All of this is taken from my book of the same name which goes into this into much more detail, but here’s the short story of my first manic episode:

It started around December 17, 2017. I wrote a journal entry that I believed that I might be followed. I only know that this was the beginning of paranoid delusions later, as I’m writing my book, but at the time, I think nothing of it because it’s just me writing my daily artist pages and everything comes out in artist pages and means nothing.

At the beginning of the month, I had gotten a second job at an authentic french bakery, and I was very happy with the job because not only would it help pay off my credit cards, but it gives me extra spending money. I was starting to be physical again and lose weight. The downside was, I was working 18 hours a day, several days a week, and I was exhausted. My boyfriend at the time didn’t notice that I had started to replace sleep with coffee.

I began exploring the city more, because I had a chance to on days I didn’t have to work my job at the security company in the afternoon. Then, I started going out at night. Around Christmas was the worst. I started to believe I was in a movie, that David Lynch was filming it, that he had stolen my ideas, and was using them for various projects, and now I was being disposed of because it was all part of some game set up a long time ago in Death Valley National Park, where I used to work as a waitress. 

This led to a confrontation between my mother and my now ex boyfriend that landed me in jail. I thought this was part of the game instead of the result of my own actions. I thought, at the time, that I had been played into the role and now there was no going back, and this was it. 

I spent two months in the hospital believing that an army of old men were sent to spy on me and that David Lynch had sent them. 

Even when I got home to my mother’s house, for almost a year after that, I would double take and cringe every time I saw an old white man because my trust had been rattled so deeply, but I don’t have that delusion anymore, thankfully. 

Finally, the hospital had ramped up my meds so much that it had begun to work on me, but I was a zombie. I was taking respiradol, and I saw flashes of light on a regular basis. I slept all the time. I gained weight. I was tired and had nightmares that haunted me (one particularly bad one about satan rebuking me, which I don’t even really believe in satan, or the satanic chuch, but it was a chilling nightmare). 

But, the hospital decided that I had made improvement. Because of my altercation with my family, there had been some legal trouble, which is how I had been committed against my will. Part of it was resolved, but the other part was put on hold. However, I was released by the court into my family’s custody and sent home from Seattle to Michigan. 

I had to have my medication doses supervised daily by my family and weekly reports from my sister, who had taken on my case, but I never went back into the system. Eventually, the case was dismissed, and I was seen as a win for the mental health and legal system of Seattle because so much work had gone into me to make sure that I was ok by my family who had traveled across country. 

I wouldn’t have survived without my supports. They really did save me from myself. I think about all the David Lynch delusions I’ve had over the years, and this wasn’t the only manic episode I had based on movie director David Lynch (that’s something my therapist said I should call him, to put distance between him and me, to make him impersonal). But, it was the worst of my episodes, and it shaped how I dealt with my other episodes moving forward. 

I learned a lot from that episode: how hospitals are, what psychosis looks like, when I start to see “signs” that other people don’t see because of my delusions, etc. It was all scary because it was the first time it happened, and I didn’t know how to cope with it, which is why I stayed in the hospital for so long. 

During my latest episode, I spent only a weekend because I have learned how to deal with my illness and symptoms and manage my disease, working with my support system of family, friends, and army of doctors. I’m very lucky.