Some basic aspects of my personality changed after that early July almost choking->hypomanic episode.

I think my stable weight changed. Or my energy intake/expenditure, same thing, I’ve been dropping weight ever since. And I don’t feel hungry… or rather I don’t feel driven to eat. If I feel “I’m a little hungry” the result is “well if I get active I might have low blood sugar, watch out”, the same way “I’m a little overstuffed” yields “I might feel sluggish” and not “I should vomit”

More than that tho I’m just less anxious and more disinhibited in general. I’m more outgoing in general, more likely to start up a conversation about nothing and more able to maintain it, more likely to assume any given person will see me or any random thing I say as valuable and more likely to conclude afterwards that they did. Sure put myself out there a lot more, and I think I’m at least .5 Kinsey less straight.

And I really think it is “disinhibition”, this feels like a milder version of what I experienced on Lexapro that one time, and not an elevated mood. For one, it coexists even with significant felt tiredness and a difficulty in tackling planned-out writing like this, which doesn’t fit the pattern.

But also it’s just a different experience. When I’m in an up period, my baseline expectation what it will take to succeed doesn’t really change, it’s that THIS plan, THIS pickup line, THIS piece of writing are particularly good and compelling (and when I look back later, they usually are). But this is like a sense I can just offer… myself, and that’s a good deal that people will take. (Even at baseline, I often pump myself up a little pompous and then cut it with deadpan, to be a little larger than life while admitting how ridiculous and artificial it is, and I’m not even doing that here.)

In high moods it wasn’t that I could make meaningless small talk more fluidly, it was that I could make it meaningful - find the unexpected throughline linking two stray observations, twist it to be an example of something completely different we had been talking about before, phrase it so to make the obvious objection you’d have to say the exact opposite of a line you delivered earlier, finish with a reference that makes it clear that by adding how you did respond to something random you said months ago, I grok more of you than you meant to reveal.

Now what’s really jumping out on me is that I don’t really have any meaning to attach to this.

I feel like if I had a Freudian, or a Christian or a folk sense of psychology it’d be like “obviously surviving a brush with death will leave you changed and a bit more confident” because… Eros and Thanatos? Proving myself worthy? I can whip up a story about how I now know that my ideal conception of myself, calmly applying knowledge to the point of staring down death, is real, and every day I live since then I know I live in that reality, but honestly? That’s not my felt experience, and the inciting incident itself is glossed over in my mind in favor of the weeklong up period that followed.

But I don’t, my sense comes from DSM-III, experimental psych, and the “psychopharmaceutical revolution”, that there exist some qualities whose value varies between people or even over time, but is fairly sticky moment-to-moment, and known combinations of those values yield broadly predictable personality-mediated life experience.

Like, even the best mechanism I can think of to explain this itself relies on unexplained mechanisms, it’s “mortal threat induced parasympathetic response, once the threat was resolved ([and in combination with the satisfaction of resolution]) this manifested as severely elevated mood, [severely elevated mood is somewhat self-sustaining], [under persistently elevated mood fundamental personality variables become labile] [and they changed in this way]”, where each section between [brackets] is an unknown black box.

Which doesn’t drive me to change worldviews in search of meaning, I’m perfectly comfortable reading my life experience as the inherently meaningless interaction of emergent systems developed under evolutionary pressures far removed from the situation at hand. But from infohazard stuff it does seem clear that a lot of people respond to intense experience with changes in these “variables”, narrativized after the fact in various ways, and that does need some accounting for.

Alternate hypotheses:

• I’m so invested in a particular vision of American culture that I experience a sort of reverse pathetic fallacy, as it grew faint I shifted into a guarded, anxious loss-averse “defensive stance”; as I increasingly notice signs of a reversal I subconsciously took advantage of the labile period to update to a more open, confident “forward stance”.
• This shift in personality predates the experience, which merely accelerated it, made it more visible, or induced me to play closer attention to personality changes. – I called “horny week with kontextmaschine”, because I’d noticed I was talking about sexual dynamics and myself as a sexual being who interacted with them more, back in May, and chalked it up to the same “spring fever” effect I noticed in previous years.
• The elevated mood led to suppressed appetite, this lead to metabolic and habitual changes that yielded a new dietary balance, this change in diet is what effected the change.
• This is actually my true baseline mood, not elevated or depressed, and the “standard” I took for granted was actually a mild depression. Something has changed about my mood cycle  to make this state more common - the cycle moderated, or alternately cycling more frequently so I spend a greater share of time in transition.

UPDATE: It was COVID in my brain