When Grief Turns Into Mania, Not Depression

Everyone expects grief to look like collapse. A person who can’t get out of bed, who goes quiet and grey and small. That’s the version we’re taught, and for a while, that was mine.

But grief doesn’t always pull you down. Sometimes it launches you. Mine turned into mania — and I didn’t see it happening until I was already someone I didn’t recognize.

Losing her

My mother died in December 2019, after a long illness. She wasn’t just my mom. She was my confidant, my role model, my best friend — the person I turned to no matter what was happening in the world.

I remember standing in the hospital room in her last moments, under that harsh white fluorescent light, everything cold and distant. I held her hand while mine trembled. I kissed her forehead, hugged her one last time, and let go, knowing it was goodbye. I even paused to admire her perfectly polished nails one last time — something so small, and so completely her.

Outside, the world was decorating for the holidays. Music, lights, laughter. I felt disconnected from all of it. What I felt most was numb — a physical numbness, like I’d been switched off.

I needed to feel something. So I went and got piercings, even though I’ve had a serious phobia of needles my whole life. The first time I ever pierced my nose, it felt like being punched in the face. This time I didn’t feel a thing. I didn’t even faint, the way I always do around needles. That’s how numb I was. And it didn’t help. Nothing reached me.

The day I stopped my medication

Then COVID arrived, and the lockdowns, and the isolation stacked on top of the loss. I sank from numb into a depression I couldn’t find the bottom of.

I was on nine medications at the time — antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, an antidepressant, ADHD medication, and more — and none of it was touching how I felt. So, for the first and only time in my life, I decided I was done. I stopped all of them, cold turkey. The only one I kept was my Xanax, because I knew that particular withdrawal can be dangerous, even deadly.

I want to be very clear, because someone reading this might be exactly where I was: I am not a doctor, and I am not telling you to do what I did. Stopping medication suddenly is dangerous, and what happened next is precisely why. I told myself anything would feel better than this. I was wrong about which direction “different” would take me.

The switch flipped

Once the medication cleared my system, it was like a switch flipped. My bottomless depression turned, almost overnight, into mania.

I started waking in the middle of the night to shove all the dining room furniture to one side so I’d have room to dance — sometimes to music only I could hear. I argued with my fiancé over nothing, overreacted to the smallest things, threw myself on the floor, then drowned in guilt about it an hour later. Who was I becoming?

And underneath the chaos was something that felt, at the time, wonderful: I was bursting to create.

I thought I was a star

I decided I was going to be famous. My canvas was YouTube and Instagram. My fiancé — not realizing this was illness, just thinking I’d found a hobby he didn’t want to crush — set me up with a green screen, studio lights, and a real microphone. I sang covers, everything from Madonna to Metallica, and I believed, completely, that I was the next Celine Dion. That people would line the streets of Hollywood to see me. That I belonged on America’s Got Talent — never mind that I’d never so much as sung in a school choir.

When I danced in that dining room, I was certain Tina Turner herself was watching me through the window, admiring my every move. Every view and every like felt like a standing ovation.

I spent a thousand dollars at Victoria’s Secret, because none of my old clothes fit the new star I was becoming — and none of them fit my body anymore either. I was losing weight fast; my shirts slid off my shoulders. My hair, which I’d always been proud of, fell out in clumps.

I can’t watch those videos now. In a stable mind, I could barely do those things in front of a mirror, let alone post them for the world. But that’s the cruel trick of mania: from the inside, it doesn’t feel like illness. It feels like finally being alive.

What I understand now

Grief became mania because I pulled out the one thing holding me level — and grief, it turns out, doesn’t only sink people. For some of us, especially with bipolar disorder, an enormous loss can send us up instead of down. And the “up” can be every bit as dangerous as the “down” — maybe more, because it feels so good you don’t want anyone to stop it.

If you’re grieving and you notice yourself speeding up instead of slowing down — sleeping less, spending more, feeling chosen or special or unstoppable — please tell someone you trust. And please don’t stop your medication to chase relief. That decision didn’t end my pain. It handed the wheel to my illness.

I’m still here. I found my way back. But I lost a whole stretch of my life to a version of grief nobody warned me about — and if telling you means one person recognizes it sooner than I did, then those months weren’t only wreckage.

If any of this sounds familiar, you don’t have to sort it out alone. NAMI is a good place to start, and you can find more on my own getting-help page.