What I actually want to write, that has been bouncing around my brain and turning infuriatingly slippery every time I try to grab it, is an account of the experience of hypomania. It is maybe the second most meaningful drug-free state I have ever known, only surpassed by grief, and lists of symptoms - while correct - do not do it justice. "Feeling intensively driven", what you mean is hypomania opened all the doors in me. it removed all the walls. suddenly I was dropped in the world, born anew, and there was a motor in my belly vroombing "go go go", no fear, no filters, just an urge to act upon reality and have reality act upon me. Music stopped being a pleasure because it competed with the euphoria of thinking. Wikipedia tells you about undersleeping but it doesn't approach the feeling of lying in bed with your brain going a thousand miles an hour and it feeling so *good*. If you've ever taken stimulants - nope, that doesn't come close. Stimulants are to hypomania what directions are to true knowledge of the territory: directions let you get to your destination as long as you keep them in mind and you don't veer off course, but hypomania is utter freedom, the ability to choose where to go and how, update on information, change your mind yet still make it without a shadow of a doubt in your ability to. I remain convinced that your hyper-achievers are those lucky enough to have been born in that state (or a more sustainable variant of it). I write about it like a witch crafting a summoning spell. It may be true to say that everything I throw at my work capacity - the pomodoros, the (legal!) drugs, the time-tracking, the coaching - is an attempt to trigger hypomania. I push the creaky gates of my mind hoping if I keep going they'll swing open and I'll be free again. But I don't push very hard, because outside hypomania I am so hobbled! So many fears! But I know, because I've lived it, that there is a different state available to me. And every insecurity I overcome feels like completing a side quest from a finite list. Soon I will have ticked them all done, and there will only be the real thing left. And maybe then I'll write that damn blog post about it.