Apparently, I need an Off Switch
- Hampton Law Firm ⚖️
- 4 days ago
- 10 min read
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For most of my life, I thought one of my best qualities was that I did not have an off switch. I could work longer than everybody else, focus harder than everybody else, and keep going long after everybody else had gone home, gone to bed, or simply lost interest. I thought that was discipline. I thought it was ambition. I thought it was why I had been able to do so many things that, if we are being honest, probably should have required several different people. Apparently, it was all of those things. It was also a problem.
Looking back, this did not begin when I became a lawyer or opened a law firm. It did not even begin when I became an adult. In high school, I wanted to play every sport. I did not want to choose because I saw no reason to choose. The fact that track and softball occurred during the same season seemed like a scheduling failure by the school system, not a limitation I should personally have to accept. The fact that cross-country and basketball overlapped? No problem. It at least helped with lowering my energy levels if I could do both at once. Put me in, Coach! Eventually, a coach caught me while I was walking to class and said, “Look, you’re going to get pissed off.” He was right. He told me everybody had been trying to figure out how to break the news to me, but I was going to have to choose between track and softball. I chose track. That was also the year my love of softball died. I never picked up another one. I ran like hell, though.
A few years later, I decided I wanted to be healthier. That began normally enough. I started exercising and paying attention to what I ate. Then I kept exercising and kept paying attention until “paying attention” had become calculating every calorie and “being healthy” had become severely and unhealthily underweight. At the time, I was diagnosed with anorexia. I am not going to sit here now and declare that diagnosis completely wrong because, to be fair, I was barely eating and exercising like somebody was chasing me. Something was clearly not right.
What I do not remember is hating my body. I do not remember believing I was fat. I remember starting a routine and then being unable to stop following it, even after the routine had stopped making any sense. My meals were apples and peanut butter. If I wanted a little something extra, I ate a Fiber One granola bar. I am not sure who I thought was going to arrest me if I ate something else. Nobody had passed this law. I had created it, enforced it, and then somehow become trapped by it.
My parents made me get help. I had to work with a trainer twice a week to rebuild muscle, and I saw a nutritionist who gradually increased my calories. I understood why. I was not confused about the basic scientific principle that people need food. The problem was making myself eat something outside the routine. I still remember standing in my parents’ kitchen on Foxwood Drive in Ruston and making myself eat yogurt with chocolate chips in it. I was so proud of myself. It sounds ridiculous unless you have lived through something like that, but those chocolate chips felt like an act of civil disobedience.
I also remember calling my boyfriend at the time and saying, “You are going to be so proud of me. I ate a whole hamburger.” He did not laugh. By that point, it had become a real problem, and he understood exactly what I meant. I had eaten an entire hamburger without calculating it, negotiating with myself, or planning how I would make up for it later. I had simply eaten a hamburger and enjoyed it. He was legitimately happy.
That same pattern has followed me throughout my life. I get an idea. Usually, it is a genuinely good idea. It is almost always something that I believe will help my children, my clients, or my staff. Those are apparently the only three categories my brain recognizes. I do not generally stay up all night developing a plan to buy a yacht or join the circus. I stay up all night because I have decided my clients need a better explanation of Louisiana succession law, and obviously that explanation needs its own webpage, downloadable guide, coordinated graphics, and a name nobody else has ever used.
The problem is not necessarily the idea. The problem is that there is a point where a normal person would say, “This is good. I will finish it tomorrow.” I do not have that point. It was not included in my original programming. I can recognize it in other people. I can advise other people to stop working, go home, eat dinner, and get some sleep. I can say those words with genuine conviction while privately planning to work another seven hours.
I will leave the office at 9:00 at night and know that I need to go home. I will go home. I will walk around for a little while and do a few things that resemble having a personal life. Then I will think, “If I finish these two small things tonight, tomorrow will be easier.” It is never two small things, and tomorrow has never once been easier. I finish the first thing, which reminds me of another thing, which gives me an idea for a better way to do all the things. Then I look up and it is 4:00 in the morning.
I did not decide at midnight to stay awake until 4:00. That is the part I have had trouble explaining. I did not look at the clock and think, “Sleep is for cowards. Let’s see how far we can take this.” I did not really think about sleep at all. I did not think about eating. I did not think about drinking water. I was so focused on what I was doing that there was no room for another thought to get through.
Recently, I sat down with a psychiatrist who spent several hours talking with me and my mother. I learned more about myself during that appointment than I may have learned during all the years I have spent living with myself, which seems inefficient. My mother learned some things too. She also contributed several childhood stories that I did not remember, had forgotten, or would not have considered relevant. At one point, after listening to a lengthy medical explanation, she said she had always just thought I was anal. That did seem to cover a surprising amount of the same material in considerably less time.
