'Twenty-hour days were not uncommon. In the meantime my 
dress had become slightly eccentric ...'

Few of you have ever had the experience of waking up 
from a drunken stupor in a strange city in a strange 
country, jobless and friendless and nearly penniless. 
You don't really want to be sober, for aside from the 
unwelcome intrusion of reality, you also find your 
psyche playing host to the type of cold fusion nuclear 
reaction that demands instant release.

Rage, Goddess, sing the Rage - a line from Homer. The 
shrinks have no adequate description for it - agitated 
depression, dysphoric mania, a mixed state, mania and 
depression fused into an explosive kinetic ball of 
emotional kilotonnage, one that makes the very act of 
living totally unbearable. It was simply a matter of 
following through.

Meanwhile, as I lay sprawled on the floor of an
apartment that I could ill afford to pay the rent 
on, it was a beautiful summer day in Melbourne, 
Australia. Outside my window the eucalyptus trees 
that lined my street created the impression of an 
urbanized Eden, while the kookaburras' shrill laughter 
in the distance sounded forth a Midsummer Night's 
Dreamscape of fairyland gaiety.

But the rumbling of the tramways around the corner 
represented my one-way ticket out this life, out of 
my private little hell. I only had to change trams 
maybe once or twice to put me within walking distance 
of the suspension bridge that spanned the harbor.

Only seven months before I had been on a plane to 
Melbourne bound for a bright new life. I had sent out 
my resume to the major Australian newspapers and 
business magazines, and four editors had made me an 
offer. Oddly enough, I snapped at the one that offered 
the least money, lured by the idea of making my mark 
on a paper going through the kind of changes I revelled 
in.

This had been my modus operandi in New Zealand, taking 
over stodgy publications and giving them the old 
razzamatazz. I had done this on a law journal, an 
accountant's journal, a finance journal, and the business 
pages of a national Sunday newspaper. My average tenure 
lasted about a year. My longest stay was three years. On 
my last job, they integrated the Sunday paper into the 
daily one, and I had been left out in the cold. Looking 
back, my downsizing only served to delay my ultimate crash 
and burn.

Oh, the motor had been running hard back in New Zealand. 
The new Labor Government there had surprised everyone by 
becoming more right-wing than the right-wingers had ever 
been, and a whole new wildwest economy had been born, 
dominated by capitalist cowboys with paper fortunes who 
had Parliament at their beck and call. Suddenly, instead 
of operating on the fringes of journalism, we business/
finance journalists were front stage center, smugly looking 
down our noses at our less-knowing brethren in the 
Parliamentary gallery.

Fifteen-hour days were par for the course, and twenty-hour 
days were not uncommon. In the meantime my dress had become 
slightly eccentric, featuring brightly colored socks and 
ties and a collection of broad-brimmed Humphrey Bogart 
fedoras. The thing I am most proud of during all that time 
was that, unlike many of my colleagues, I never glorified 
any of these capitalist cowboys. It would have been easy 
to fill up space with material put out by their PR flaks, 
but I resisted pressure from a lot of quarters and put my 
readers first.

It took me a little while to find my rhythm in Australia, 
but by September my old habits were returning. Then came 
the stockmarket crash of October 1987, and - thanks to all 
those paper fortunes going up in smoke - nowhere in the 
world did it hit harder than in Australia and New Zealand. 
By then, I had found my niche as the paper's cowboy 
capitalist reporter, and I covered the spectacle of their 
downfall across the entire continent, plus New Zealand. I 
treated the airline as my bus service, up to Sydney and 
back again the same day, perhaps Brisbane, over to Perth 
for a longer stay, not to mention New Zealand, always on 
short notice, usually not knowing for sure when I would 
return.

Often I literally composed the stories in my head, 
dictating them over the phone to someone at the other 
end in hopes of making it into the next edition. On one 
occasion, I actually found myself reviewing a Frank 
Sinatra concert, which got major play on the paper's 
entertainment pages, together with about three or four 
pieces of mine that appeared on the business pages that 
same day.

An acquaintance from New Zealand then living in Melbourne 
called me up and commented on my output, for which I had 
a ready answer: "Yeh, well it was my turn to write the 
paper that day."

Oh, I had the one-liners coming. I was floating on air. 
On a return visit to New Zealand I was even nice to my 
ex-wife and her boyfriend. Somewhere, I found the time 
to fit in a brief fling with someone who had just left 
her husband.

But the high was beginning to turn on me. Sometimes I 
found myself snapping at people, which was very 
uncharacteristic of me. Once, on the tram, on my way 
to work in the early morning, I found myself on the 
brink of physically attacking some wise-assed teenager. 
I actually got up out of my seat and went for his neck 
before I caught myself. And then there was the issue of 
my six month salary review.

Based on my performance, I was certainly entitled to 
a substantial raise. No, it was not delusional. The 
delusional part came in thinking I couldn't be replaced. 
When the editor failed to make me a decent offer I quit 
in a huff, bitterly resentful over his treatment of me. 
Furious, in fact, in a blind rage. I told my colleagues 
what had happened and they looked at me like I was 
crazy. Didn't anyone understand?

Hell with them, I thought. I'll just apply for another 
job. But this time there were no takers. No one would 
touch me with a ten-foot pole. I happened to encounter 
one of the paper's big name journalists in a nearby 
pub, and he literally turned his back on me, pointedly 
refusing to acknowledge my existence.

I was nothing, a non-person, a pariah.

