During a manic episode I taught myself how to play piano

One day I was watching a movie and heard a piano piece during it. The piano piece is called Fantaisie Impromptu. I became infatuated with the piano piece. For around 2 days straight I had it blaring on the speakers in my basement. I was obsessed and decided that I needed to learn how to play it myself.

I went to the guitar center near me and bought a super nice keyboard, which I eventually returned, because it was almost a thousand dollars. Needless to say, I was full blown manic.

I then faced 2 issues 1. I had never played an instrument 2. The musical piece I wanted to play was extremely complicated However, like I said, I was fully manic and unhinged.

I proceeded to setup the keyboard, find a tutorial on my laptop, and begin. For 2 days straight, and I truly mean 48+ hours, I did nothing but practice the song over and over. I did not sleep, I did not eat, I did not leave the chair other than to use the bathroom.

I played it over and over, stopping and restarting whenever I missed a key or messed up. Thousands upon thousands of tries to learn the song. After probably the first 15 hours or so, I started to get blisters on my fingers. They started relatively small, but as I kept going, they increased in size. It got to the point where after about 30 hours, my hands were completely swollen and I had trouble opening water bottles.

At some point I was feeling extremely disoriented and I think I was pretty much just pressing random keys. It all just went black and I woke up. My hands were locked when I woke up and I was actually in such bad pain that I couldn’t get myself to play through it. Just like that, I lost interest.

I can actually to this day play about 30 seconds of the song masterfully. If you didn’t know that I can’t play a single other song, you’d think I was an absolutely skilled pianist. But I’m not.

This was when I was in my late teens, before diagnosis or treatment. Looking back, although it was kind of funny, it was without a doubt an extremely dangerous situation. I was crazy