The First Warm Day

There is a particular day in Minnesota — every Minnesotan knows the one I mean — when the temperature climbs past fifty for the first time since October and the entire state loses its collective mind. People appear on patios in shorts and T-shirts. Someone, somewhere, is grilling. The snow has not fully melted — it persists in dirty piles along the north sides of buildings and in the shadows of parking ramps, holding on with the particular stubbornness of a season that does not believe it has been fired — but the air has shifted, and the sun has an angle to it that suggests intent, and the whole state exhales in unison, as though winter had been holding a hand over its mouth and has finally let go.

I love this day. I also fear it.

My therapist has a phrase for what happens to me in spring. She calls it “being aware of your mood.” This is the clinical way of saying: the thing you are feeling right now, this warmth, this expansion, this sense that the world has been returned to you in color after months of grey — you need to determine whether this is a normal human response to sunlight or whether your brain is doing the thing it does. The thing with a name. The thing that starts as euphoria and climbs, and climbs, and does not always come back down the way it went up.

Hypomania. The prefix means “under” or “below,” which makes it sound like the lesser version, the manageable one, the introductory offer. And it is, in the way that a lit match is the lesser version of a house fire. It feels wonderful. It feels like competence and clarity and the conviction that you have finally, after months of winter and medication and maintenance, arrived at the version of yourself that was always supposed to be running the show. The sun is out. Your thoughts are quick. Your energy is abundant. Everything is, at last, going well.

This is the particular danger of a symptom that feels like a gift.

—

I was eighteen in the spring of 1999. A senior in high school, technically, though the word “senior” implies a level of participation I had not been providing. I had spent much of that year at home. The closest diagnosis the doctors could muster was “severe migraines,” which was the late-nineties catch-all for a teenager whose brain was doing something the available vocabulary could not yet describe. The migraines were real — the pain was real, the sensitivity to light was real, the days spent in a dark bedroom were real. But they were also, I suspect now, the visible edge of something larger, the part of the iceberg that doctors could point to and name because the rest of it was underwater and nobody had thought to look.

When I felt well enough, I would go into the school for a few hours per week. I participated in a group tutoring session — a small collection of students who, for various reasons, were not attending classes on the regular schedule. Primarily, this group consisted of the pregnant teens. There were several of them, at various stages, navigating math worksheets and English essays while navigating the particular logistics of being seventeen and expecting. I fit into this group the way I fit into most groups at that time — awkwardly, without a clear category, a boy with severe migraines among girls with morning sickness, all of us trying to finish something we had started under different circumstances.

The teacher who supervised these sessions was a woman who split her attention between our academic progress and CNBC. This was the DotCom era. The NASDAQ was performing in ways that made grown men giddy, and our tutor was no exception. She would glance at our worksheets, nod approvingly or circle an error, and then turn back to the screen where analysts in suits discussed tech stocks with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for playoff games. The ticker scrolled along the bottom. Names of companies that would not exist in two years appeared and disappeared like subtitles in a language no one would soon remember. The teacher watched it the way some people watch weather — with interest, with investment, with the belief that what was happening on screen was connected to his own life in ways that would shortly be disproven by reality.

I was aware of this only peripherally. I was eighteen. The stock market was an abstraction. What was not abstract was the fact that I was almost done — I had accumulated enough credits to finish high school a few months early, and the end was visible, and the migraines were lifting, and spring was arriving.

Spring arrived.

I remember the day. Or I remember a composite of days that has hardened into a single memory, which is how memory works when you are reconstructing the past through the lens of a diagnosis you would not receive for another twenty years. I was sitting outside, in the sun, reading George Orwell’s *1984*. The sun was warm on my face. The air smelled like thawing earth — that particular Minnesota smell in April when the frost releases its grip on the soil and the ground exhales months of cold, a smell that is part mud and part promise and part the slow rot of everything autumn left behind.

