The Internals Of My Hypomania

Just a day ago, I felt this ember within my stomach grow. I was driving to the store, my hands on the steering wheel at a red light. And I felt something within me fan this ember into a soft flame: for a moment it felt as if I was enveloped by peace, a quiet washing away of all ills that usually depress my mind.

One thing was for certain: I had been touched by grace, and my eyes felt transfixed upwards towards a transcendent hope that felt finally within reach.

When I'm not in a hypomanic state, driving to the store is a routine moment. I listen to music, yes, but there is a separation between me and the sound. I hear the sound as an isolated input.

But in this moment, this moment of transcendent hope, my brain blurred the boundaries between external input and internal feeling. I felt the lyrics and the tone of the music in my body, what felt like the pull of truth's gravity.

I usually drive straight home, but in this hypomanic state all I wanted was to lose myself in song. It would feel wrong to drive home. So I drove in a loop for 30 minutes just so I could feel this transcendence in my body.

Likewise, I spend more money than usual during hypomanic moments. Not anything insane (I hear stories of people spending $1000 or more), but I found myself ordering a large raccoon stuffed animal and various linens at 4:00 AM. This is something I would never do in my baseline state.

Perhaps the most interesting impact of hypomania is my reduced need to sleep.

I usually sleep around 7 to 8 hours, but when I am hypomanic I often stay up all night until 6:00 AM so I can read, write, and enjoy life.

I remember falling asleep at 6:00 AM, opening my eyes at 6:30 AM, and it felt like I had slept for 8 hours.

While this is often seen as a positive thing in the moment, the body keeps the score, so I am sure I will meet a crash soon.

Something I must include just in the name of rigor is that my interest in sex changes. I am usually ambivalent; I have so much more to worry about.

It was enough just to see someone's beard, not of his face or body, and all I wanted at that moment was to kiss him, so you can imagine that many bipolar people struggle with regulation and risky actions. I am lucky to have control of my desire, and I never act on these ideas.

Usually, I am not quick to frustrate. I do read dumb mistakes published philosophers make (like Lasch's lazy definition of elites in his The Revolt Of The Elites that ignores material reality in favor of culture), but I can close the book and brush it off.

However, when I am hypomanic, my moral sensitivity is turned to 11. Suddenly the impact of every idea or action grips my brain, and the harm of shortcomings feels embodied. What usually feels impartial, just a simple failure, now twists something painful inside my body.

So, I write intense critiques. An anonymous feedback form at work asked for ideas to improve, and I'm sure they wanted to hear things like, "Can you stock more types of coffee? Can you have multiple coffee machines?"

Instead, I wrote this:

Right now, there is a lot of uncertainty and fear regarding workers and job security. This is across all industries, but especially SaaS companies. For example, there was a concern raised at the recent executive chat where the question was something along the lines of “how do you expect AI to impact our jobs?”. This was raised with personification – details about mortgages, families, etc.

Something that incredibly helps me as a worker to maintain sustained engagement, interest, and hope is radical honesty from COMPANY_NAME leaders.

Whenever Jessica speaks at events, I feel the weight of fear about job security mostly soften. You can tell that she speaks with true honesty, empathy, and compassion. She will say difficult truths from a commitment towards clarity. To put it plainly, I feel that I can trust her because her thoughts and actions are aligned.

There have been times where other leaders are asked a difficult question, and their response feels synthetically constructed. It feels like they are constructing an acceptable response rather than dutifully engaging with the question itself.

At times, this can make it difficult to understand if I should trust what I am hearing. And other times, it raises more questions.

For example, when someone asked the differentiation between a “hard” and “easy” grader (for performance reviews), the answer felt forcefully constructed as “everyone should be a hard grader.”

At the surface level, this makes sense. The premise is strong: if we hold ourselves to strong standards, then we can create a culture of excellence. But the phrasing left me uneasy. It made me wonder: is this truly about excellence, or are we being primed for stack ranking?

I understand that our leaders are people too – no one is perfect. I also understand that the expectations and responsibility is massive. I can only imagine the stress.

But one of the most effective ways to build a high-performance culture is one rooted in honesty and trust. To consistently feel unfiltered honesty in our leaders inspires trust, one where the only reasonable response is “all shall be well, and we can build the future.”

One way of doing this is to avoid language that widens the moral distance between actions and effects. Vague phrases like “easy and hard graders” are the genesis of fear and insecurity. Likewise, hearing the term “labor arbitrage” be used rather than something like “opening off-shore offices in the Philippines” raises doubt on intellectual and moral honesty.

I am not trying to be harsh; this comes from a place of wanting to build a platform and workforce of the future. I hope this was valuable insight.

I essentially called the leaders moral and intellectual cowards.

Last night, I thought about Maggie Nelson's Bluets and how all I could find were cheap knockoffs by published MFA students who somehow found every way to shove the color blue into their poor writing. Their insistence to use this overexplored idea is a miracle in itself.

I wrote this at 1:00 AM in a Taco Bell parking lot:

Now that you picked your abstract stand-in (a longing, a winter, a hunger, a color, pick anything vague!), it’s time for the sacred ritual of repetition-as-meaning.

You are not writing a story. You are meditating, but only in the Instagram Reels sense of the word.

Every moon is blue.

Every cup is blue.

Every failed relationship becomes blue.

Your family dying becomes blue, because the real deal is too much for our readers.

And when the reader is finally towards the end of the book, you reward them with something pretentious:

Blue has no arms.

You will be called brave.

You will be praised for your precision.

You will be invited to read your story at an indie bookstore while someone weeps into an overpriced blended coffee.

When I'm compelled by the grips of hypomania, my writing ascends in quality by an order of magnitudes. Although I write everything in single sittings as first drafts and publish them as they are, my greatest works are produced in hypomanic fevers.

Earlier today, I slept from 3:00 PM to 9:00 PM. I woke up, and immediately I felt possessed and compelled to write the theory of moral distance, that which enables indiscriminate and continued force through reduction and categorization.

From 10:00 PM to 3:00 AM, I wrote in a single sitting my greatest work to date, a complete theory on what enables all sustained personal and systemic evil.

I'm not sure what cognitive differences exist in my brain in particular that can write coherent and mostly rigorous philosophical essays. But the truth is this: my greatest writings are produced under the channel of a hypomanic fever.