The Fire That Doesn’t Burn Out

There’s a moment in mania, usually early on, where everything feels like becoming.

You’re golden. Electric. Wide awake in a sleeping world. The ideas come so fast you can’t catch them all, and somehow that doesn’t even matter, because the very having of them feels like flight. Your body buzzes with purpose. Your hands can barely keep up. You feel powerful, divine, and… finally, finally alive.

You clean your whole apartment at 2am.

You start six projects. You finish none.

You text everyone you love and then disappear mid-conversation, pulled into a thread of thought too rich to abandon.

It looks like energy. It feels like energy. But it’s not the kind you can spend. Not really. It’s more like borrowed light. Like a bonfire that roars higher the more kindling you throw in until there’s nothing left but fire.

And then it starts eating you.

That’s the thing no one talks about.

That mania, for all its glitter and drive, is exhausting in a way that doesn’t look like exhaustion.

You don’t sleep, but you don’t feel tired.

You haven’t eaten, but you’re not hungry.

Your body isn’t asking for rest. It’s forgetting how to.

And somewhere in that sleepless stretch, when your mind’s been sprinting for days, the edges blur.

Psychosis doesn’t kick the door in.
It creeps.

First, it feels like a metaphor that’s a little too real. A lyric that knows your name. A coincidence that makes your stomach flip.

Then:
The TV starts talking to you, not just at you.
Your thoughts stop feeling like yours.
Reality doesn’t break. It melts.

I remember once standing at a crosswalk, convinced the streetlights were communicating in Morse code. I stood there for twelve light cycles, translating patterns into messages meant only for me. I wasn’t scared. That came later. At the time, it felt important. Sacred, even.

Psychosis, at first, feels like revelation.
But slowly, subtly, it steals the ground from under you.
It distorts every reflection until you can’t tell if you’re the prophet or the problem.
And by the time you realise you’re slipping, you’re already underwater.

Mania is a thief dressed like a saviour.
It gives you the illusion of being limitless, only to drain you from the inside out.
It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t warn you when it’s done.

It just vanishes leaving you scattered, shaken, and unsure if the world you’re waking up to is the same one you left behind.