the absolute impossible creativity of the bipolar brain

i have spent the past several days in a rather unpleasant mini-mixed episode. any second i've had of unstructured time, i have spent absorbed/crumpled up into an empty, bottomless, thought-pit, that somewhat resembles the inside of an ice cream maker. it is dark, tumultuous, and mind-numbingly loud, where thoughts materialize alarmingly quickly, drop into the ice cream pit at once, and are then smeared away immediately without so much as a millisecond left to process what is happening in there. it's enough to make me mentally nauseated (which trust me, is a thing), and has even gone as far as to make me physically nauseated. i am exhausted from spinning in my thought vacuum without enough time to grab on to any conscious thought to even make any sense of it. 

a calming exercise i've been trying when i have a shred an energy left to do it, has been to try to break down where in my subconscious the seemingly random "speed-thought" came from. for instance, an abstract image of a butterfly unfolding its origami paper wings will go swirling by and it will have several layers of development in my subconscious. it looks like the paper is made from pages of a coloring book that belonged to my brother when we were children. i talked to my brother earlier that day, about a topic unrelated to butterflies or origami but related to childhood and handiwork. the subconscious did its best.

anyway. that way of thinking has begun to help me be more mindful about where my thoughts are going, why they're there, and how to slow them down.

so today, as i was exiting the shower, mindlessly but mentally preparing to de-turban my hair to unlock whatever curly mysteries may lurk beneath, my brain was simultaneously, on an unrelated note, narrating a potential short story, as folks often do in their brains. (i.e "Wouldn't it be great if a movie went like________?") the short story was some silly weird narrative that was writing itself on the backburner of my mind while i was doing the menial post-shower tasks. 

something about star-crossed lovers. at a crossroads. about to find out if they were truly meant to be together. what if they weren't?! what would they do?! but what if they WERE?! what THEN?! were they READY?! 

it was as this narration was rolling in the background in my brain that i was taking my hair out of its towel and realizing that the story wasn't in fact about lovers at all but about my HAIR.

my hair is about to be taken out of its turban. at a crossroads. about to find out if curls truly had formed under there. what if they hadn't? i guess they could be combed back to try again another day, but what if they HAD?! what if curls HAD managed to form?! WHAT THEN?! would I actually need to STYLE THEM?! BEFORE BED?! and HOPE FOR THE BEST?! makes star-crossed lovers sound like child's play. 

all this to say, bipolar brains are a nightmare. if i told you i didn't nauseously cry myself to sleep several times this week, mentally motion-sick from the relentless "thought swarms" getting dumped into my ice cream-maker, i would be lying. but nightmares can be magic. bipolar people are magic. there is a reason the great creative minds of our world are bipolar minds. 

i am not a creative genius. but when you hear an actual creative genius one day say something like "Yeah i actually thought about my idea for Katniss and Peeta while I was getting out of the shower, my hair was telling me a story in real time, it was wild!" it will make sense. and you'll know why because you've just taken a peek inside a bipolar mind :)