I was reading about Winston Smith and Big Brother and the telescreen, and the sun was warm, and I was happy.

Not just happy. Euphoric. The kind of happiness that does not have a specific cause, that is not a response to good news or achievement or resolution but simply exists — a state of being, a frequency the brain has tuned itself to, a brightness that seems to come from inside rather than from the sun that is warming your face. I felt, sitting there with Orwell and the April light, that things were finally right. That the migraines were over. That the dark year was behind me. That I was emerging into something better, something earned, something that had been waiting for me on the other side of the winter.

I am certain, now, that I was hypomanic. The euphoria, the sense of emergence, the conviction that the darkness was behind me and the light was ahead — these are the calling cards. These are the things my therapist asks about when she asks me to be aware of my mood. But at eighteen, in the spring of 1999, sitting outside with a paperback and a face full of sun, I did not have the vocabulary for what was happening. I had “feeling good for the first time in months,” which is a sentence that could describe recovery or could describe the early stages of an episode. The difference between the two is visible only in retrospect — like the difference between a scenic overlook and the edge of a cliff, which, from certain angles, look exactly the same.

—

Three years later. Spring of 2002. Duluth this time — the undergraduate years, the city perched on the hillside above Lake Superior, where spring arrives late and grudgingly and with the particular passive-aggression of a lake that keeps the air temperature fifteen degrees below the rest of the state well into May. But when the warmth finally breaks through, when the sun overpowers the lake’s objections and the ice begins its long retreat from the shore, the feeling is the same. The same expansion. The same brightness. The same tuning-fork hum of the brain clicking into a frequency that feels like pure clarity.

I was driving. Windows down. Moby’s “We Are All Made of Stars” was on the stereo — a song that is, by any objective measure, a piece of early-2000s pop electronica that does not withstand serious musical analysis. It is dreamy and repetitive and exactly the kind of track that mistakes a good synthesizer tone for profundity. But in that car, on that road, with the windows down and the Duluth sun doing its spring work on my face, the song was pure sunshine. I felt it in my chest. The beat and the warmth and the movement of the car along the road above the lake — it all converged into a feeling so clean and bright that I wanted to hold it permanently, to preserve it as proof that the world was exactly as good as it felt in that moment. In two months I would meet Melissa. I did not know this yet. I was just a boy in a car with the windows down, feeling invincible in the way that only the undiagnosed can.

This is the siren song. This is what hypomania offers: the world, exactly as good as it feels. No asterisks. No fine print. No clinical language to qualify the experience. Just the sun and the song and the absolute certainty that this feeling is real and earned and yours.

The problem — the particular, vicious problem — is that it is real. The euphoria is not a hallucination. The sun is actually warm. The song is actually playing. The feeling of expansion and brightness and rightness is genuinely occurring in your brain, produced by the same neurochemistry that produces joy in every other brain on the planet. The difference is degree. The difference is trajectory. The difference is what happens next: for most people, the first warm day produces a good mood that lasts an afternoon and fades into the ordinary rhythms of the week. For me, it can produce a good mood that lasts a week, then two weeks, then a month, and by the time you notice that the good mood has developed velocity and direction, you are no longer in a position to notice much of anything, because noticing requires a kind of self-awareness that the escalation has already eaten.

This is what the eighteen months looked like. The eighteen months that ended in an emergency room in St. Paul and an ambulance ride to New Ulm and a diagnosis on a locked ward. It started with feeling good. It started with the sun. It started with the particular conviction that everything was, at last, going well — the same conviction I had felt at eighteen with Orwell and at twenty with Moby and at every spring in between, the same bright certainty that arrives with the warmth and the light and the thawing earth.

The match. The house fire. The distance between them measured not in temperature but in time.

—

I am forty-five. It is spring in Minnesota. The snow is quickly retreating in its usual pattern — the south-facing slopes first, then the open fields, then the stubborn piles along building foundations that will hold their ground until April, out of what appears to be sheer spite. The light has shifted. The air has that smell.

