Terri Cheney

Most of the time I barely noticed that I had any body hair at all. Like most redheads, mine was fine and delicate, almost invisible to the eye and soft to the touch. [...] But innocuous as the little hairs might have seemed, they were my manic trip wires. Inevitably, when the chemical balance in my brain started to shift, they were the first to alert me to it. As soon as I felt them come alive again, I knew that the depression was finally lifting. I knew that it was hypomania, heavenly hypomania at last.
- Terri Cheney, Manic (p32)

How could I ever hope to tell a normal person about the terrors of being happy? Unless there was a damned good reason for it, something objective and verifiable like a winning bingo card or a negative biopsy, happiness wasn't a safe harbor for me. It was just another checkpoint on the road to mania. [...] You get too happy, you go pick wildflowers in the middle of the night from your neighbor's lawn, wearing nothing but a sneaky grin.
- Terri Cheney, Manic (p33)