Just a Little Unwell, 10 Years Later

Mania, Madness, and Matchbox Twenty

I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell

I know right now you can’t tell

But stay awhile and maybe then you’ll see

A different side of me

 –from “Unwell” by Matchbox Twenty

It’s been ten years since I was severely manic, in a constant, medication-induced state of anger and hyperactivity that lasted fifteen months. I hated alienating everyone around me and having that much trouble with self-care, and I still hate remembering how much more trouble I had shutting up than usual.

At the same time, though the episode wasn’t exactly a triumph or badge of honor, going through that kind of medical trauma forever altered my sense of what I can handle. 

In 2019, as a columnist for the Good Men Project, I wrote “Just a Little Unwell? On the Good and Bad Parts” during breaks at a retail job to help me come to terms with the memory of the episode–and the piece helped me land my first placement in a national communications contest. That was an exceptional surprise to get that Honorable Mention for personal opinion columns for a very personal, relatively brief piece.

Recently, Rob Thomas, leader of Matchbox Twenty, revealed he wrote the early 2000s hit song “Unwell,” which was the inspiration for my column, about mental illness, and I bet my piece makes a lot more sense to people now. 

Yes, to some, as an autistic person, I take things far too literally (. . . but not like kleptomaniacs!).  But apparently, my interpretation of the song was right on the metaphorical money, and in 2020, I wrote a second article called “Matchbox Twenty: Aren’t We All a Little ‘Unwell’ in the Time of Coronavirus?” for PopMatters about mass anxiety and uncertainty in a pandemic. As annoyed as I was at this song being constantly overplayed on the radio in 2003, today it occupies a very special place in my life.

For the first many times I heard “Unwell” back then, I guessed–and was convinced–that its title was “A Different Side.” (I also guessed Des’ree’s 1994 smash hit, “You Gotta Be,” was called “Love Will Save the Day,” so my track record of guessing song titles is not exactly spotless, but it is full of obsessive compulsive tendencies.)

And for me, that’s the point of the song: someone can be “crazy” and/or “unwell,” but “a different side” of them that doesn’t alienate everyone else is present, too. Of course, some question why anyone should care about how they come across to others, but we live in a social world, so how others perceive me matters a great deal; anyone who thinks otherwise often has privilege that they’re not acknowledging, let alone challenging.

But part of me thinks of that song differently now, not just because of my own struggles, but because of my friend MV Perry, who introduced me to the social model of madness, as opposed to the medical model of mental illness. 

The idea of madness as socially influenced and formed makes a lot of sense to me: is depression in response to climate change really a mental illness or is it natural in response to horrendous social conditions? My manic episode came from a new medication because another med that worked became too expensive with insurance. That’s certainly socially conditioned–and medically conditioned, rather than an apparent illness within my brain that occurred unnaturally.

I’m a big fan of the social model of disability, which argues that people are disabled by larger, human-made social forces, so that I call myself a disabled person rather than the patronizing “person with disabilities.” Disabilities are nothing to be ashamed of–except in an ableist society expecting everyone to fit socially constructed norms of behavior and thinking.

So, in the aftermath of my manic episode, I’ve worked on accepting my past and present with Bipolar Disorder. And with different conditions I deal with, I’ve come to embrace “Unwell” as a neurodivergent anthem.

Looking back on my manic episode, I’m reminded that “Unwell”  never struck much of a metaphorical chord with me until I struggled with obvious madness for the first time in many years . . . and I wasn’t hearing the song every hour on the radio.

Rob Thomas’s compelling lyrics and singing really started to strike a nerve in me when I started to pay attention to other Matchbox Twenty songs. So, when I looked up “Unwell” a couple years after my manic episode, I was simultaneously floored by its quality and unsurprised that I had overlooked it as a snobbish teenager. (Something about a lack of ubiquity makes music more appealing to snobs as we mature into . . . lesser snobs.)

Most might remember “Unwell” for its catchy, hypnotic banjo riff, but today I embrace that song as a genuinely great song about madness and neurodivergence.

Rob Thomas’s lyrics feel rich with both specificity and broad applicability. For me, I’ve silently talked to myself, mouthing conversations in my head in public, dodging glances on the train, as the song says.

And in the last several years, I’ve worked to come to terms with my Bipolar Disorder, though it’s never been officially diagnosed. My doctor did say that I had a severe manic episode starting in February 2014, when I was forced to get on that new medication.

During that episode, my hyperactivity scared the hell out of people—and I already have ADHD, so this was a whole new level of hyper, sometimes involving swearing at others.

I lost thirty-five pounds without trying; I’ve never been so grateful to gain weight as I was after the mania ended. 

I was talking with pressured speech, which meant that I would speak sentences really fast and they would go on and on, and on, and on. And this wasn’t only present in spoken communication; emails and text messages had the same issue.

I struggled with hygiene like I hadn’t in a very long time, sometimes showering once a week and rarely brushing my teeth, let alone flossing.

I couldn’t sleep more than four hours a night because my mind and my body wouldn’t shut the hell down.

And my heart rate would spike on even one cup of decaf coffee, so I had to quit consuming all caffeine for at least a little while. Getting off of it was a lot easier than staying off of it after the mania ended, as coffee had led to innumerable problems in the previous decade.

In the aftermath of those fifteen months, when I was able to get back on the old medication that was successful, I’ve worked really hard to do things differently—and in the last few years, I’ve worked hard to accept myself and how I alienated people during my mania. I couldn’t do anything about it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to remember how I alienated others.

All that said, there were some good things that came out of that manic episode. For one, I found my community in Chicago after years of trying without success. I also found a graduate school that saw potential in me after I struggled with getting good grades in college. Finding that school led to Graduate Assistantships, awards, an international English honor society, and, later, teaching.

And then there were more personal milestones. I had the first day of being genuinely happy in my hometown when I was invited there for a concert—the first social event that I’d ever been to in that town, and I was 25 and hadn’t lived there for years—by a college friend. That was truly one of the best, most healing days of my life. I also sent a cousin of mine a message thanking him for saying something hurtful in 2005 because it led to me coming out at college.

The mania may or may not have led to that moment of clarity, but whatever caused it, my feeling that way was unprecedented. So, clearly there were some good things that came out of my fifteen months of mania.

That said, I wouldn’t want to go through it again. I loved not experiencing depression, which is the other side of Bipolar Disorder, but I didn’t love alienating people the way I did. People in my life had never seen me act like that–and I was violent as a little kid. Those lines from “Unwell,” “I’m not crazy, I’m just a little impaired/ I know right now you don’t care/ But soon enough, you’re gonna think of me/ And how I used to be,” resonate with me thinking about how I acted then.

Some of the metaphorical fruits of my work to do things differently since 2014-15 appeared recently, when someone who met me then said he didn’t recognize me, years later, because of how hard I’ve worked on my issues. That’s comforting for me to remember when I get down on myself for all the issues I had no control over: the pressured speech, the terrible hygiene, and the lack of self-awareness. I do have more control over my life today, but I hope I never become that out of control again.

In the end, whether I’m “crazy” or “just a little unwell,” I have Bipolar Disorder and I am not ashamed. I’m okay with being just a little unwell.

Note: This is a heavily expanded and updated version of “Just a Little Unwell? On the Good and Bad Parts of a Manic Episode” from August 6, 2019, at the Good Men Project.