The Moment I Realised Something Was Wrong

My major manic and psychotic episode in 2023 was a whirlwind. On the one hand, it was exciting. I believed I held the answers to the world's problems. At one point, I thought I was broadcasting my ideas to the entire world. My mind was overflowing with ideas, and I was having experiences and visions that felt extraordinary. Thoughts seemed to roll effortlessly off my tongue, and everything appeared to make perfect sense.

At the same time, I was spending extraordinary amounts of money. I smashed my phone in anger. I jumped out of my mother's moving car. I believed I was writing an email that Elon Musk would use to transform the way humanity managed its resources. Looking back, many of my ideas were naïve, and some of my actions were extremely dangerous. The remarkable thing is that none of this seemed unusual to me at the time.

I had strange conversations with close friends, including discussions that crossed normal social boundaries. Police followed me down the street because they were concerned for my safety. I walked through town without a shirt or shoes, telling people I had solutions to the world's problems. Yet I never stopped to think that something might be wrong.

Everything felt normal. The behaviour continued when I arrived at the hospital. I sang to security guards, offered bizarre advice on how to predict people's behaviour, and behaved in ways that were clearly inappropriate. I was completely out of control, yet I still believed everything made sense.

The turning point came in the High Dependency Unit. By that stage, I was fighting for what I believed were my rights, but something wasn't adding up. I had been living within a delusion that I was experiencing the Seven Days of Creation. As events unfolded in the hospital, the story I had built in my mind stopped making sense. The reality around me no longer fit the narrative I was trying to maintain.

For the first time, I began to question what was happening. As I spent time in the High Dependency Unit and later in the general psychiatric ward, I began reflecting on my life. Memories and past traumas surfaced. Rather than trying to justify the delusion, I started trying to understand myself. I reflected on my experiences at work, my relationships, my childhood, and the many events that had shaped my life.

I gathered scraps of paper and began writing. At first, I documented what was happening around me in the hospital. Gradually, that writing evolved into something much larger. It became an attempt to make sense of my experiences, my trauma, my recovery, and ultimately my life. That process continued at the Hills Clinic. There I began writing what would become The Dialectics of Mania and my memoir, A Turtle's Journey. By the time I left, much of both books had already been written.

Looking back, the moment I realised something was wrong was not a single dramatic revelation. It was a gradual awakening. The story I had constructed could no longer explain what was happening around me, and reality slowly began to reassert itself. What followed was a different journey—not one of delusion, but one of understanding.