When I get a little hypomanic, or a lot hypomanic, or dangerously manic, I have energy and a willingness to engage humanity at the same time and curious ideas come out that are teaching me about how my brain works and doesn’t work. I share thoughts for myself and for others, because not all people with these conditions can describe what is happening to them and maybe there is something helpful by being transparent.
Right now I have a lot of parts in my life where things are working well (or better) than when I was first “lost” in 2022 and in a hospital because my brain had stormed out of control. And in 2023, two times I failed to take my condition seriously and failed to get support or to use medication and it again put me back into the hospital. I have not been close to hospitalization for 20 months, but I have been relying on a support team with therapists and a psychiatrist and friends, to navigate this world and not so easily be set off by it. My wellness team started to plan for and learn about my mood swings that can come from overstimulating my brain. We started to openly discuss what parts of doing things like puzzles are turning on the addictive / dopamine parts of my brain in a dangerous way. And from group therapy and other settings I’ve found commonalities in others’ lived experience when their conditions or their “drugs” are different, whether ketamine or doom-scrolling on a phone.
I am not smart enough — no one is — to handle a condition like bipolar disorder alone. With a team, I’m hopeful we can manage it. Mental (I)llness becoming mental (We)llness. But not without weeks like this where I’m in a high state and my neurons are firing and I need to be typing ideas to slow them down because my inhibitory system is not working well.
So what does this have to do with puzzles? And can’t we just get back to puzzles and find the “soma” we crave as an escape from the pain of the world? Well, let me tell you that I can’t tell you about my favorite puzzle of last year without sharing I could not have discovered it without doing something dangerous. Playing in an addicting puzzlehunt.
In summer 2024 I saw someone mention the Galactic Puzzle Hunt used an unusual and fun new structure and was something people should check out. I really trusted the person and had the time over the second weekend to try. I don’t like remote solving hunts ever so I just soloed the hunt. It was the most addictive form of a puzzle hunt I have seen, because of its structure. I failed to live up to some of my self-care goals as a result. My sleep hygiene went bad because there were always these small puzzles to solve that often had loose themes and lots of small Ahas like little hits of dopamine that gave you a new thing to do right away so 10 PM and time to sleep became 2 AM became next day became full weekend until Hunt was done. I know better, and still the desperation of a lonely September weekend became taking too many hits of drug-like puzzles in a digitally supplied form. It was all the worst techniques of modern free-to-play games that have made timed returns and releases and nudge nudge nudge commitments served up to the kind of genius who can independently solve a puzzle hunt in just two to three days and will never feel that stuck.
Still, besides these little hits of energy, there were the larger experiences (celestial puzzles) that engaged a different part of the brain with a larger challenge. Like one logic puzzle set that used a song on infinite repeat, “Rock Lobster”, which is a song I now have in my could listen to it forever list. One way to lose track of time: play a puzzle with a looping soundtrack. Rock Lobster!
By far the most intellectually and philosophically stimulating puzzle was called the Kid, my favorite puzzle of 2024. It involved playing with blocks, trying to learn a set of rules and thinking you succeeded only to maybe not and trying again with a new hypothesis. Doing that for awhile until you finally get to a last step where unless you have mastery you cannot win and the learning jump is not at all forgiving. To me the Kid exemplifies the problem solving challenges of life and the different approaches to address them. How real intelligence (from people or from machines) means crossing lots of hurdles in different ways. Brute force search can do some parts of Kid better than I ever can. Perhaps without any learning. But then there were the parts of the puzzle where even I was just starting with brute force until I could grab onto a pattern and form and test hypotheses. it is impossible to complete the full puzzle without being a high intelligence. But high in our scale, it is probably just a Kid for where intelligence could get to. Human and machine? Actual intelligence and not artificial?
The Kid wasn’t necessarily the easiest or hardest of the big puzzles, but it is the one that sticks with me. In the day after I finished the hunt I was suddenly hypomanic, reading Silver Linings Playbook which further engaged my bipolar self and the focus on triggering songs that bring back good/bad memories and now one like that with “Rock Lobster!”. I wrote unusual poetry, a work I’ll call “Where we’re going we don’t need phones”, if I ever release it, connecting the Kid to bipolar to the number 19 to my best female friends to music and so much more. I have a style of writing now when where hypomanic I type a thought, hit enter, type a related thought, hit enter, and continue. A long brain chain of poetry spits out with connections that are obvious to me but maybe few others between thoughts so while it jumps from sights and sounds and ideas all around my brain there are cohesive themes that pop back up as I return to focus. Sometimes typing thought after thought forms a piece like this. A large amount of my highly important workplace writing is controlled hypomania as I see it now. A large amount of my freeform nonsense is something else.
You don’t get the Rock Lobster poem today. The first time I wrote like that I was absolutely manic, thought I needed to write without being able to see for a while so I shut my eyes and fumbled my way to a computer and then fumbled a way into typing and such. My “all white” poem as I could only see blinding ideas without my eyes. That piece is revelatory and frightening in how the artist was working. In the same way seeing Van Gogh’s works not only when he was self-asylumed but also in the days he wouldn’t leave his room are, to recognize aspects of form and dysfunction that I can write to my Theo (you all on the internet) in a new way. I don’t think you are ready for those words when I’m much higher in creative state. But writing them was a part of my therapy. Because getting some thoughts out of my head and onto paper or whatever stops those neurons from firing briefly. Gradually the brain storm becomes a drizzle becomes just a healthy cloudy Seattle day if I can do it right. That was the situation in Seattle behind “Where we’re going we don’t need phones”. Because my brain was storming, I found a need to just sit on a park bench with the promise to eat pizza after my ideas were out of my head. 1 hour and then that pizza and then normal sleep and use of medication later I had managed a potentially overwhelming set of ideas in ways I hadn’t before. I didn’t get stuck in an escalating hypomania. I decided to be deliberately careful before playing another puzzle hunt in any mode, and I still haven’t. I may never play in a puzzle hunt again. I certainly need to have a handler / accountability partner for “eat, drink, sleep” checks throughout the day if I do.
So puzzles affect my brain in the way an addict’s might be. Do you want to know something else that I am addicted to, that sends my brain to interesting places? Being near people. I don’t see them often in my normal life, and far less since the pandemic, and love releases a set of “dangerous” chemicals to me given how socially isolated most of my days are. I’m learning better to manage them, but I knew SudokuCon would probably push me into an elevated mood for at least 5-7 days and it has done so. I am still getting some sleep, I am using the rescue medications even earlier to stay stabilized. This is controlled writing, but it is important and unusual writing. An ok question is “Thomas are you okay?” and my answer is “yes, I’m actually better than fine. I think I’ve finally found a life mission since feeling ‘lost’ but I should be sleeping more”.
I think I’m about to focus onto a specific life mission by using sudoku, but I can’t ignore how dangerous puzzles have been in my later adult life in coping with the world. I didn’t grow up by drinking alcohol or doing any other real drugs. My tolerance set-points are different, but dopaminergic addiction still a problem all the same particularly with a neurodivergent brain.
That is the last I’ll say for now on mental issues. The Kid raises a host of ideas about intelligence and proving it through puzzles. We’ll get to real and artificial modes of intelligence soon, whatever day I wake up with a need to type and clear my head as part of restoring order.
Rock Lobster!
