With hindsight it seemed that overnight my normally shy and reserved persona disappeared and I became gregarious and over-familiar. At first this just made me the butt of a few jokes. But it soon began to spiral out of control. I propositioned practically everybody, at times in the presence of their partners. I drank too much and shouted a lot and got in peoples faces. I talked incessantly about things that to me only made any sense. I distinctly remember not being afraid of anything, whereas I was ordinarily scared of my own shadow. But the situation was most destructive at work. I couldn’t understand why I had to do any work. It all seemed so utterly pointless. On the days when I did turn up, I spent the entire day flirting outrageously with all the female members of staff and generally causing as much disruption as I could. I had a flagrant disregard for authority (which, I must admit, my sober self rather admires). I wanted to do things my way. I was a manager at this time and I started many an argument with other staff about the best way to manage employees. My prevailing thought was that not everybody wants to get ahead, some people just want to get by, so we should stop pushing all this promotion bullshit. Of course this was just my own inflated personal ethos shared by no one in the company. I turned up to appraisals still drunk from the night before, completely oblivious to what was going on and, more importantly, what the point of appraising anybody actually was. It went on like this for months.

This all culminated around the time of my birthday, when I slept with a straight female colleague with whom I, predictably, became infatuated. My feelings were not reciprocated. She even told me that she only slept with me to “try it out”. I began to dread going into the office as I had to see her and eventually I plunged into depression. Around this time I was also demoted, and, realising that everything had become too much, I resigned before the inevitable push.

It wasn’t my worst depression, but everything felt pretty pointless. In my younger days my depressions were shot through with anxiety and due to this my appetite, which had been voracious when manic, evaporated. I stopped eating and slept very little. My weight dropped and I could’ve blown away on a light breeze. I made endless lists of the things in my life that made me anxious but had neither the energy nor the motivation to do anything about them. Being around other people felt like a herculean effort. Smiling, small talk, feigning interest was more than I could manage, so I holed up and I read.

I remember reading the Catcher in the Rye over and over. I felt that this boy, this Holden Caulfield, had been where I was. Confused in a world where everything is a sham, where authenticity and honesty are slim on the ground. I felt he was echoing my own thoughts that you couldn’t trust anybody and everybody said and did what they had to to get ahead.

My own authenticity and truth of spirit has always been incredibly important to me, to the point where I wouldn’t repeat another’s joke or remark without giving them full credit. My ideas had to be my own. I couldn’t stand the thought of being a shadow of somebody else. Of being what is essentially a hollow human being, devoid of anything original.

In my mania this was fine as I believed that every thought I had was unique and that every connection I made, however mundane, had never been realised before in the whole of human existence. I thought people’s words in books were written directly to me. That they had known that one day I would read their tomes and be inspired to do great things.

In my depression it was awful, there wasn’t a spark of originality anywhere in my being. I had nothing to offer. Barren, lifeless. The human realisation of the Sahara Desert. Every thought I had was generic, I was too embarrassed to have a conversation with anyone less they realise what an awful fraud and phony I was. Just like Holden said.