"Oh, you must be really creative."

I was chatting with a Canadian friend and a few people she knows on msn last night. One of them was almost visibly bouncing around the chat, declaring that he was bipolar. He danced around, saying how great it is to be so creative, playing music, writing, painting. Oh, how gifted he is. Oh how lucky he is.

I told him that I, too, am bipolar.

"Wow, are you creative too?" he gushed, "It's amazing isn't it."

I didn't really know how to respond. Yes, in a certain, very narrow band of hypomania, I can produce incredible things. My mind races and things flow in such a way that I'm frustrated the rest of the time when I cannot summon it at will. I cannot sit down and say, "Today, I will be brilliant. People around me will be in awe." But there again who can?

The creativity produced by hypomania and the lower bands of mania, for me at least, are fractured and frustrating. So many thoughts. So many brilliant thoughts. Woe betide you if you do not instantly agree with all of them. Ideas and plans racing faster, falling over each other to get out of my head. I know a million riffs and can play them perfectly, but cannot string together a song and play it in its entirety. I have a thousand ideas and themes that I can interweave into the best novel you are ever likely to read, and yet I cannot finish the first sentence. I can focus on a concept with extreme clarity, and know my understanding is thorough, but I'm wrong. As wrong as can be. Yet, I cannot see it. Everyone else is an idiot, but they can't see it. Only I, with the gift of manic clarity and creativity, can.

Although we never see Marvin's manic state in The Hichhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, some of his expresssions ring oh-so-true.

"Reverse primary thrust, Marvin." That's what they say to me. "Open airlock number 3, Marvin." "Marvin, can you pick up that piece of paper?" Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper.