It's that time of year again folks....

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About six weeks ago, I suddenly got really restless, and decided to go to the gym. I just had this urge to move. So I worked out at a pretty high intensity for an hour. I loved how it felt, and decided I needed to lose 15lbs. Then I saw a trainer who happened to be off at the time, and I made an appointment with him right then and there and bough 20 sessions with him for $1300. Then I booked a cruise when I got home.....I've suddenly got the urge to cook more, and I've been spending way more on groceries than I should. I'm making pasta from scratch, making fillet mignon or Chilean sea bass for dinner. I even had an idea to quit my job as a research and development chemist, go enroll in culinary school to become a chef.

I have loads of energy. At work I was on top of everything. I had so many great ideas and I was easily able to follow through with them. At home my laundry is clean, my house is clean. There's food in my fridge. My hair is clean, my teeth are brushed....I even put on makeup before work, and occasionally wear high heels. I can put a decent outfit together. My trainer is convinced I am one of the strongest female clients he's ever seen.

I also don't really need to sleep, it's just sort of optional....Sounds great right? Not so much.

I noticed around the time I decided to start losing weight that a second train of thought appeared in my head.....it's only purpose for now is to derail my main train of though. It makes little jokes and rhymes about what I'm thinking. It makes fun of other people. It makes up funny songs. It factors numbers when I'm trying to do math at work. It's like trying to count to 100 and having someone yell out numbers in random order to confuse you......all the time. Right now there is only the two of them......Soon there will be a few more, and I'll be pulling my hair trying to get the chatter in my head to stop.

A few weeks ago I saw a black shadowy figure out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head and it was gone. Then a day later driving to work on a highway, I could have sworn I saw flashing red and blue lights behind my car. I pulled over, figuring I was getting a speeding ticket, and there was no cop car behind me....or anywhere. The next day I started hearing someone call my name. I kept asking my coworkers and my boss if they called me and they didn't...then it happened a few times during lunch...when I was in the lab alone. My cell phone would ring, I'd pick it up....and no one was there....in fact no one even called me. I constantly see my message light on my phone at work blinking....when I go to check my voicemail....it stops blinking and I have no messages. At home, I hear someone knocking on my door...I go to open the door and no one is there. ....yesterday I went to make a photocopy of a lab notebook, and the page I tried to copy had makeup spilled all over it.....I looked again, and it didn't....I have dozens of these little hallucinations a day now...

I can go several nights with no sleep at all, and when I do sleep it's only for at a maximum of three hours at a time....before my mind wakes me up with a laundry list of all the things I have to do that day. Then the second train of though comes in and inserts things like "fly to London," in between "do laundry and buy a bathing suit for the cruise."

Now the great ideas are coming so fast I can't keep track of them. I feel like I'm an a million places at once. I have the attention span of a ferret on meth. It's gettting hard to function at work now.

So now I'm alternating between euphoria, paranoia, and rage. Occasionally I'll walk into work, or my house or somewhere very familiar to me, and for some reason I feel like it's totally foreign to me. I don't know where I am, I get confused and scared. I'm having trouble speaking...I try to talk, but my sentences get all messed up like my brain is going faster than I can speak. I'm convinced when people at work are talking to each other they are talking about me. They all know.

Yes folks....I am manic.

Are you bipolar with AS? I am. Check with a doctor. Mania can actually wreck havoc on your body because you go without sleep and research has shown that manic episodes cause mild brain damage over time. If you have a psychiatrist, let them know as soon as possible. I hope you feel better soon!

Not AS, I was dx'ed with classic autism when I was three. ADHD when I was eight, bipolar at 16. I might have been dx'ed with AS if I didn't have a speech delay when I was little. I don't think I have ADHD at all....

I don't have a psychiatrist anymore. I haven't had one for a couple years. Last year's episode wasn't too bad. Really didn't go too far beyond hypomania, I crashed sometime in late May, slept for over 48 hours straight and reset my "clock."

I've been on medication before...many of them actually. It's not that they don't work, sometimes they do. But they also caused rashes, liver problems, even seizures. The reason I stopped seeing my psychiatrist was because she didn't know the difference between simple partial seizures in the occipital-temporal lobes of the brain, and psychosis. She kept increasing the medication that was causing the seizures in the first place.

Anyway. I know I probably should be on medication. My episodes occur seasonally. I am always hypomanic/manic/ mixed in the late winter to late spring, and depressed in the early fall to early winter. My seasonal cycles override most medication.....if I take an atypical antipsychotic in the fall or winter it only makes the depression worse, and for some reason that's all the pdocs want to prescribe to me.

I probably should be seeing a psychiatrist, I just haven't had very good luck with them.