Manic Depression
This week I realized that I appear to have some predisposition for manic depression. I've known that this runs in my genes – my mother's father committed suicide when she was an infant and my father also struggled with manic depression for a long time.
But I had always managed to keep my emotions mostly stable. Sometimes they've been so stable that I got bored with it and started searching for things to excite some waves in my mood.
Now last Monday I was starting to work at a small startup that had just moved to a new airfield. Their workshop was chaotic, but the CEO was friendly like on the phone and explained a lot to me, including the reason why instead of their own prototype a Lancair IV was standing right inside the workshop.
That friendly greeting and the fact that a Lancair IV, one of the fastest and most inspiring kitplanes on the planet, was standing right in my workplace made me really happy. My heart felt like it was jumping when I looked at that airplane and thought about the time to come.
I was experiencing the highest of euphoria that I had experienced in a long time. That feeling stuck throughout the day and peaked when I got the chance to fly to Oslo with another colleague.
During the flight I was calm and simply enjoyed it. Same in Oslo. A calm evening. The next day I got to the airfield by bus instead of bike because obviously I had left that in the hangar.
The CEO was at home to be with his family and I was alone with Kristian, so I got a chance to talk with him and get us some dinner in the evening before helping him to laminate some structures inside his prototype.
The next day was also good, but organizing the new workshop felt a bit like the wrong task to me. But in the end it was a normal day. I proposed an idea for solving the problem I was working on and got the permission to keep going as I had planned.
But in the evening, on my way back home, when the saddle hurt and the headwind was slowing me down, negative thoughts were suddenly pouring over me. There was no real way to explain where they came from.
I realized that my mood was still my responsibility and my decision, but deciding against this current mood seemed almost impossible. It seemed like the only reasonable way to see things this way.
Apathy and despair seemed like the only reasonable emotions to deal with this reality. I felt like I had taken so many wrong one-way-doors in my life that it would be impossible to get back on the track I wanted.
I felt like I was unwilling to put in even the slightest amount of energy to continue. The only reason to keep pedaling was that I knew I would eventually get very cold outside if I didn't keep going.
But I was really fantasizing about simply exiting this life like a shitty computer-game. I thought about ways of doing that in a socially acceptable way. Maybe just risking my life for a good cause would be a sufficient way of killing myself. But I was almost a hundred percent sure that I would have to leave my “friends” and my old life because it would be impossible to continue.
I realized that friendship is not real at all, that it's all just opportunistic and never really unconditional.
When I got home I noted all these things and a day later I already felt much better about them. Yes, friendship is not real in the deepest sense, but that doesn't mean it has no value.
Two days later I got to the happy realization that yes, I took many shitty paths but I'm still in a good place and after all, all that counts is what I do right now. I can't change the past. And I can't change the future. I can only change this moment.