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One morning, two weeks into the challenge, I woke up. The haze in my mind had lifted. It was a clear, crisp, brilliant sunny day in my mind—the first such day of sunny internal weather for years.

I thought perhaps this was just a hypomanic phase that would only last a few days before the depression sank back in. So I didn’t get my hopes up. But this time, it felt much different than a hypomanic phase, which always had a very jittery, cranked-up, ungrounded feeling. Rather, for the first time in memory, I felt consistently happy, calm, energized, and grounded.

And it stayed. And stayed, and stayed. And—with the exception of a few down days here and there—it’s been that way ever since. Of course I have moods, just like everyone else. But they are normal moods, not the wild swings between suicidal despair and grandiose hypomania as before.