Dad wanted me to write a book, about my life with bipolar disorder. He thought it would serve as an inspiration for others. He was really proud of how I had gone forward with having a mental illness, how I was trying to use my experience with it to help others. I like to think he would be proud still of my work the past three and a half years at a state department of mental health, where I've been employed as a peer support specialist. I've gotten to utilize my knowledge and experience just about every day of that, toward assisting others to have more full and complete lives despite their diagnoses.
I had been working on a book, and had quite a lot of it completed, before Dad passed away in November of 2014. And that... took the wind out of my sails, to put it mildly. A year and a half later I left my old hometown for a year's journey across America. And ever since a LOT has transpired that effectively make the original plan for a book, well, obsolete.
But I think that it's finally time to get back to work. Last week I finished the prologue. I know how it begins and I have bits and pieces in mind for the rest. I haven no idea how to end it. Friends have told me that since it's an autobiography that I shouldn't have a definite ending. Maybe it will wrap up with me going into peer support: some symmetry there, from how the book begins. The opening paragraph is me getting put into handcuffs for my first time en route to a psychiatric hospital. Not a particularly cheery image to evoke but it happened, and I'm going to be brutally honest with this work.
It's not going to be entirely all about my life with bipolar disorder. There are going to be other things too, like the trek across the country. Something like that changes a person, I prefer to think for the better. And I thought it could include the school board run, since that was so much fun and educational.
And hey, this will actually be my second book. The first was a children's book I wrote a few years ago. Maybe getting this one published will help me get that one to see print too!
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