Meanwhile, I would walk for hours - occasionally breaking 
out into a run - feeling the cold fusion inside my psyche 
pulsing and surging and desperately seeking a fast way out. 
Going to sleep was like the Fourth of July. All I had to 
do was close my eyes to experience the fireworks flashing 
onto my retinal screen. I would open my eyes only to find 
shadows and objects merging in the dark into an ominous 
new hellscape. I was on the brink of breaking out into 
full-scale hallucinations, and I knew that fairly soon 
I would be going mad

I'M NORMAL! I wanted to shout. I've always been normal. 
This was just - stress - that was it. New location, crazy 
working hours. I just needed to slow down, that was all.

But no, that wasn't it, I decided in a Damascus Road flash 
of insight. I needed a religious experience, a spiritual 
transformation, a zen moment, a cosmic turbocharge. Then 
everything would be fine, better than fine, in fact. 
Perfect - I could walk the earth as an enlightened being. 
I'm ready! I let God know. Plug me in.

I found myself prowling the bookshops, spending my dwindling 
supply of funds on books about Tibet and eastern religions 
and white magic. I tried to float out of my body and talk 
to spirits and will my hair to grow in and move objects by 
thought, knowing the only thing holding me back was my lack 
of ability to change my vibrations and concentrate my mind. 

But it was only a matter of time. 

But now there was the small matter of me on the floor 
emerging from a drunken stupor in a strange new country 
with no job, no friends, almost no money, and no hope of 
finding work. But just when the idea of jumping off a 
bridge seemed my only alternative, another option presented 
itself:

I'll write a book, I thought. On the stock market crash. 
The idea had actually crossed my mind much earlier, while 
still at work, but now there was a certain desperate 
quality to the proposition. That day I grabbed hold of a 
typewriter and began pounding on the keys:

"A stock market crash has no setting," I wrote. "It occurs 
in people's minds, a collective will that determines what 
is valuable and what is worthless, from day to day, minute 
to minute. To understand finance has nothing to do with 
economics or accounting. Instead, it is a philosophical 
discipline, of the mind determining reality, the natural 
territory of Kant and Plato and the rest."

In nothing flat I filled up a page, then another and 
another, all rushing out in a frothy stream requiring 
very little rewriting. Paradoxically, this new state 
of productive mania pulled me away from my more destructive 
old state. As the days went on, I began to enjoy my new 
life working from my apartment. I would pour a glass of 
wine or make myself a cup of tea, and put on Duke Ellington 
or Beethoven or any number of composers in between, and 
settle in for a pleasant round at the keyboard. Later I 
would go out for a walk in my urbanized Eden.

The creative afterburners were running white hot by the 
time I put sheet number two hundred in my typewriter: 
"One would never know there'd been a crash," I banged 
out. "It was a different sort of disaster in a new world 
of intangibles - far more subtle than a nuclear bomb - 
one that could practically be willed away in a Berkelian-
Kantian outburst of subjective idealism - or was it the 
other way around?"

I finished my book in five weeks, and very soon after I 
found an agent and a publisher. Lest I be seen to be 
giving my manic phase all the credit, let me make it clear 
that I did not write that book so much as retrieve it. 
The book was actually the product of six years of immersion 
in the world of business and finance, and several years 
before that in law and many more years working at my craft 
as a writer, plus a whole lifetime of reading and learning. 
By the time I came to sit down at the keyboard, my brain 
knew exactly what to do. Mania may have been a part of 
the process, but only as an accessory to the deed.

Once I had a publisher lined up, the inevitable letdown 
occurred. I literally didn't get out of my bed for weeks. 
Meanwhile, my depression was punctuated by the kind of 
rages that could very easily be mistaken for mania. In 
fact, mania may have intruded into my depression. These 
"mixed" states, by the way, continue to perplex the 
psychiatric profession, who can't seem to agree amongst 
themselves.

Over time my depression eased and I took on another major
writing assignment. As for my Damascus Road experiences, 
there was no turning back. I now began to explore my 
innate spirituality in a far less delusional fashion, 
and experienced several immediate benefits. The meditation 
and yoga I began practicing brought me back from the 
edge, and gave me a sense of hope. I also found that 
after years in the single-minded world of business and 
finance, my thinking became far more three-dimensional.

But my miraculous "recovery" prevented me from seeking 
real help. My minor successes only served to fuel grandiose 
ideas, and my resurrection back into the real world gave 
way to the intoxication of mild mania. In time I would be 
felled by a cascading series of killer depressions. It 
was only when I had an irresistible vision of myself 
swinging from the balcony of my bedroom that I finally 
called out.

Fortunately I was back in the States with my family 
able to help.

It has taken me six months to claw my way back to a state 
where I actually had an experience of feeling happy 
without being in a state of mania or hypomania. All my 
life I have always wanted to be normal and fit in, even 
though I knew from day one almost that I was different. 
But now normal has taken on a new meaning. Normal is what 
is normal for me.

These days, thanks to medications and talking therapy and 
a strict diet and exercise and sleeping regime, I have 
declared an uneasy truce with my disorder. I have learned 
to live with this beast inside me, even with the knowledge 
that it could very well bring me down at a moment's notice 
and show me no mercy. It has taken me into faraway places 
and endowed me with near-mystical qualities and insights 
plus real-world wisdom and skills. It has brought me 
closer to God and myself and my fellow human beings. But 
it has also reduced me to nothing and taken away everything 
I had. It has left me for dead, powerless to fight, feeling 
abandoned by both God and man.

And so I must accept what I am, the bad as well as the 
good, the ridiculous as well as the sublime. Maybe then, 
in my own way that is unique to me, I can feel as though 
I fit in. Maybe then, after nearly a lifetime of feeling 
different, I can say for the first time - and say it like 
I really mean it - that I am truly normal.

Originally written, September 28, 1999, for Suite 101.com where John writes about Depression.