Manic Episode 4: Idea #213 “The Social Nukeworks”

During my 4th manic episode, I had this idea:

“Trust yourself enough to nuke your social networks, and start over by texting your direct contacts to rebuild. Refine and Regrow. Let the power of wildfires and earthquakes and floods power your network and connections? Burn it down and trust yourself and bet on yourself in your ability to be able to regrow. You have brand new opportunity to catch new people in your orbit. Trust in yourself in your ability to regrow your dendrites, brain plasticity is an incredible phenomenon, and it is regrowing connections, as though they were never there.”

…hmm… this one I’m not too sure about in it’s validity for the real world or for other people… seems a bit out there… …do remember, I was still manic when I had this idea…

But, the inspiration for this though came from my own nuking of my own social networks after my third, very rocky, manic episode at the beginning of 2020 (even before the shitstorm of the pandemic began!). Maybe there is still something to learn here.

My third episode was rough. For me, and for everyone around me. If I am to boil down the main problem that I dealt with that time was this:

I believed I was in control of myself, and I was not.

Over the course of my third manic episode, I posted and shared a lot of stuff online that betrayed the trust of those around me. There is lot more to say about that experience, but I am not going to explain how it all played out in this post, if ever on this blog. Let’s get a coffee or a beer sometime and I’ll talk you through it.

After I had regained actual control of the situation, and after doing lots of damage to my relationships with my family,

I decided to nuke all of my social accounts.

(okay… well, not all of them. Reddit survived the purge, but I didn’t post any of my manic stuff there during the episode).

And when I say nuke. I mean nuke-nuke, to the roots. Not suspend or any pseudo version of closing my accounts to be revived later. I mean I went deep, deep into the secret locations and labyrinthine dungeons of the account settings, communed with the unholy digital devil trinity of Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Nadella, and performed the requisite cabalistic ritual sacrifices that are required of mortals to validate that yes, I do indeed, want to forsake and banish my accounts eternally.

Maybe the move to nuke everything was a bit drastic, but hey, it happened, and I dealt with it.

I am now, finally, getting back into social.

As you can tell by my menu bar. But I am doing it very differently this time. For the most part, I am creating my social accounts under my blog-titular pseudonym, Mad Grad Dad. My family is much more comfortable with this approach.

I think that staying away from social accounts was the right thing to do, for a time. In the 15-month span between my third and fourth manic episodes (all of which was during the pandemic) I was able to get better in touch with what was important for me to share with others in person or online.

However, after a while, I was far too lonely with only my thoughts and feelings about living with bipolar. I only had two or three significant people in my life that I could really talk to about my condition openly, which is far too little. I needed to recreate my online existence. The prime evils of Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Nadella opened their arms wide to accept me into the cabal again.

So I created a flight of new accounts to seek out the online bipolar community. My hope is to be a leader in the bipolar online space, but obviously that will take some time. For now, I am just happy to be a part of the ongoing conversations, and to commiserate with the rest of the online bipolar tribe.

And here is a great upside to my necessary online rebirth:

Starting over is one of my favorite things to do.

This has been a blessing and a curse of mine, but let’s just focus on the upsides for now. I get high on new projects (in a good way, usually). The novelty of it all and the opportunities to learn new things and develop my skills are so just so much fun. The state of social media has changed very much since my last entry to all of the outlets that exist now. I never got much into twitter in the past, and given the changes to facebook that have happened over the last 15 years, there was plenty of new stuff to learn about getting started again.

So I jumped in to twitter, facebook, instagram, and reddit (a new, fresh, and shiny account) with both feet, no longer as _____, but as Mad Grad Dad.

Whether I prescribe others to nuke their accounts is debatable. But, I can tell my story about how it worked out for me. See you next week!