The Quickening

The Quickening is my term I use for being in a state of mania. It's hard to describe to folks that haven't been through it, I will do my best. If you have ever hunted it's like that feeling you had after you got your first big buck, or after the first good hit in the big game, but it doesn't go away. Your mind races and your thoughts are hard to keep in one direction. I think I really started having theses feelings around age twelve or thirteen. I would stay awake for a few days at a time sneaking out of my house a roaming the streets of the village of B'ville or even better stalking in the woods. My dad took me hiking a lot and taught me woods skills and I would sometimes go by the railroad tracks by the Beer Bewery in town and build a fire at night when they where making the beer I liked the smell of the hops. My mind was like the train on those tracks I would sit by rolling fast and hard, I had a cool yellow cassette walkman and would bring it and listen to tunes burning it up and trying to slow it down till I had to get home before my parents woke up. I did this often in the fall and spring but rarely in the winter or summer. This is significant because I have found that my issues are cyclical I quicken in the the fall and spring and get depressed in the winter and summer. I don't know why that just how it works for me. Over the years I have learned you can do a lot of cool stuff during the quickening if you can keep it under control. Like becoming super productive. To the point of where you can't stop. Before CTE started really kicking my ass about 2 years ago I was an avid reader. Especially when I couldn't sleep. A psychiatrist explained it to me like this to me once that my brain during mania is like a computer with many files being open and working at the same time. The trick is to keep it all balanced without running the train off the tracks. So I sometimes do stuff for shits and giggles to keep myself busy. An example of this would be about three years ago while designing pools I did something really cool. You see I am not a computer guy and was trained by an old school draftsman to draw pools with a pencil, ruler, and compass. Therefore when drawing a Freeform pool the only way to get an accurate figure for the area of the pool is to count the little squares on the graph paper. Well this is tedious and time consuming. A computer will do this for you but like I said I am not a computer guy and did't use a CAD program. So I came up with and equation that I could use to figure out the area of a circle using the radius and .785. Which is how much space a circle takes up in a square. And it works pretty well too. Lol

But it's not always fun the quickening it can be a scary place a dark place with thoughts of violence and self destruction. Luckily I have a support team of friends and family that are always available for me when I start to go off the rails.