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After a couple of weeks during which I'd experienced astounding intellectual, emotional and moral growth (not knowing that in actuality I was having a vast manic episode en route to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder), I made a discovery which I thought could make me incredibly rich. As I rotated the idea in my mind, it slowly dawned on me that I'd be so rich that I could walk out the door and might never need to see my beloved house again, should I choose not to.

Doing just that, in search of either intellectual excitement, or pampering, whichever I could find first, I left home leaving a trail of destruction, fear or bewilderment in my path. To recount the entirety of that day of crisis would take an essay ten times the length of this one. You need, however, to understand the worst of it if this essay is to make sense.

It's one of the principal symptoms of the first manic episode that the mania is obvious to everybody but the person experiencing it. My boyfriend Ben, a doctor, had had a bipolar boyfriend in the past, and had recently been increasingly concerned that I was heading in that direction. In the afternoon of my day of havoc in Hollywood, before I'd done any real damage, Ben, called me, sounding tearful. He was wondering where I was: I'd forgotten about our meeting with our counselor.

After Ben's call, it became, all of a sudden, the most important thing in the world that I get to that meeting to assuage Ben's worries. The resulting anguished rush through Hollywood on foot, during which because of the torrent of my manic thoughts I couldn't keep my focus on how relatively unimportant it was to make the meeting, propelled me to the precipice of insanity.

I saved myself only by dimly recognizing that I'd pushed myself into a crisis that was far more costly to both of us than just missing the meeting. I held onto that thought long enough to take a bottle of tequila by force from a Mexican restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, and drink enough of it to calm my raging mind. Ben later came to pick me up from a nearby parking lot.

I'd never been a spiritual person, but the experience that day had taught me something very profound, which I'm going to attempt to describe below.

My dad had a life changing experience a few years earlier, when my mother, which whom he'd shared a deeply devoted love, developed Alzheimers. My father and I hadn't been close since I was in college, but when I saw how he looked after her, even until she no longer remembered who he was, I found

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