I learned that anxiety widens personal space—we need more than the standard 8–16 inches that the average person requires to feel comfortable. I also learned that those of us who veer into mania and hypomania generally find most aspects of sharing the planet with others irritating because, as Jay Griffiths writes in her manic depression memoir Tristimania (tristimania is an eighteenth-century term for bipolar), “when you’re racing and overcapable and wildly energetic, any ordinary human speed looks like lethargy and . . . feeds the irritability.”
