It is 3 a.m. and a man of 41 is happy.

He has slept two hours. He feels as if he has slept twelve.

Since midnight he has registered a company, sketched a product that will be written in Python by the weekend, and booked guitar lessons, three a week, because a man with this much energy cannot be expected to learn slowly. His thoughts arrive faster than his fingers, so he types faster. Everyone he loves is slower than he is, and he forgives them.

Mostly.

Sakkath, he tells the ceiling.

By every metric we publish, he is thriving. This is mania. Nobody has told him, and the mind that would have to tell him is the one running the show.

Let me return a stolen word. I have called a Tuesday bipolar. I have called a colleague bipolar for answering one email in two moods. I owe the word an apology.

Mania is a stretch and not a swing. Everyone swings. A manic episode runs a week or more, or any length if a hospital becomes necessary, with elevated or irritable mood and energy turned up past the dial. It travels with companions: inflated confidence, racing thoughts, pressured speech, a mind that cannot stay on one window, a surge of purposeful activity, a taste for risk. The savings go. The company gets founded on a Tuesday and announced on a Wednesday. Hypomania is the quieter cousin. Four days, ordinary life still standing, and from the outside it looks like a very good quarter.

I have sat in review meetings where it would have been promoted.

Irritable is in the definition. Not every mania is joy. Sometimes the world has simply become slow and stupid and in the way, and the short fuse gets filed under personality. A man can carry that file for twenty years.

The strangest symptom is also the most exact. The insomniac wants sleep and cannot find it. The manic does not want it. Three hours, two hours, none, and the body files no complaint. Nobody has solved sleep. The department that files complaints has gone home.

I write for clarity as a hobby, on the working belief that a clear sentence means a clear mind. Mania is the counterexample. At 3 a.m. the prose is superb. Short, certain, every clause pre-approved. He reads the manifesto back and it is the best thing he has written in a year. That is the diagnosis, hiding inside the compliment.

Every instrument we own for checking a mind is a mind. In depression, the instrument reports its own failure at full volume, whether or not the failure is real. In mania, it reports that it has never worked better. Insight, the faculty that would raise the alarm, is the first thing the episode borrows and the last thing it returns. He is not lying. He is reading accurately off a broken gauge.

Code is kinder. A wrong program fails with a traceback, a red line, a number. A wrong mind throws no exception. It returns a confident value and carries on. Anyone who has written Python at 2 a.m. knows the brilliant fix is the bug by nine.

A guitar teacher knows the small version. Students rush. Excitement drags the tempo forward and the player feels it as fluency, never as error. Hence the metronome, a clock outside the head that does not care how the playing feels. A tiny Ulysses contract, clicking.

The large version belongs to Odysseus. He knew the Sirens would sound like the truest thing he had ever heard, and he knew he would believe it. So he used his judgment before the song and not during it. Tied to the mast, wax in the crew’s ears, one instruction: when I beg, tighten.

Psychiatry has a duller version. A plan written in a well season of dulling drugs. The early signs (sleep below a set number of hours, a purchase above a set sum), the person who gets to say it is happening, and what follows. Programmers would call these assertions, written sober and enforced otherwise. The plan asks the well self to distrust the unwell one, and the unwell one to sign nothing.

Men do not write this plan. We say we are fine and treat the appointment as a concession. Add the Indian family WhatsApp group and the appointment needs a cover story. The Sirens were never worried about any of this.

Underneath sits the question I cannot answer. The man at 3 a.m. feels more like himself than he has in years. The man who wrote the plan says that feeling is the symptom. Both are him. I am 41, and I have mistaken a good week for character often enough to distrust anyone who knows which one is real. Including me.

For many, the high ends in a crash, and the crash is the part that gets a name and a doctor. The high gets a LinkedIn post.

If any of this sounds like a week you know, see a psychiatrist. Mania responds to treatment, and the treatment is mercifully dull.

And if you woke tomorrow feeling better than you have ever felt, whom would you ask?

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