Comment by intenex

It reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt’s constant state of hypomania throughout his entire life - https://ibpf.org/theodore-the-roosevelt-bipolar-inheritance-...

Honestly that’s a huge compliment to me - if I can pull off the semblance of hypomania while remaining mostly functional, it basically means I manage to live a hilariously exuberant life with minimal downsides

From the profile on Teddy:

“Kay Redfield Jameson, one of the leading experts on bipolar disorder and a sufferer herself, has described Theodore Roosevelt as “hypomanic on a mild day.” Mark Twain warned that “we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane and irresponsible.”

Exuberant and childlike were two adjectives often used to describe our 26th president. The man bounced around like a rubber ball. Known at Harvard as a “locomotive in human pants,” one of his classmates noted of Roosevelt: “When it was not considered good form to move at more than a walk, Roosevelt was always running.” British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice observed: “You must always remember that the president is about six.”

But Roosevelt was also tremendously productive. He wrote 40 books, read at least one book a day, wrote 150,000 or so letters, and lived a “strenuous life” with regular exercise. He acted impulsively and unpredictably — burning an official portrait of himself he didn’t like, going skinny dipping in the Potomac with the French ambassador, taking a plunge in a submarine and later hopping on an airplane, and participating in a seance with Harry Houdini.“

So thank you for that :). I do admit committing to buying a random house in Japan on a whim less than a week from first having the idea (we just saw two places yesterday and one was so perfect we canceled our two showings today and submitted our purchase application) does feel a bit manic, and I’ve actually had one clear discrete manic episode in the past (only seems to happen under severe pressure and sleep deprivation; in that instance it was 9 years ago and I had been running a new super high octane startup lifestyle and basically set a deadline that in a week start to finish we’d start fundraising and finish raising 5 million and it was nonstop talking to people for 14 hours a day every day and on the last day I woke up completely convinced this would become the largest company in the world and that this was an inevitable fact of the world. I will say this was incredibly effective for fundraising and we totally managed to hit our funding target incredibly, but I also totally torpedoed and destroyed my relationship at the time on the last day of that exercise that triggered the mania, which hilariously seems to have sobered me up enough to have short circuited the manic episode. Truly fascinating stuff) and several clear hypomanic episodes.

I do think the jet lag and weird sleep hours and lack of sleep from all the travel to Japan right now could be a clear catalyst for some degree of hypomania, though at the risk of doing the classically unreliable narrator thing of a manic person self diagnosing themselves as totally not manic, I will caveat that by saying I do feel like I actually have a pretty good grasp on if I’m feeling hypomanic or not from past experiences, especially if someone calls it out explicitly, and this doesn’t feel like it meets the bar.

Case in point, I’m generally more extroverted when I’m hypomanic and so would possibly be totally down to meet, but I’m still my generally relatively introverted self. Impulsivity also seems relatively low, obviously with the huge caveat that I’m buying a house in a foreign country and decided to fly there last minute on a whim. That being a singular impulse qualifies as relatively low impulse for me

The confounding factors are that I’m definitely both ADHD and autistic, and the ADHDness absolutely helps contribute to conflating massive openness to experience and lack of impulse control and both the ADHD and autism really help with hyperfixation that can present as a manic degree of fixation/energy about something, so there’s that to consider :)

And now you’ve clearly triggered another giant stream of consciousness rant that is possibly both endearing and manic

Anyway, appreciate the positivity and the rooting and the personal perspective!

I agree I truly would love to learn Japanese and do need to give it more of a shot - I just unfortunately happen to be genuinely abysmal at language learning. It’s honestly shocking how bad I am at it given that I’m otherwise relatively intellectually intact on the scale of human intelligence, but I’m absolutely stunted in some way when it comes to language lol. Putting my growth mindset hat on I’d say this probably isn’t an inherent defect but some profound lack of interest for some reason - try as hard as I can, and I just can’t seem to bring myself to muster the intellectual curiosity to go deep with a language. Quite possibly the result of a classically Chinese upbringing where the entire concept of the humanities were largely lost on us as a familial unit (with, interestingly enough, a large caveat clause on literature, though even there I’m basically exclusively into sci fi and fantasy and classically a STEM nerd in every sense of the word). I do hope one day I’m able to overcome this character defect, but as anyone with ADHD knows, willpower alone is not quite the answer. I need to creatively find some way to actually find it fascinating and hyperfixate and rabbit hole on it and I’m sure a year would be plenty if that ended up being the case for me to acquire some functional degree of fluency. One can hope!

But yes - definitely feel free to hit me up at intenex@gmail.com when you’re next in Japan and maybe our paths will cross! I’m making an Airbnb-esque app for friends and family to be able to book staying at our soon to be new Kyoto home too for free whenever it’s not occupied by us, and you’re welcome to stay whenever when that’s all live and operational as well :)