Note to reader: Trigger for mentions of suicide, self-harm, and mania.

How do you know when someone is ill? Your mother can put a hand against your forehead and say, yes, you are sick. Your emergency room doctor can look at an X-ray and point to the fibula fracture that caused your child to pause soccer for 4 to 6 weeks. There is comfort, however cruel, in the visible wound you are presented.

Mental illness, though now becoming a progressively outdated way of describing mental health conditions, is more clandestine. There is no scar I can show anyone, but if I were to take off my clothes and allow eyes to arrange themselves on my skin, they will see scars not inflicted by my brain. Mental health conditions are electrical, atmospheric, almost imperceptible, and sometimes, perversely, the condition does not make me look ill at all. In fact, I feel like it makes me look better than I have ever looked.

Mental health conditions are peculiar. It does not always make me feel “ill.” At times, it makes me feel and look extraordinary! I move with such velocity that ordinary time becomes almost insulting. One idea produces another until the original thought is buried beneath the debris of everything I summoned. Sleep seems so unnecessary, vulgar. I could lie awake at 2:00a.m. with my eyes brightly opened, the room blue caressed by the moonlight, feeling I had discovered some secret passage into a more efficient version of consciousness. I do not feel tired. I feel illuminated. My mind becomes a room in which every light has been switched on. I could write for hours and hours and hours. I could make plans with the feverish conviction that every plan was brilliant. Magnificent!

Everything was possible because nothing had yet had time to disappoint me. This is the seduction of hypomania. There is productivity and confidence, dressed and draped as the woman I have always wanted to be. I can sleep for all of three hours and feel insultingly alive, lighter, quicker, brighter. I make plans. I buy things I do not need because the future is suddenly generous enough to absorb the expense. It can imitate me so convincingly that I begin to resent the person who asks whether I am all right. Of course I am fine. I am better than fine! Are you even seeing what I am seeing? Look at everything I am accomplishing. Look at all these words. Look at how little I need sleep. Look at how much I suddenly understand. I could, with full confidence, say I could become an Avenger if I set my mind to it because why the fuck not? I AM THE AVENGERS! And do you see how unimaginable I sound? The Avengers aren’t real. And neither are the Super Rangers— I’ve come to learn.

In the downhill spiral of suicidality and hypersexual tension between me and every person I meet drunk at a club, I had to become a kind of weather observer—like Henry DiCarlo or Vera Jimenez, the weather anchor and meteorologist from KTLA5. I watch the barometer of my sleep, the first strange absence of exhaustion. I watch for the atmospheric pressure of too many thoughts pressing against the inside of my skull. I watch for the sudden bright front of conviction, when I become certain I can solve everything if everyone would simply listen to me for five minutes and not argue with me about putting a knife down. I wasn’t going to use it on myself by the way. I was trying to prove a point.

Hypomania makes my world too bright. Depression removes my light entirely. There were three months of my life where I sunk myself into my bed and let it become a shallow grave, toppled with blankets, unwashed greasy hair, and skin carrying the stale smell of a body gone too long without water. When I watched LADbible Stories on Youtube during an Honesty Box segment, Barbara Butcher–a death investigator for New York City’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner–answered “Describe the smell of death.” To which she said, “There is a hellacious smell that comes from a decomposing body.” Now I was obviously not decomposing, but I felt as if I was given my lack of hygiene. I didn’t care if I died in my sleep. In fact, I could do it myself if I wanted to. And I wanted to. Strange for a woman who, just a few days prior, wanted to jump out of a moving plane for the best view of sunrise on an unemployed Tuesday morning.

Back to my point, my curtains were closed for three months. Mornings I could not remember whether I had slept six hours or sixteen. The distinction stopped mattering. My body was something I forcibly and reluctantly inhabited. I would lie there beneath the blankets, sweating and shivering at the same time, my limbs weighted with the peculiar density of wet sand. The smallest tasks became grotesque in their scale. Showering required standing and standing required me to get up and getting up required a supply of energy I no longer possessed. I became intimate with my own neglect. To put away the pile of cups, empty orange plastic medicine bottles, and plates of half eaten meals felt like an expedition–8,000 miles of uncharted territory. There was nothing cinematic about it either.

My mind is the instrument through which I make things. So what am I to do when I must distrust the very machinery that produces my work? I have been in charge of my own treatment since I was 18. I was reluctant for a multitude of reasons. One being I hated the memory wiping, heavy sleep inducing side effects of the various medications and sedation methods they would eventually have me on. Second, I was afraid that treatment would make me less creative. Stale. Quiet. Less strange, and I loved my strangeness because it gave me a passion for chicken figurine collections. I was afraid the stability would flatten me like Jeff Brown’s Flat Stanley, only I couldn’t slip underneath the cracks between the door and the floor, so what was the use?

The use was this. There is a cultural mythology about the “tortured artist” identity that is cruel to artists with very real, intense mental health struggles. “Suffering gives us depth” or whatever. “Madness gives you vision,” but there is nothing romantic nor poetic about being so far past unable to trust your own perceptions that it banishes you to eternity in bed. Bound to bed sounds like a dream, does it not? There is nothing glamorous about waking up and coming to the realization you made a million and one decisions you would have not made in another state of mind. That is how I discovered my hypersexuality. So when treatment begins and I become flattened, and those three months of stabilization eventually stabilize, I will be popped back into my shape.

What I have learned most from my imaginative mind is that a calm sea is not a dead sea. The surface can be still…and remain immeasurably deep. There can be pressure, darkness, migration, hunger, and yet still, within all of that, there is a calm sea for me to float on and return to shore—and maybe some phosphorescence to light the way. So when the sea inside me becomes calm, I will not mistake its stillness for death.

Rest. And then live.

Aug 12, 2026