I Thought Rules Didn’t Apply to Me: Grandiosity and the Manic Mind

When your brain convinces you the rules are for other people

By Jessie Hawkeye

I want to be clear about something upfront: I am not someone who typically breaks rules. I follow directions. I respect boundaries. I understand why rules exist.

That person disappeared during my manic episode.

In his place was someone who believed he was special. That the normal constraints of society didn’t apply to him. That rules were suggestions, not mandates. Someone who could break them, not face consequences, maybe apologize, and genuinely believe in that moment that the rules didn’t actually apply to him anyway.

The contradiction didn’t bother me at all. That’s what I want you to understand about grandiosity during mania. It’s not just overconfidence. It’s a fundamental rewiring of how you perceive yourself and your place in the world.

I’ll give you the specific moments because they’re concrete.

There was the restaurant. I wanted to go in through the back door. So I did. Not sneaking, not trying to hide it. I just walked through the back door like I belonged there, like the normal path to the front entrance was for other people, and I had some special understanding of the building that exempted me from that process. When someone stopped me, I was confused. Why would they care? Why did the usual way matter when I had a better route?

Then there was the bar. I brought a flask. I drank from it openly. When the staff confronted me, I was annoyed. Not ashamed. Annoyed. Because there seemed to be some misunderstanding about how the rules worked in this space. I had a drink with me. Therefore it seemed reasonable that I would drink it. The fact that I wasn’t allowed to bring my own alcohol was almost… irrelevant? Like someone was missing the obvious solution, and I was the only one who could see clearly.

I got thrown out. Deserved it.

What’s strange is what happened after. I apologized. I meant it. In the moment, I genuinely felt bad about breaking the rules, about inconveniencing the staff, about creating a scene. My apologies were real. I wasn’t being manipulative. I wasn’t being sarcastic. But underneath the apology, I didn’t actually believe the rules applied to me. I could hold both thoughts at once and not feel the contradiction.

I also dressed in different ways, played different characters. I’d dress wealthy and charming. Then homeless and desperate. Then sexy and dangerous. pretended to be blind. These weren’t con games. They were experiments. I was a method actor in my own life.

This is the really dangerous part of grandiosity during a manic episode. And it feels completely real in the moment. It feels like truth. It feels like you’re finally seeing how the world actually works, and everyone else is just stumbling around in the dark, following rules that don’t need to be followed. I thought I was having a breakthrough. I thought I was becoming braver, smarter, less constrained by arbitrary social conventions. I thought I was evolving.

What I was actually doing was committing acts that could have resulted in a criminal record. That could have hurt the people who work in those establishments. That could have created consequences I’d be dealing with much longer than the manic episode itself.

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