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\u2019ve been dropping weight ever since. And I don\u2019t feel hungry\u2026 or rather I don\u2019t feel driven to eat. If I feel \u201cI\u2019m a little hungry\u201d the result is \u201cwell if I get active I might have low blood sugar, watch out\u201d, the same way \u201cI\u2019m a little overstuffed\u201d yields \u201cI might feel sluggish\u201d and not \u201cI should vomit\u201d
More than that tho I\u2019m just less anxious and more disinhibited in general. I\u2019m 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\u2019m at least .5 Kinsey less straight.
And I really think it is \u201cdisinhibition\u201d, 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\u2019t fit the pattern.
But also it\u2019s just a different experience. When I\u2019m in an up period, my baseline expectation what it will take to succeed doesn\u2019t really change, it\u2019s 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\u2026 myself, and that\u2019s 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\u2019m not even doing that here.)
In high moods it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019d 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\u2019s really jumping out on me is that I don\u2019t 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\u2019d be like \u201cobviously surviving a brush with death will leave you changed and a bit more confident\u201d because\u2026 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\u2019s 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\u2019t, my sense comes from DSM-III, experimental psych, and the \u201cpsychopharmaceutical revolution\u201d, 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\u2019s \u201cmortal 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]\u201d, where each section between [brackets] is an unknown black box.
Which doesn\u2019t drive me to change worldviews in search of meaning, I\u2019m 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 \u201cvariables\u201d, narrativized after the fact in various ways, and that does need some accounting for.
Alternate hypotheses:
UPDATE: It was COVID in my brain
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