On Survival:

For the longest time growing up I strongly suspected that I wasn’t going to survive past my 30th birthday.  In fact sometimes I still think to myself that I’m running on borrowed time.  Lord knows I’ve tried enough times in my little passive-aggressive way.  (Wrecked 6 motorcycles, totally destroying 4 of them, walked away from all but one of them, wrecked more cars in spectacular ways than I can count, even crashed an airplane once.)

So what do you do when that self-destructive tendency comes back and conflicts directly with the sense of purpose and responsibility that comes with being a husband and father of three?

You bury it.  You suppress it.  You do everything in your power to ensure that it never affects them.  The problem with that is, when you suppress emotion for that long, eventually it boils over.  This can happen in many ways.  You get…twitchy is the best way to describe it.

My wife knows when I’m getting this way.  We get into useless fights, I fuss at the kids, I get *REALLY* stressed about mundane issues, bills etc.  I dive into my only remaining addiction (caffeine) and bury myself in work so as to do the least damage.  (When going through my phases I absolutely excel at my job, which is to pay attention to the smallest details and the big picture at the same time.)

But the fight is wearying.  You get to where you spend so much time surviving that you aren’t able to live.  So much time fighting for an even keel that you can’t experience the real highs and lows that life has to offer.  So much time drowning in rapid-fire emotions that you don’t have time to feel or enjoy any of them.

Those who’ve never felt true mania don’t know what it’s really about.