I take seven pills every morning. Four psychiatric, three for side effects. I see my therapist. I see my psychiatrist. I do the maintenance work of a mind that has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it cannot be left unsupervised. And every spring, without fail, my therapist looks at me from across her office and asks how I am feeling, and what she is really asking is: *is this spring, or is this you?*

I do not always know. This is the honest answer, and it is the terrifying one. After years of living with this diagnosis, after medication and therapy and the hard education of multiple episodes, I still cannot always distinguish between a good day and the opening bars of a familiar and dangerous song. The sun feels the same either way. The warmth on my face feels the same. The urge to sit outside and read a book and let the brightness fill me — it feels identical whether it is a normal human response to the end of a Minnesota winter or the first note of something that does not end well.

My therapist tells me to watch for the signs. Sleep changes — am I sleeping less, and am I energized despite the deficit? The thoughts that start to move faster than conversation can hold. The creeping sense that I am sharper, funnier, more capable than I was last week, which is not a thing that actually happens to people in the span of seven days unless something clinical is underway. These are the tripwires. These are the instruments I have been trained to monitor, the way someone who lives on the side of a volcano learns to read the particular quality of steam that precedes an eruption.

But the monitoring requires suspicion of joy. And suspicion of joy is its own kind of cruelty — a tax levied on every good day, a surcharge on sunshine. To sit outside on the first warm day of spring and feel the sun on your face and to think, automatically, reflexively, as a matter of clinical discipline: *is this real, or is this my brain?* To run the checklist. Sleep: normal? Energy: proportional? Thoughts: present tense, manageable, not accelerating? To treat your own happiness as a thing that must be audited before it can be trusted.

This is the cost. Not the pills — the pills are easy, the pills go down with water every morning and the routine has long since stopped feeling like a burden. The cost is the suspicion. The cost is the annual spring ritual of feeling something wonderful and immediately interrogating it for signs of disease. The cost is knowing, from experience, that the most dangerous thing your brain can do is make you feel good, and that the better you feel, the more carefully you need to pay attention.

This past January, I returned from a work trip to Uruguay — summer there, warm air, the sun at the angle Minnesota will not see for months — and landed back in the frozen dark of a state that had not gotten the memo about human comfort. I refused to wear long pants. This was not a medical decision. This was a protest. Shorts, in January, in Minnesota, as a personal act of defiance against a winter that I had decided was no longer entitled to dictate my wardrobe. Melissa thought it was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. But there is something clarifying about standing in a parking lot in zero degree weather in shorts and declaring, to no one in particular, that you will not give this fucking winter the satisfaction.

I mention this because it is funny, and because it is also the kind of behavior my therapist would raise an eyebrow at if I described it in session. Was it a joke, or was it a sign? Was it a man tired of winter, or was it a man whose brain was beginning to rev? The answer, in January, was the former. I was cold and stubborn and making Melissa laugh. But the question is always there. The question is always there.

Everyone in Minnesota feels it. The first warm day arrives and the whole state tilts its face toward the sun and exhales. People drive with their windows down. Someone is grilling something. The snow is retreating. The world, after months of cold and grey and the particular endurance that a Minnesota winter demands, has remembered that it contains warmth and light and the possibility of being outside without suffering.

I feel it too. I feel it the same way I felt it at eighteen with Orwell in my lap, and at twenty with Moby on the stereo, and at every spring since — the warmth arrives, and the brightness follows, and something in my chest opens up, and for a moment, just a moment before the training kicks in and the audit begins, I let it be what it is.

Then I check. Sleep? Normal. Energy? Reasonable. Thoughts? Present tense, grounded, not racing. The tripwires are quiet. The instruments read green. And I allow myself to settle into the warmth, carefully, the way you ease into water whose temperature you have tested with your hand first.

The sun is out. I am sitting outside. I am aware of my mood.

It feels like spring. I am choosing to believe it.