bipolar disorder

Chris Knight's avatar

…I am writing for my book.

Let’s summarize for a moment.  Last May and up until late October, my book was going at a very good pace.  Oh sure, there were some fits here and there, and I made a few mistakes from which I learned a great deal (and made the book much better, I think) but as this sort of thing goes, it’s my understanding that this was going along better than a lot of first-time authors.

Then Dad had his stroke.  And a little over two weeks later he passed away.

Things have been in turmoil since then.  And the past few weeks especially.  I am now looking at some very drastic life changes which I had not had to consider anytime during the course of my life.  And on top of all of that, work on my book practically ground to a halt.

Then in late ...

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Please note: I am not a physician or a chemist or a pharmacological engineer or anything of that nature.  I’m only your friendly neighborhood blogger who comes across interesting things to share, and more importantly musings and observations from my own peculiar vantage point on the world.  So you know to take what I’m about to say for whatever that’s worth.

That said, this is by now something worth putting out there.  Maybe others have had the same thing happen to them.  I’m very eager to find out if that’s the case.

Hay fever is the bane of my existence.  Come every spring and the yellow residue of pollen collecting everywhere, those damnable grains infiltrate my nostrils, set off the chemical receptors and flood those inner tissues with histamine.  And so the cascading effect ends with me sneezing my head off, my eyes and forehead scrunched together in writhing unrelenting ...

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Who can say where the road goes,
Where the day flows?
Only time… 
And who can say if your love grows,
As your heart chose?
Only time… 

— Enya, “Only Time”

Manic-depression has a time dilation effect. There are periods when time slows to a snail’s pace. There are others, like what I’m going through right now, when time goes by too fast.


Either results in the same thing. An oppressive sense that time and life itself is being wasted. That the harder I try to wrest control of time the more it flees away from me. I think, for me anyway, that is the source of a lot of the paranoid thoughts. My mind is either extrapolating situations and outcomes beyond rationality or it is deathly afraid of being “left behind” by the rest of you who have a normal perception of time. I’m too fast or
...
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Late last night I finished another chapter for my book about having mental illness and specifically bipolar disorder.  So depending on how you figure it, that’s three chapters I’ve done in the past few weeks.  Three chapters done since I picked up the project again in the wake of Dad’s death.

In all honesty, I never expected to have come this far along, so fast.  I don’t know if I could have before now.  Maybe I had to go through some things before I could arrive at the place where I am now.  Dad’s death… well, it changed me in some ways.  Most of all it renewed my faith in God, that His timing is perfect though we often can’t see that.  That aspect has made me realize anew that everything that I’ve gone through, everything that has happened, has had some purpose.  It hasn’t been for naught.  What that ...

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I think… I think… that Chapter 23 is in a form which I can be content with.

I refuse to say “comfortable with”.  There is nothing comforting about this chapter.  This has been difficult to write because it is becoming very painful to write about some things.  Indeed, at the moment I’m trying to take steps to help more accurately convey what was happening at that point in my life.

Chapter 23 has been rough, to put it mildly.

The next few are going to be the harshest of the book by far.

The thought of revealing the original title has been floating around.  The more I think about it the more I find myself of the notion that it was a great title at the time.  That it may have been the best that I could have come up with, that it was the title that got ...

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I
am writing about the night that I stormed out the door of our apartment
without telling my wife where I was going, because not even I knew
where I was going. And how I wound up in Raleigh at my best friend’s
door at 10 at night. God only knows how I made it to the highway
without crashing the car at the high speed I was going at.

This
is the part of bipolar disorder that I hate the most. Asking God why He
let me have something like this when it destroyed my capacity to think
clearly or to have empathy to others. When I know that’s not the way I
really am at all.

Hating the things that I’ve done to others, mental illness or not.

500 words into Chapter 23. I started it yesterday afternoon.

This is going to take awhile.

...
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I think I’m getting back into the full swing of writing my book, at last.

I’ve completely re-written Chapter 1.  And I seriously hope that I’m not just seeing things but the more I read over it and how it flows into the rest of the manuscript, the better and better it’s looking.  It sets up a much better tone for the book that follows.  It’s more gripping.  It’s more “me” than the original version was.  And that is what this project is about, isn’t it?  Reaching deep down and translating my heart and soul and mind onto the printed page.  Being true to myself.  Sometimes that is going to hurt.  But there is also going to be a lot of humor too.

So the new first chapter is something I’m really stoked about more than I had become about the original.

The prologue has been somewhat re-written, but not ...

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Actually, it’s a rapid-cycling episode that’s been going on for the past two days.  I woke up yesterday morning, remembered that Dad was gone, went into sadness that suddenly plummeted into clinical depression (something that lacks any emotion whatsoever) and then got catapulted into a bout of mania where the sadness returned, got escalated beyond my ready grasp of things, and threw me into a somewhat paranoid state of mind.

This has been going on and off for the past 36 hours now.

So I’m looking forward to working backstage during tonight’s performance of Theatre Guild of Rockingham County’s production of It’s A Wonderful Life: The Musical.  Three more performances this weekend: tonight, tomorrow night also at 7:30 and then Sunday afternoon at 2:30.  Being involved in something like community theatre helps immensely, whether I’m on-stage or behind the scenes.  That’s a really special group of people ...

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As of today, the book project has officially smashed through the 75,000 words mark.

This is considered the minimum point of a memoir. And that’s what this is (among other things).

That is enough material to quantify as being a book. But there is much work still to be done. It wouldn’t surprise me if at least one of the “locked-down” chapters was re-written, and that’s what I’m considering even now. One of the first chapters written is also now being taken apart piece-by-piece and those parts implemented in a chapter I’ve just started.

And based on input from a good friend, Robert Frost is no longer referenced in the prologue. Lord willing that this is published, you will probably correctly guess what was going on there.

Two chapters finished today and I’m at the point I was aiming for! Think I’ll celebrate by watching this week’s new episode of ...

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Some developments since the last time I posted about how my writing project is going…

  • The original title of the book, which then became another title by changing one word, is now the title once more.
  • Manuscript is now hovering around 73,000 words.  It’s going to hit the 75,000 mark that I’ve aimed for since starting writing this!  But still a lot more work to go.
  • There are now two definite “parts” to the book completed.  I just began writing Part 3.  As things stand now there will probably be five parts, and an epilogue.
  • Each part has a title.
  • The parts are separated by theme, not necessarily by span of time.  Whereas Part 1 covers many years, Part 2 encompasses about 18 months… but those are 18 crazy months.  Lord willing that this gets published you’ll understand why.
  • I just began writing stuff specifically for Part 3.
  • The book’s
...
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