The Beautiful Conviction of Being Wrong

It starts with a hum. Not so much a sound, as a subarachnoid tingling. It’s as if the world is trying to speak and you’re the only one receptive to its mutterings.

Things become clear — crystal clear. Colours sharpen. Time becomes restless. You read between lines that never existed — connecting dots that no one else can see.

There’s a strange confidence in the way your thoughts meander. Every intramural monologue sounds like scripture to your most loyal disciple: you.

Mania doesn’t feel like madness. It feels like purpose.

There’s beauty in it, at first. The way ideas stack effortlessly, the way every song sounds like it was written for you, the way people seem to orbit you like you’ve become magnetic. You get things done. You become generous, articulate — a genuine visionary. Or so you think.

The conviction is where it gets dangerous.

You don’t question the impulse to email someone a 3 AM manifesto. You don’t doubt the plan to rebuild your life in a week. You’re not trying to be irrational — quite the opposite. You’re convinced you’re seeing things as they truly are for the first time in years. That’s the trap. That’s the part no one warns you about.

Most people think mania is a form of chaos — laughing too loud, staying up for days, making bad choices under neon lights. But there’s a quieter, crueler version. The one where you sound in control. Where your theories are just close enough to make sense. Where people around you don’t know if you’re inspired or in freefall.

Underneath it all lurks the lie: you’re not well, but you feel better than ever.

The crash always comes. It might take days, weeks — sometimes months. You look back on notebooks full of incoherence dressed up in metaphor. You apologise. You hide. You remember the looks people gave you — hesitant, patient, a little afraid. You rewrite your story again and again, trying to figure out where it turned.

And then, if you’re lucky, you get quiet. You learn to trust the slower thoughts. You recognise the warning signs — the rush, the righteousness, the endless ideas that must be written down.

You learn to doubt the beauty.

Not because it isn’t real — sometimes it is. But because when you’re wrong in that state, you’re not just a little wrong. You’re beautifully, catastrophically wrong — with conviction. And that’s the kind of danger that wraps itself like a gift.

I don’t romanticise it anymore. I don’t chase the high, or call it creativity, or pretend it made me wiser. It didn’t.

But I understand it now.

And if this all sounds too coherent to be true — maybe that’s just the gift talking.