I have known this for years myself, having manic depression (bipolar). I wrote an essay for a friend who didn't understand how it works.
Bipolar disorder isn’t as straightforward as most would have you believe it to be. You can’t just stop acting all down or settle yourself when you’re having a tizzy. Like most things, you can’t really understand it unless you’ve been through it. But at least I can make some comparisons that may help.
Some of you have taken drugs or medications that have made you hallucinate. Most of us have had the flu at some point with a high enough fever that strange waking nightmares have hit. At such times the world looks wildly different from what you’re used to, and that can be terrifying. At such a time if someone tells you to knock it off and stop acting so weird, can you? Of course not, because you’re not in control of it. The only thing you can do is to grit your teeth and hold on until it passes, if you’re aware enough to see that it’s just hallucinations.
That’s what it’s been like for me for all these years. There is something within me driving me in strange directions, utterly against my will, twisting how I see things. I have very little control over it; generally it controls me and all I can do is keep quiet and not say anything. So one day I’ll feel a deep happiness, where the sun is shining and birds are singing, and get the urge for a particular food that’s thoroughly satisfying that day, and spend the day smiling and enjoying life. But a few days later, perhaps, this sort of dense grey curtain sweeps in across the world sucking all the color and music from everything, and now that food I took such joy in seems uninspiring, even revolting.
What changed during that time? Me. That food is the same no matter what. The sunlight is the same, the birds don’t change their song, the world is constant around me. The only thing that has changed is how I see it. And I don’t get to control that.
What it does to me is show the world in its extremes of ugliness and beauty, its cruelties and sweet wonders, its horrors and magnificence. It’s like looking into bright sunlight while everyone else has on dark sunglasses. It is not always a pretty sight, and I see things that make me shudder on a regular basis.
Not that it’s all negative, of course. In my depressive state the filters are really ripped away, exposing me to the ugliness all around us, and that’s when I’m at my most creative. This is true for most artists and writers and musicians and others in some sort of creative field- when we are sinking into it, we make strange intuitive leaps that startle other people. The mad artist is a cliché for a reason.
Yes, I'm brighter than most, and creative. It is not always pleasant. It has also given me a twisted sense of humor. Lord Byron put it nicely in “Don Juan”: “And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep.” There are many things that I see that are not nice but are darkly hilarious. The problem is keeping myself from cracking up or making jokes at bad moments.
Would I trade it away to be like the rest of society, living in a bubble of comfortable little lies that shelter me? No. Even though it has cost me professionally as well as personally, I wouldn't stop it if I could. I do tone it down with meds so I don't hit the really terrible extremes, but overall I kinda like it.