What mattered to me was finally understanding that bipolar disorder does not always look like the version people joke about or show on television. I do not hallucinate. I have never thought I was God. I do not jump off buildings. I do not go on sex sprees. My version is much less cinematic and probably more annoying. My brain catches a legitimate idea and says, “We should do this.” Then it says, “We should do all of this tonight.” Then it becomes personally offended by food, sleep, clocks, interruptions, and anybody who asks a perfectly reasonable question while I am trying to save the world with a new client-information packet.
The doctor explained that the glitch is not necessarily in the content of my ideas. It is in the speed and intensity. The idea may be intelligent. The project may be useful. The article may be good. The problem is that my brain locks onto it and does not release it when a normal brain would say, “That is enough for today.”
That helped me more than I expected because I had been afraid to ask what this diagnosis meant about the things I create. If I write ten articles in one night, are all ten articles crazy? If I develop a new project while my brain is moving too fast, does that mean the project is ridiculous? Is every productive thing I have ever been proud of actually a symptom?
He said no. The ideas are still mine. The intelligence is still mine. The creativity is still mine. The problem is not that I create. The problem is that I do not stop.
There is another part of this that I want to be clear about. It is not that I never asked doctors for help, and it is not that they refused to listen. Over the years, I asked for help with anxiety, sadness, intense emotions, too much energy, and a brain that would not settle down. The problem was that I could not adequately describe what was happening because I was so involved in the pattern that I could not see the whole thing.
I was also highly functional. I could walk into an appointment, speak clearly, explain that I felt anxious or depressed, and then leave and complete the work of several people. Nobody looking at me would naturally think, “This woman’s brain has been running at an unsustainable speed for two weeks, she has barely slept, and there is a good chance she has forgotten to eat lunch every day this week.” They would think, “She seems anxious.” I did seem anxious. I was anxious. I just did not understand that anxiety was one piece of something larger.
The distinction matters because mental health treatment is not one-size-fits-all. Antidepressants help a lot of people with a lot of different conditions. But for some people with bipolar disorder, antidepressants—particularly when used without appropriate mood-stabilizing treatment—can worsen symptoms or trigger mania, hypomania, or rapid cycling. In my case, some of the medications intended to calm what looked like ordinary anxiety or depression may have intensified the feelings I was already trying to fight.
That does not mean the doctors were careless or were not listening. They treated the symptoms I could explain. I just could not tell them that my brain felt like it was traveling 100 miles per hour because, to me, that was simply the speed at which my brain had always traveled. I thought everyone else was taking an unusually long time to get where we were going.
The real problem comes after the productivity has gone on too long. It is not simply, “Oh no, Judith accidentally worked until 4:00 in the morning and completed several useful projects. How tragic.” The problem comes after I have done that repeatedly—after I have gone too long without sleep, food, water, or any meaningful break. My brain is still moving fast, but now my body is depleted and my emotions are operating without adult supervision.
That is when a minor inconvenience can feel catastrophic. Someone asks a simple question. An email comes in at the wrong moment. The printer does something printers do because all printers are demons. Something small goes wrong, but my brain is already running so fast that the small interruption feels like somebody threw a brick through the windshield.
Understanding that does not excuse my reaction. I do not want it to. I am not telling people about this so they can watch me behave in a way that is completely unlike myself and say, “Well, she has bipolar disorder,” as though we have all agreed to let me continue until the building is empty and the printer has been formally exorcised.
I want the people who love me to speak up. I want them to get my attention or get the attention of someone who can. I want accountability because I want to manage this. A diagnosis can explain behavior, but it cannot become permission to avoid accountability.
My greatest fear about treatment is not really the medication. It is the possibility that slowing my brain down will change who I am. I have spent most of my life being useful. I produce. I contribute. I solve problems. I make things for people. I do not know how to separate those qualities from my identity, and I am afraid that if my brain slows down to a speed one person can safely sustain, I will feel like I am no longer doing enough.
The doctor told me that this fear is common in people whose illness can look a lot like exceptional productivity. If you are accustomed to doing the work of five people, doing the work of one healthy person can feel like failure. I did not care for that observation because it sounded exactly like me, and I prefer medical information to be about somebody else.
But I also left that appointment relieved. The good things are still mine. The intelligence is mine. The creativity is mine. The desire to help people is mine. Treatment does not have to remove those things. It may simply help me recognize that a good idea can still be a good idea tomorrow.
I am trying to learn that stopping does not mean I have failed to finish. Rest is not laziness. Sleep is not wasted time. Food and water should not have to submit written requests for my attention. I can create something helpful without creating every possible version of it before sunrise.
I still do not have a natural off switch. Apparently, I am going to have to build one myself.
Which, now that I think about it, sounds like a project.
That is probably enough for today. But I probably won’t let it be.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney At Law
Hampton Law Firm
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