Extract from a book
"There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humour and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those were there. It will never end, for madness carves out its own reality.
It goes on and on, and finally there are only others' recollections of your behaviour-your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviours-for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories......Credit cards revoked, bounced cheques to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories(what did I do?)friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. .........Which of my feelings are real? Which of theme's is me? The wild impulsive, chaotic, energetic and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed and tired one?"
It's very interesting to read written by a Professor of Psychiatry and tells the story of her fight with manic depression.
An Unquiet Mind A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison