I’ll begin, here, with a caveat: bipolar disorder is hard, makes life harder, and really sucks a lot of the time ? but sometimes that makes the ways in which it’s a gift all the more startling and meaningful (at least, it does for me).

As such, take all of this with however many grains of salt your own experience requires at this time. Just because I feel like I’ve discovered a secret bonus doesn’t mean that’s everyone’s experience, or that everyone needs to feel the same way. To borrow an aphorism from the kink community, “Your Bipolar Is Not My Bipolar, And That’s Okay.”

It has become somewhat de rigeur to talk about bipolar disorder as, perhaps appropriately, both a curse and a blessing.

With it come harrowing depressions and dizzying (sometimes terrifying) manias, instability that can wreck careers and lives, a powerful predisposition to addiction, the very…