Calm • Anxiety
On Feeling Manic
Many of us are prone to slip into states of mind we might call ‘manic’ – in which we run obsessively and at high speed away from something within us that asks for our attention and yet feels intolerably raw and overwhelming.
There are many ways in which we might ‘run’ away. We may keep extremely busy; ensuring that there is not a single moment in the day left to pause and acknowledge our feelings, creating a life in which external demands are perpetual and unrelenting. In this, the modern world is supremely cooperative, prioritising continuous economic activity over stillness and interior awareness – and lending enormous implicit prestige to the art of never being with oneself.
We may also deploy fear and anxiety in the service of self-forgetting. We may be masters at choreographing one panic after another so as to block insight. On Monday, we may lose connection with most of our minds over an email, by Tuesday, we are alarmed about the possible response of a friend, Wednesday sees us scared about something we told a colleague and on and on. We tell ourselves that we have no alternative to fear, but in truth, we are turning our whole lives into a white water rafting experience, pretending that we are facing one mortal enemy after another, as a way to sidestep an exploration of feelings of regret and dislocation.
Or our mania may push us towards addictive behaviours: alcohol and drugs most commonly but it might also be pornography, exercise or repeated checks of our phones.
What unites our manic states is that they involve a febrile wish to avoid an acknowledgement of, and reckoning with our minds and their feelings of loss, sadness and isolation. We are usually – beneath the storms of anxiety, busy-ness or lust – primarily bereft and unreconciled to pain. But we are refusing the work of mourning. We cannot bear to feel the feelings that are our due. We prefer to press ourselves against a narrow ledge in our minds rather than stepping down to explore their wider, quieter, sadder open spaces.
The task is to lessen our fear of our own unwellness. The world isn’t so terrifying, we are using terror not to feel our loneliness. There isn’t so much to do, we are deploying busy-ness to stop ourselves encountering our loss and confusion.
We need to make friends with the root causes of our griefs in order not to continue to suffer from the manic symptoms of their denial. We need to lie quietly by ourselves and dare to finally and fully listen to some of the very sad things inside us that we have half known about for so long.
