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My eating habits are the only behaviour of mine that are still manic. I can't walk by a restaurant, a bakery, an ice-cream store or a candy store without making a purchase; the amount of calories I take in today are at least five times as many as I took before starting on all of this medication.

The little depression I experienced during my manic-depression was not like depression as anyone else had ever described it. It was very violent and angry, and I was full of rage. I wasn't lying in bed.

There's childhood and early onset bipolar, but it transitions in your early adulthood into something a little bit different, and extremely severe. It was at that time that my impulse control just went out the window. Impulse control when you're manic just disappears.

Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There's very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I'm lucky enough that it's reasonably mild in my case.

Do I perform sometimes in a manic style? Yes. Am I manic all the time? No. Do I get sad? Oh yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh yeah.

A sense of electrical current was part of my own experience of being manic. The sensation that my mind was spinning and overheating would sometimes build to a sensation like an electrical short - a burst of light, a melting, or dissipating - and I'd get a metallic taste in my mouth, like when you lick a battery.

My recovery from manic depression has been an evolution, not a sudden miracle.

I'm kind of effectively bipolar.

My manic depression was ravaging my life, but because nobody could see it, many people thought it was a figment of my imagination.