I realise I never actually posted the first email excerpt where I describe the detox symptoms. I'll summarize it instead:
1. Shivers or whole-body tremors.
2. Reignition of life-long ticks that, in life, tended to come on for a few days to weeks, then cease for a few weeks or months; most of the time this is the attempt to induce neck chills through shuddering. Both this tick and the others try to reach an elusive feeling like when a yawn eludes you, only unlike a yawn, there is no defining point of satisfaction (i.e. that actually yawning would be)--these include making a sort-of clucking noise with the throat, squinting, repositioning my jaw in a funny way, and probably others that haven't happened frequently enough for me to remember.
3. After a few days of doing the day-long process, stiffness in the spine would occur as well.
4. Creation of new ticks (only can count 1 for certain), such as a chesty noise I started making after the first occurance of spine-stiffness. It seems to ONLY occur when I get the stiff spine.
5. A desire to massage, and later on, beat, or press a finger hard on, specific points of my body, which range from head to toe. The first occurance was a pricking feeling in deep tissue just below my right nipple. Sometimes the pricks are near the surface, sometimes they feel like they are inside organs.
6. As all the aformentioned symptoms subside and the need to massage diminishes, a very obvious increase in cerebral blood-flow occurs, as if the blood were able to occupy more of my brain. This coincides the symptoms that also define the hypomania (except the thoughts are so grandiose that someone judging me would drop the hypo, but I think that is just where my self-esteem is genuinely at).
The order seems to go: shivers, tremors, need to massage, hypomania, spine, with small variations/overlap/fragmentation. The ticks are scattered everywhere and sometimes don't crop up much at all, except the one that coincides with the spine occurance.
I believe though that hypomania is just the brain ascending to a higher activity level due to feeling prepared to do so. I also have a theory for bipolar that relates to this:
When a person becomes 'manic', their mind is operating in a higher level of functioning. The hunger that the mind then wishes to satisfy is to _rediscover_ reality at this new level, with an ability to reintegrate everything they already know at a new level of detail. This feeling has the same innocent clean enthusiasm with which a toddler points at an aeroplane; the young are the most eager and swift to take on board knowledge. I also believe we have the ability to learn at that same rate our entire lives, potentially.
They begin by looking out at the world. They aren't actually be looking at the world through their senses, as an infant would, but rather revisiting the sum of everything the person has already ever seen or known, and having an orgy of rediscovering and seeing greater depth in the already-learned (I actually have a hypothesis that the mind has recorded everything that's passed over all of its senses throughout its life, with conceptualisation/abstraction as the means to making sense of it all, but the theory here doesn't depend on that hypothesis being true).
The depressed episode comes when the person finally stops staring outward at the world, and much like how an infant does so for the first time, looks inward to (re)discover the self, i.e. become once again self-aware with this increased mental vision. The unadulterated eyes forget all automated self-deception, as that is a product of the eyes of the less active brain. They see the self as it is.
And they see something in their selves that they couldn't see before because of constructs of automated self-deceit, as well as seeing the constructs themselves, and they very much dislike what they see; it looks completely black and ulcerous, and totally out of place in contrast to the joy of the discovery they were experiencing just before. This experience is so intense that they instantly slam their mind shut on it.
Since it takes time to automate self-deception, the mind has no time to wait for it; it instead regresses back to its previously, less-well-operating state in order to regain access to the automated processes, constructs, and rationalisations that block out the self and offer reinterprations of the self to permit self-acceptance to be possible. Their mind puts the blinders back on, but not before it got an eyeful. Like a person who went under hypnosis and doesn't remember what was said, they don't remember actually seeing the self, and the event occured subconsciously. But they're left with the emotional aftertaste of it, a causeless feeling of needless doom, or dread. They'll also feel a sense of being undeserving to feel good emotions, or of the benefits of the 'mania' that they were enjoying so much.
A variation on this theory at this point (or perhaps a variable, where either thing can happen) is that the mind doesn't regress back to any previous state, but remeans 'manically' depressed, i.e. glimpses the self, puts blinders on without the prerequisite of alternating to the lowered brain-activity state.
Eventually, the mind feels punished for becoming 'manic', and becomes depressive. The amount of punishment it felt determines the duration until the next episode.
Truthfully, the 'mania' just refers to a step up in brain activity that many of us throughout our lives experience, as a natural thing that helps us meet and overcome challenges and as a means to grow as a person. Perhaps it happens through an epiphany, or perhaps it is more physical, such as the body getting continually supplied with better nourishment continually over a long period and then is free to give the brain more of its resources. Or maybe it is something else again.
Manic depression would be a cycle of this stepping up of brain-activity until the mind rediscovers the self with new 'eyes' to see with, and then regresses down to the previous level due to what it sees.
This isn't a theory I am settled on. It is also possible that the increase in activity simply can't be maintained for resource reasons, and there doesn't seem to be a point in life when you're not at that heightened level as you can't do any of the things that you want to do without it. Or it could be a combination of both of these things.
I also don't have bipolar; that'll disqualify me for being able to rightfully discuss the subject in the eyes of some. Though, without presumption, I believe that I received a taste of what it's like today, and for just this day followed the pattern of a bipolar sufferer, in form but not in intensity.
I wrote that while 'hypomanic'.
<- why is it grey?
Sorry for the flood of posts, I would consolidate it into one.
Hope I'm not perceived as hijacking the thread. ima ghost
