I read a lot of blogs. A whole lot. In fact, I subscribe to over 120 of them. Of course, it’s not possible to read all of them every day, but I do have my go-to’s that I never miss if at all possible. Today’s guest blogger writes one of my must-reads. I never miss it because she is always insightful and informative and never ceases to make me laugh. Be sure to check her blog, Bipolar On Fire.

About eight years ago, I was in a phase of my bipolar that wasn’t very well-controlled. I wasn’t seeing a psychiatrist for my meds, they were prescribed by my primary care physician. I wasn’t on a classic mood stabilizer, in fact, the only bipolar med I was on was Topamax, which took the edge off my addictive side and helped immensely with impulse control. However, the impulse control did not extend to what I put into my mouth, and I always struggled with my weight. So, I got the bright idea to ask my primary care physician to prescribe Phentermine to help me with my appetite. She obliged, and off I went. I had no idea what I was in for.

The Phentermine kicked me into full-blown mania. How I managed to hold down a job through this, I will never know. I worked at a cable-tv company and the people were wonderful, but the management was pure shit. My boss, a woman, had basically promised me a promotion from the time she hired me, but she kept moving the target. She would tell me during my annual review that I needed to do A, B, and C in order to get to the next level. So, I would proceed to do A, B, and C, expecting it to pay off. Then my boss would say “you’re not ready” which would throw me into a rage. THEN she would accuse me of being too negative, so I determined that I was going to THWART her by being the most positive person ever, just to piss her off. But I had a lot of anger to stuff, and at night I would go home and use marijuana, and drink copious amounts of vodka. I was so afraid of calling my boss while drunk, that I would take apart my Blackberry and throw the battery, phone and SIM card in different parts of the room, knowing I wouldn’t be able to find the parts and put it back together while drunk. It sure was fun retrieving my phone parts the next morning and putting it back together in a mad rush before work!

In addition to conflict with my boss, I had to do on-call work on a rotating schedule, and this was extremely hard for me because I would be woken up in the middle of the night out of a sound sleep and expected to function and help someone in the UK or Australia, or to run an outage, notifying all affected parties (including management) and providing scheduled updates on the outage until it was resolved. I deeply resented having to do on-call work, and found it incomprehensible that I was still expected to show up the next day at 8am, even if I’d been up half the night! To say that this was a stressful job is an understatement of epic proportions. This was the beginning of the end of my IT career. I was burning out.

In my free time, although I had some friends, I also had a lot of secrets, what with my excessive marijuana and alcohol use, so I was somewhat isolated. I felt like I was living a double life. I started reading Craigslist personal ads and having anonymous sex with people from the “Casual Encounters” ads. One of the ads in particular was very intriguing to me. It was for a naked camping trip. By this point, with Phentermine firmly on board, I had been working out daily, eating better, and my body was shaping up. My sexual confidence was building, too. I contacted the person who had placed the ad. Basically, he was a drug dealer (that part I didn’t know at the time) looking for someone to go with him to a swinger’s camping trip. I met up with this guy and we decided to have sex, sort of like we were auditioning each other. The sex was good, so the trip was on!

I’m not going to turn this into a porno post by telling you everything that went on during this camping trip. Suffice to say, lots of people had sex with lots of people. There was lots of pot and I think I was extremely stoned, and probably drunk, the whole time. I did things that I had only thought about before. My own personal taboos were broken. A whole new world had opened up to me: The world of sport-fucking!

After that weekend, my sexuality went wildly out of control. I went to swinger’s clubs and had lots of sex with strangers. I had ridiculous numbers of Craigslist hookups. I started a sexual dalliance with a very young, very hot married cop, because I became fixated on men in uniform. Again, how I managed to do this at night, both on the weekends and during the week, and still go to work, I’ll never know. Behold the power of Phentermine. And mania.

At work, I became “one of the guys” with all the men in my IT Department and they fully accepted me. I would casually rattle off my conquests, which they, all married, would behold with wonder. When I think about it now, I cringe. I was wayyyy too open about wayyyy too much. What in the hell must they have been really thinking about me, I wonder?

I don’t recall what became of my Phentermine prescription, or why I stopped taking it, but at some point I did. Also at some point, fearing that I might have terrible consequences for my dangerous behavior (specifically, fearing that I might run into a serial killer), I calmed down my sexual acting out. I gradually became less afraid of being found out, because I wasn’t living this double life anymore.

On the work front, it never got better in the battle of Me vs. Management. I did finally get that promotion, but it just meant more work and more stress. My boss kept ragging on me, and most of the time it was unwarranted. Believe it or not, I was a good employee. I was very detail oriented, very thorough, and very service-oriented. Eventually, I found another job, one without any on-call work. That was my last job, which I ended up hating with a passion. I was just “done” with IT.

I don’t regret my bout of mania and hypersexuality. I did a lot of things that I had always wanted to, but had been too inhibited to do. I feel like I had some big adventures, and I’ll have no regrets as I get older. My sex drive now? It’s almost non-existent. I may have used it all up. Maybe drugs have turned it off. I don’t really mind. I’ve had enough sex for ten people. Ten very horny people.