It happened. Not like my French tutor had predicted, either (Vous êtes un person en colère.) I didn’t snap at random and go murder someone. But tears streamed down my head as I careened and moaned up Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue one somber evening. The corner store loomed large, in and out of view, pummeling at me as if in an earthquake. The streets became wavy and that excruciatingly loud humming noise blanketed the earth, the sound that makes you feel like the entire planet is encapsulated in a bug zapper. I had a firm desire to hurl myself into traffic.

Yes, I truly lost my mind. It wasn’t pretty. It’s never like you expect it. And it was inevitable. I saw it coming months away. The signs were there: anxiety, anguish, bad attitude, apathy, lack of judgement, lack of sleep, running full throttle through life, doing something every millisecond of the day, not taking a moment to sit down and relax. Not BEING ABLE to sit down and relax. Too many deadlines. Doctor visits, health concerns. The clincher -- or at least one of them -- was the "quit smoking drug" I was so merrily taking as prescribed.

Amid all of this self-induced anguish, I decided it would be a good time to quit smoking. My doctor prescribed a "miracle cure" drug which I took for a week, promptly losing my mind on the seventh day. The possible side-effects on the box mentioned the loss of sleep, but it surely didn’t include auditory hallucinations, acute anxiety, or blasting through a roller coaster swing of emotions that pummel from euphoria to depression in one fell swoop.

Unfortunately, this whole mind-loss concept was not altogether new. I thought it had happened twice before (of course each instance is a tad different, just to keep it interesting) until my friend had reminded me that something like this also happened back in August when I underwent a huge life change (also lacking sleep at the time). That makes at least three.

The more I talk about it or write about it (two of my favorite soul-purging activities), the more I find that it happens to other people, too. In fact, one person even said "I don’t want to sound mean, but I am so glad that I am not the only one who goes through this!"

Ok, we have established that this "horrorshow" of cracking up in one form or another happens to a lot of people. Besides compiling accounts of these episodes into a very interesting anthology, what can we do with this information? What about learning how to prevent it?

The ideal answer would be to turn into genies with the light blond pony tail and wave our heads magically to get things done while we hang out sipping tea in the most adorable pink genie pants. I have thought about this one quite often, actually, and decided that if that were the case, no one would do much of anything.

We could also go about inventing more hours in the day, a project a very capable editor I know is already working on. But until she gets back to me, we should really come up with some practical solutions.

We could try to take it easy. This sounds so simple, especially when it’s coming from the mounds of shopkeepers and strangers on the bus who have told me much more than once.

We could lay off the demands. As author Kahlil Gibran tells us in his book "Spirits Rebellious": "...man set for his God-given soul a limited and earthly law of his own." This echoes back to William Blake’s "mind-forg’d manacles," or the incessant limitations coupled with demands we place on our very own heads.

We should really stop doing all this stuff.

One more simple solution for me, of course, was to stop taking the anti-smoking drug. In a nutshell (which is where I felt like I was when I was taking it) it is an anti-depressant that doctors found helped patients lose their desire to smoke. Unfortunately I also found through my own experience and stories from other people who weren’t having much fun on this drug, you could also possibly lose your sanity. I’ll check out acupuncture instead.