To allay the worries of friends

I’ve often reflected that there are three different versions of me that run my life. One version of me is the version that people see most days. I’m generally quiet, fairly dependable, not easily excitable, and relatively boring. That said, I’m relatively content with that version of me, although it is not the incarnation of me of which I am most proud or in which I would like to spend most of my time.

The second version of me is the one which I find to be the best version of myself. Sometimes this version controls me for days, sometimes for weeks, but while I am in this particular incarnation, I only need about 4 hours of sleep per day, my mind races faster than can anyone else’s, and I am filled with not just good, but I’ll say it, brilliant ideas for solutions to a wide variety of problems. When captured by this persona, I speak quickly and my hands are quite animated while I talk. I’m filled with boundless energy and I feel like I could be a god if I tried.

Unfortunately, aside from the soaring of me #2, there is the crippling me #3 which is the one currently dominating me. I feel that I need to explain this because of some… irregularities… that have been going on for about a few days, and to put at ease the mind of a friend who seemed worried about me.

When I was an undergraduate, I used to be a double-major in biochemistry and microbiology. I frequently tell people that the upper level chemistry classes bent me over and had their way with me violently, and so I found it prudent to re-evaluate what I was going to do for a living. What I don’t usually tell people, though, is why this was the case. For almost a complete year, the third side of me was the one that people saw.

I slept all day. When awake, I couldn’t concentrate on anything. My speech was slower than usual, and I would play video games for hours on end when I could rouse myself from my bed. On the few occasions that I could manage to work myself up to go to class, I barely paid attention to the professors and instead wrote out and solved long division problems where I would divide a thirty-five digit long number by seven or something. I spent my nights wandering campus alone in the dark, sitting in the Chancellor’s cemetery, or doing things that I probably oughtn’t to have done in retrospect. One of my usual haunts was a fire escape at the hall that I lived in. I would ascend to the highest point on the fire escape (at the top of the third story) and then just climb up on the railing and stand there looking out. It never even occurred to me that a stiff breeze could send me plummeting three stories down to the cement below.

When I’m the third version of me, I’m distracted, absent-minded, and oblivious to dangers, and I don’t know why. Well, those things caused me to gradually stop going to classes in one semester as an undergrad, and as a result, my A’s and B’s becomes something substantially lower. I didn’t even show up to take my physics final for the class. Instead of being eloquent and impassioned, my writing becomes more like this, and a reflection of my mind – disjointed and rambling. It's a huge effort right now just for me to write this.

I operate mainly by intuition, which may sound surprising to many of you. I’m the classic INTJ for that famous psychology profiling system, though. I just know what the right answers are by feeling them, and then when I stop to think about it, I come to understand why my feelings were right. Unfortunately, the third incarnation of my persona doesn’t really seem to have any intuitions. Nothing seems particularly important or urgent. I could have likely roused myself to go to class, but it just didn’t seem all that important to do so, even though I have now missed two classes in a row in a class that I enjoy, with a professor that I enjoy, and where we discuss material that I generally find engaging.

So whatever it is that makes me into this completely unmotivated, apathetic, and sleepy version of me is here. Hopefully he won’t stay for long.