Losing Your Voice

How Mania Changed My Relationships

337 pages in a single WhatsApp chat.

That's how much I wrote to my then fiancé between January 16 and March 31, 2025. 168,000 words in 75 days. Double George Orwell's 1984, and considerably worse.

He wrote back 32 pages.

Ten to one. It's not the whole reason he left, but it's the part I can measure.

And I was the introvert in that relationship. The quiet one, usually.

I don't remember writing most of it. Mania doesn't keep minutes. It just takes them. The parts I do remember, I'd trade for the parts I don't.

Here is what 337 pages contains, roughly. God. Descartes. Me, as God. The Big Bang explained like never before. Why bonobos are almost conscious. A theory of history. A theory of music. A theory of medicine. Why I wasn't sick. Why everyone else was. Apologies. More theory, to explain the apologies.

Some of it I can quote verbatim.

On January 21, at 4:45 in the afternoon: "Mark the time. I just figured out God." (Something to do with Hegel. I never did get around to explaining it.)

On January 27: "Circumcision proves reality." (Apparently it was the first act of human consciousness. History will end when we agree on the foreskin.)

On January 28, slightly darker this time: "We are cancer, the mutant that wasn't meant to be." (That night I'd end up in the hospital.)

Sent at four in the morning. Sent from my car. Sent while he was at work, trying to do his job.

On Valentine's Day, I sent him 12,000 words. 24 pages. He sent back 651, and brought home flowers instead.

Every sentence felt true. Mania doesn't feel like noise. It feels like superhuman clarity with an urgent deadline.

That feeling I remember. The certainty. How bright everything was. The content, nearly all gone. I have a general idea of some of it, but I couldn't tell you for instance what I meant by "a habit is a language game that your soul creates with the observable universe."

Then the words escape the chat and start getting used.

A message I sent turns up in a meeting I wasn't invited to. Then in a chart. Then in a binder. My sentences become quotes with timestamps. Exhibits with my name at the top.

I was trying to be understood. I ended up being documented.

Words cost me my job, for a while. A fiancé, for good. My kids, until God knows when. Friends who stopped replying because they didn't want another 12 pages on why I was the second coming of Christ.

Then I stopped and went mute.

I had burned brighter than the sun. All the fuel I had, all at once. When it was over there was almost nothing left. Not a fire, barely an ember.

I'd like to call the decision to stop a choice. It wasn't. Nobody decides to lose their voice. It went the way your hand leaves a hot stove, before you've had a chance to think about it.

I still answer emails. I reread them twice. I cut them in half, then cut them again. Work has a format.

It's everything else.

I miss someone. I open a chat. Three words in and I can't do it. I see how the sentence would be read in court. Highlighted. Tabbed. Timestamped. I delete it and put the phone face down.

The wanting to connect didn't go anywhere. Only the nerve did.

People check in. How are you doing. Thinking of you. Haven't heard from you in a while. I read every one. I just can't answer. So they pile up. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred.

These posts are where I can still speak. Honestly, briefly, in neat little packages. Each takes about a month and several edits to write, and even then it isn't right. It ends up in the binders anyway.

So my head becomes the only room I live in. It's a small room. It's loud. It's only me in there. Nobody else has a key, and most days I can't find mine either.

Along with the silence comes the pacing. Kitchen, hallway, living room, back. If it can't come out of my mouth, it comes out through my feet.

Which is where massage comes in.

It started as work, and the work started as money. But I noticed I was calmer after a session than my clients were. I don't think that's how it's supposed to go.

For an hour my feet have somewhere to be. No hallway, no kitchen, no loop. Just a table, a sheet, and a man who needs me to stay put.

Quiet is the job. Nobody wonders why the masseur isn't chatty. For an hour, the thing I can't do anymore just looks like professionalism.

My hands know what to do. My mind can sit this one out. I don't trust it anymore anyway.

A massage has no transcript. Nothing to screenshot, nothing to forward. I can't be grandiose with my palms, paranoid with my touch. They find where a man is holding tension and stay there until he isn't.

Twenty minutes in, his breathing changes. Something goes out of him, and neither of us has said a word about it.

It isn't much. Not a fire. More like a flicker. A small spark of being useful, and someone grateful for it at the end.

Massage also comes with small talk.

People complain about it. I can't afford to. It's all I've got. The drive over. The weather. Where he grew up. Nothing in it can be used against me. I prove I'm friendly, I prove I'm harmless, and then I stop.

A man who texted 337 pages in 75 days to a single person, now rationing himself to "how was the traffic." It isn't recovery the way most people think of it. It's just what I can manage.

Massage gives me connection, in a form I can still bear. An hour where nobody is reading me, and I'm not the only one in my head.

He leaves. I wash the oil off my hands. It never comes off all the way.

But I feel good. Lighter than I've felt in a while. The kind of good where I think, maybe today.

I pick up the phone. The red number says 87. I open the first one. How are you doing.

I start typing.

Actually feeling good, thanks for

I stop. Read it back.

Good days are when I trust myself the most. That's exactly why I shouldn't. The last time I felt sure of myself, it ran to 337 pages.

I delete it, one letter at a time.

Then I put the phone face down and walk. Kitchen, hallway, living room, back.

Maybe tomorrow.