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“Euphoria is the experience (or affect) of pleasure or excitement and intense feelings of wellbeing and happiness. Euphoric mania often releases a surge of super human energy that creates a feeling of invincibility.” – Wikipedia 

I think I could write a whole book and tell about every experience I’ve had, but I could never explain how euphoric mania actually felt for me. The happiness. The absolute “clarity”. Seeing things differently, seeing your loved ones and friends in a completely different way, like you have never seen them before. Feeling unconditional love towards the world – the same love you feel when you hold your newborn baby for the first time. Seeing the amazing beauty of everything around you. The vivid colours, the amazing sounds. The flowers blooming. The birds singing. The power of a stormy sea. The sound of classical music. The colours of a painting. Every good feeling felt multiplied by 100. Everything feels different, like you’ve seen the world and the universe for the first time in your life. It feels like you are one with the universe. I cried my eyes out when I saw it. I was so sorry for myself that I had lived my whole life in such darkness. That it took 25 years to actually understand the beauty of the world. 

If you have never felt it, you won’t know what you are missing. It’s like trying to explain what the world looks like to a blind person. He has never seen it, so he can only imagine. 

Sometimes I wish I had a bipolar psychiatrist. Because, the ones we have, only understand that you have symptoms – euphoria and delusions, but they can’t understand how it feels. Knowing about something and experiencing it are completely different things. It is easier with depression. Everyone has been through a hard time in their lives so it’s a little bit easier (on some level) to empathise with someone who’s struggling with sadness, loneliness, being misunderstood and living in pain. But you can’t empathise with someone who feels the most amazing feeling in the world. Same as you can’t understand what taking a drug feels like, if you’ve never tried it. I wish people, at least once in their lifetime, would see the magic I did when I was manic. If hell is a place between our ears, then heaven is there too. 

The song by Louis Armstrong perfectly describes my feelings during this high:

“I see trees of green

Red roses too

I see them bloom 

For me and you

And I think to myself 

What a wonderful world

I see skies of blue 

And clouds of white

The bright blessed day

The dark sacred night

And I think to myself 

What a wonderful world”

I have to say that I am completely non-religious and have never thought about God before, but I felt like this feeling is the greatest gift from God himself. At one point I was convinced that it’s some sort of spiritual awakening. 

When I explained my experiences to my friend, she asked if I really hadn’t taken any LSD, because everything I described was similar to her experience with the drug. I’ve never tried any drugs in the world, so I started researching about what it feels to take LSD and what it feels to have heroin high. But nothing seemed to compare to the experience I had. Maybe that’s why some people call mania the most potent drug. There is no wonder people get addicted, but I feel like with drugs the “withdrawal” or in our case – the inevitable crash into depression, is what makes it “not worth it” for some people. 

If I didn’t have a child that needs me, I don’t know if I would stop and try to get myself together when starting to get hypo manic. I think I would just keep pushing in order to reach that “high”. Even knowing that I will end up in a hospital probably wouldn’t stop me. It’s like an addiction. At least for me. 

Mania is a different experience for each individual and these are just my feelings, thoughts and opinions. I know that some people don’t experience these kind of highs, so by talking about my experience with “euphoric mania” I am not trying to say that everyone with Bipolar Disorder feels like this.

You can find the author on Instagram @that_bipolar.girl