, then why do we have a society that worships incremental orderly box-ticking and vilifies chaotic creativity?

And yet, the education system is still training children to be excellent at ticking arbitrary boxes. They're not being taught to think for themselves. They're taught to listen to authority and do what they're told. That's exactly what computers do. Computers get programmed by an authority to do their bidding, and they're much more reliable than humans. Computers will eventually be doing all the orderly jobs. So our society is sending these kids to the economic slaughterhouse when they teach them to tick boxes, and then they also tell them their worth and value in this world is directly proportional to their ability to tick boxes.

But then, how do you change the system? The system is so messed up. I could see the problem in primary schools, so I started an online coding school for kids. It was brilliant at teaching children how to think for themselves and structure their ideas and be creative, but I've basically messed that one up because of these depressive episodes. It's hard to run a business when your mind doesn't want to cooperate.

The whole system is just so massive and overwhelming, and I feel so small and insignificant in comparison. How do you change a system with so much momentum behind it? Where do you even start? I know the answer is to start with myself. I can't control other people and circumstances, but I can control myself, right? Except that I can't even do that!

Isn't that the ultimate irony? I've spent years training my mind to be free and not under the control of others. And now here I am, talking to you because I couldn't control my own renegade mind. And you seem lovely, and all that, but there are a million things I'd rather be doing than sitting here, paying three hundred dollars an hour to expose my inner crazy to you.

So, actually, yeah — I get irritated. I get irritated by arbitrary rules that make no sense. I get irritated that I can't make an impact on the world because every time I try to do something useful, I fuck it up and make a mess. And I don't like being irritated by things outside my control, so I just get irritated at myself instead. I get irritated that the one thing I'm supposed to be able to control is my own mind, and I can't even do that properly. It's a highly effective formula for self-loathing."