It could be over a few months, like a new job where one day you feel like actually going to work thinking, hey I actually like these people and don’t mind working here.
Or when your friends have been super busy for months and suddenly you get matched on dating apps, old friends reach out and people want to buy your old junk on Craigslist in a single day.
Yeah. It was so dramatic I knew it would happen again, and waited for it to catch it in the act.
I’m super smart, but also super lazy. I think I’m lazy because I’m smart. School was super easy for me, so I was always bored. I got poor grades overall because I didn’t do the work. I could show up and crush the tests, but felt that homework was a waste of time and never did it. I took AP classes that give college credit, got a weak grade in the class but got 4s and 5s on the AP test. (Out of 5).
Poor grades in highschool meant I couldn’t get into college right away. So I took a few years off and just sort of hung out for a bit. Then the click. I decided I wanted to go to college, not just any, but a really good school. So I went to the local junior college and asked the counselor how I could go there next year. He explained that the transfer program is a two year program, but I wanted to go next year. He said I probably won’t succeed, but here’s a schedule of classes that will get me the two years of credits in one year. 24 units per semester for two semesters. I got straight As. I just did all the work and crushed it. Got into my dream school and studied… philosophy.
Don’t get me wrong, it was what I wanted to study. I got a great education, but it didn’t set me up for a real job after school, more for grad school, but I felt like I was done with school for a while. I ended bartending and waiting tables for years. It was in this phase that I started thinking about that click. Something in me elevated me to get into my dream school within a year once I decided I wanted to. I found peace in that fact. I knew that despite my toiling, working hard just for rent, making it month by month in the city, that I’d elevate myself again when the time was right. I thought a lot about it. That one year of 48 units and straight As was such a blur, what was it that drove me? I was so confident it would just happen again though that I decided to try to consciously catch it in the act.
Sure enough it happened again. Enrolled in a coding boot camp. One year of absolute blur, crushed it, became a successful software engineer. I failed to notice while it was happening, but did think right after: “fuck that was it, that was the thing, I was right, it did happen again!”
Turns out I’m bipolar and was just making the most of my manic upswings.