I hear it, I feel it, everyday, from the first heartstopping eyeblink at the darkness of my room as I wake for work to the long crawl under bed covers that promise shelter but offer suffocation, paralysis. It's like a jazz drummer who just can't keep time, thrashing through some riffs at dizzying speed and barely able to lift the wooden sticks to strike the skins one moment later. The technical term is bipolar disorder with rapid cycling, but I think it should be shortened to simply "disorder," because that's the cacaphonous clatter that fills your life. Even by the standards of rapid cycling, the turn-on-a-dime rising and falling crescendos that roar like a lunatic looping soundtrack of breaking glass and pounding metal that accompanies each day I suck oxygen is unusually fast, my doctors say. It led me to open the veins in my left wrist and forearm last June and put me in a lock-up psyche ward, then sent me riding a Flash Gordon rocket into the stratosphere as hypomania replaced the abyss of depression, only to sputter out and drop me into another crash-and-burn in the cellophane-blue twilight at the bottom of the depressive abyss. I had to go on disability leave from work for months. And now I can feel it again, as subtle as the first tremors in a spider's web tickled by a panicky moth. I had about a month in the middle place, in the quiet place. But the meds always seem to implode when I least expect them to. Now they're sputtering again. And this is all so wearing, so exhausting, a movie without an ending, a movie in need of editing so that some sense can be made of its chaotic meandering plotline, or the lack of any plotline at all. So I'm sitting here typing because the bed is waiting. And I'll take the meds that send me crashing into the darkness knowing that the first thing I'll feel when I awake in that chill 6 a.m. darkness again will be another panic attack. And I'll pop my pills and climb into my cerebellum cockpit without a clue as to what's been going on with the wiring overnight, and whether the flicker of the joystick will make my mind fly up, plummet down, or simply barrel-roll as I sit facing my computer's stern, no-nonsense digital glare in my office. This malfunctioning piece of junk between my ears offers not the slightest clue. Yes, I manage it with the bloody meds, though less well than I generally admit because it upsets my family. But now, as always, I've finally got to stop typing. Drug myself. And stick to the belief that I'll be able to fly in straight line tomorrow. No surprises. But my fingers compulsively continue their soft-shoe across the black tiles of the keyboard ballroom. It's like a miniature dance marathon. But the only way to win is to never stop.